By John Hope Bryant
This past Mother’s Day, I did what I have done every Mother’s Day since September 10, 2023, when my mother, Ms. Juanita Murray Smith, transitioned from this life — I thought about her. I talked to her. And then I tried to live like her.
Not live for her. Live like her.
There is a difference.
My mother was not a woman who talked about being brave. She just was. She was not a woman who theorized about taking risks. She just took them — all in the name of the love she had for her children. Born into a humble family — a shotgun shack with an outhouse attached, a grandmother who owned almost nothing, a great-grandmother who was enslaved — my mother looked at the hand life dealt her and decided she was going to play it anyway. And win.
She married my father, Johnnie Will Smith, and moved clear across the country to Los Angeles to build something better for her children. I was born at Good Samaritan Hospital, which was then located in Downtown Los Angeles, California. When my parents’ marriage fell apart — when my father, who could make money but never learned to keep it, lost everything — my mother did not fall apart with it. She went to work. Hourly jobs. Principally at McDonald Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, Ca. Handicrafts on the side. Fifteen, eighteen dollars an hour. And she saved, and she invested, and she built.
My father died effectively broke. My mother died a millionaire. She bought and sold seven homes. She provided down payments so my brother and sister could buy their first homes. And when I was ten years old, she handed me $40 and said, in so many words, go make something of yourself. That $40 investment was the first investment in the first business I ever started. It was the seed for everything that came after — including, eventually, the ownership of 700 homes and the founding of the largest financial literacy organization in the country.
At sixty-two years old, my mother marched into a classroom with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds and earned her high school equivalency. She did not care that she was the oldest person in the room. She did not care what it looked like. She cared about finishing what she started. That is courage. That is openness. That is what a life fueled by passion actually looks like — not the Instagram version, but the real one.
So this Mother’s Day, I honored her the only way I know how. I jumped.
A few days before Mother’s Day, 2026, I traveled to the Turks and Caicos Islands — a place I have loved for years, and a place that gives me space to breathe and think. And while I was there, I did two things I had never done before.
The first: I went scuba diving — for real. I had recently earned my PADI Open Water certification in Maui, and this was my first dive post-certification. Not a training pool. Not a controlled environment. The open ocean, eighty feet down, in the Caribbean Sea.
Let me tell you something. Eighty feet below the surface, you cannot fake anything. There is no bravado down there. There is no pretense. There is just you, your breath, and whatever is left of your nerve. You are a guest in a world that does not care about your title, your net worth, or your last keynote. The ocean does not negotiate. You either trust yourself and go deeper, or you don’t.
I went deeper. And the whole time I was descending, I was thinking about my mother. Because that is exactly what she did, her entire life. She went deeper — into faith, into work, into sacrifice, into the belief that her children would have more than she had. She never once turned around.
The second thing I did: I took my first eFoil lesson.
For those who do not know, an eFoil is an electric-powered surfboard with a hydrofoil underneath that lifts you above the water. You stand on this board, you grip a handheld throttle, and if everything goes right, you rise up and glide — literally fly — above the surface of the ocean. And if everything does not go right, you fall. Hard. Into the water. And then you get back up and try again.
I fell. Multiple times. And I got back up. Multiple times. And eventually — not gracefully, not perfectly, but eventually — I flew.
That is my mother’s whole biography in one sentence. She fell. She got back up. She flew.
I am sixty years old. I have built companies and nonprofits and movements. I have advised presidents and partnered with Fortune 500 CEOs. I have written seven books. And I am still learning new things — still putting myself in situations where I am the beginner, the student, the one who does not know what he is doing yet — because that is what my mother modeled for me. She showed me that courage is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to look foolish, to be humbled, to start at zero, and to keep going anyway.
My mother never scuba dived. She never eFoiled. She probably never heard of either one. But everything I did in that water, she taught me how to do — on dry land, in a modest home, on an hourly wage, with nothing but determination and an unshakeable belief that her life was worth living fully.
To every mother out there — especially those who came from nothing and built everything — I see you. My mother saw you too.
And to Mama: I am still jumping. Still diving. Still getting back up.
This one was for you.
Let’s go.
— John Hope Bryant
All: Inclusive Economics and the Future-Proofing of America — Available now at all major booksellers.
John Hope Bryant — founder of Bryant Group Ventures, Operation HOPE, Inc, publisher of the Bryant Journal and author of his 7th book Capitalism for All: Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America, now a bestseller. Bryant was recently named a member of the Forbes 250.
