My mom didn’t believe in studying for hours.
Sounds counterintuitive, right?
Especially coming from someone who was her class valedictorian, a consistent topnotcher, and graduated with a business degree.
You’d think she’d be the type to have us hunched over textbooks until dinner.
But no… she wasn’t like that at all.
What she did instead was set a 30-minute timer.
That was it.
Thirty minutes of focused study, and then we were free.
Go.
Play.
Do whatever kids do when they’re finally let loose.
She never made learning feel like punishment, and I think that’s the whole point.
Looking back, she wasn’t just managing our homework schedule. She was doing something much smarter.
She was wiring us to associate learning with something that felt… okay.
Not dreadful.
Not endless.
Not something to survive.
She also made sure reading and writing were just part of the house.
Books were everywhere.
Writing things down was normal.
It was part of our normal life.
And slowly, without us even noticing, we started to actually like it.
I only realized it once I became an adult. I remember my mom every time I reach for a book on a weekend, or gets genuinely excited to write something.
And I should always be excited to read or write.
After all, I write for a living.
Copywriting, content, the whole thing. I also do SEO as my main job but that’s a whole other thing that is still quite related to writing which is nice since I really do need it to provide for my family.
Anyway…
When I trace all the things I do back… a lot of it starts with her.
Not because she sat me down and taught me headline formulas or explained what a call-to-action was. But because she gave me the foundational thing that makes a copywriter actually good: the love of words.
That’s the part most people skip when they’re trying to get into freelance writing.
They learn the frameworks, the structures, the SEO tricks.
Those things matter, yes.
But if you don’t genuinely like reading and writing, it shows.
The work feels thin.
Mechanical.
You can feel it when you read it.
The writers I’ve seen do really well, whether in Davao, Manila, or working remotely from somewhere else… they almost always have some version of this story. Someone early on made them feel like words were worth paying attention to.
For a lot of us, that someone was our mom.
My Moms 30-minute Study Rule
I’ve thought about this a lot. That timer wasn’t just about preventing burnout in a seven-year-old.
It was about quality over quantity.
It was about presence.
Thirty focused minutes beats two distracted hours, and she knew that before productivity culture made it a talking point.
That’s actually a principle I carry into client work now.
You don’t need to write longer to write better.
You don’t need to stuff more words in to make something valuable.
Sometimes the tightest, most focused version of something is the most powerful one.
She modeled that without ever calling it that.
Happy Mother’s Day
If you’re raising a kid and you’re trying to figure out how to make them love learning… you might not need a curriculum. You might just need to be the person who makes it feel safe.
Low-pressure.
Even a little fun.
Read in front of them.
Write things down.
Set the timer.
Let them play.
You won’t see the results immediately.
But one day, they might be writing for a living, or running their own thing, or just being someone who isn’t scared of a blank page.
And they’ll trace it back to you.
Happy Mother’s Day. To my mom in heaven… thank you for the timer.