In much of my 40+ years in the workplace, which included military and private sector, I tried to mentor people and encourage them not to accept “good enough” in what they did. When you do that sort of thing, you don’t expect gratitude; you just hope that the people you’ve tried to help go on to succeed.
Today I got an email on Facebook (finally good for something) from someone who worked for me in the Navy some 35 years ago. He just wanted to thank me for taking the time to mentor him; to explain to a 19-year-old fresh out of electrician school how things worked, both in his trade and in the Navy. He was a bright kid and I saw a lot of potential in him, which apparently was realized throughout his life. He’s only the second person to ever contact me for that very reason, but I guess if there are two, there must be many more who were helped.
Anyway, it made my day. There must be others here who have had the same sort of validation that they’re doing (or have done) something right along the way.
My standards are clearly not as high as your’s. I am thrilled that I have yet to have to bail out any of my kids from jail and my grandchildren seem to be pretty smart. 
Knowing when “good enough” is good enough, and when it is not, is the key.
I haven’t been so lucky, although three out of four ain’t bad. You mentor your kids, of course, but the difference is that they usually don’t disappear, so you get to see the outcome, good or bad. Employees move on, which is probably for the best.
When I was in junior high school, I had a friend that came from a difficult home. Her father was a very strict evangelical Christian, her stepmother was very mild-mannered and submissive, and my friend was not getting good grades. She was getting in trouble all the time because of her grades, and starting to get in other kinds of trouble too. (fighting, truancy, etc.) Her dad was always threatening to send her to the school attached to their church, which would have been a real drag for her.
So at one point, she was failing math. I started going over after school and helping her with her homework, trying to explain things in such a way that she would really get how it worked. Her dad ended up sending her to the church school anyway.
Years later, I was walking in my home town and my friend drove by. She honked and called out to me, and pulled up to talk. She was driving a nice car, and she had a good job, and was happy. She said she wanted to thank me for helping her in school back then because it made her feel like she wasn’t stupid after all, once she understood the explanations. She said she did much better in school after that, and she felt her life was much better than it would have been.
A former employee of mine called about two months ago, wanting to meet for a happy hour. I figured he wanted advice about something. Turns out he had a job offer, and was thinking about quitting his current job to take it. Since we had worked together at that company, he wanted to know what my experience was like leaving the company and going to a startup.
I told him that I was hoping my company would be ready to hire by the time he was looking, because I wanted to bring him over. Well…we worked through some logistics, and he turned down that offer. As of this coming Monday, he’ll be working for me again.
So someone who used to work for me just quit his job to come work for me again. I’ve had team members tell me they enjoy working for me, but this is a first.