Authors: Allen Wong
2
Tiger Parents
My life story begins with my parents. Those of you who read or heard of the 2011 book,
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
by Amy Chua, would be familiar with the term ‘Tiger Parenting’. For those who are unfamiliar, ‘Tiger Parenting’ is the practice of traditional, strict child-rearing with the goal of academic success while steering them towards certain career paths.
With that being said, my parents, while traditional in many other ways, were not tiger parents. They were never very strict when it came for me to choose what I wanted to do with my life. I got to where I am today, not because my parents forced me to do certain things. Instead, their parenting worked out well because they taught me great life lessons and led by example.
Some of you may not have had an advantageous upbringing. Perhaps your parents both worked and never paid attention to you. Perhaps they were too poor to afford to buy you things and put you in a private school. Perhaps they were too strict, and pushed you to become someone who you were not. You may choose to spend the rest of your life blaming your parents and others for not being successful. Or you may realize that all of that does not matter now. You are ultimately in control of what is going to happen to the rest of your life.
The Slums
Do not get stuck on the belief that only the rich get richer, or that because you do not have wealthy parents, then you will never be wealthy. According to
Millionaire Next Door
by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D. and William D. Danko, Ph.D., 80 percent of millionaires were first-generation millionaires. This meant that their parents’ wealth was not the deciding factor that made them rich. My own parents were not wealthy at all.
In fact, my father grew up in the slums of Guangzhou, China. His mother had passed away when he was really young
, and his father wasn’t around to take care of him. Thus, he became homeless as a little kid along with his siblings. They had to beg for food in order to stay alive. As a teenager, he was forced to work on farmland by the Chinese communist regime, because his family was too poor to afford an education for him. Instead of being given a high school education, my father was given farm tools and 100 lb. bags of rice to carry over his shoulders. He received only a few cents a day for his labor, and was eating mostly rice as sustenance. Meat was rationed and scarce to him, so he was malnourished as a child. Thus, he only grew to the height of 5'3" despite having a father who was 5'9". By the time he was 18, he knew that he had to escape the communist regime in order to get a better life. At that time, Hong Kong was still controlled by the British government, so my father sought refuge there. However, the trip was not going to be an easy one.
The Great Escape
Not only was it illegal for my father to leave China for Hong Kong, it was also a perilous journey that required months of preparation and training. With several of his close friends, my father concocted a plan to cross the border that separated Hong Kong and China. At the border, he would have to swim over a long channel of water filled with oyster shells on the bottom and sharks prowling the surface. On top of that, there were coast guards who would search the waters for escapees and arrest or shoot those they caught.
The only other route of escape was to jump the barbed wire border fences that were patrolled by armed Chinese soldiers. Those soldiers were ordered to shoot and kill anyone attempting to escape. According to the 2010 book,
Big Fleeing
by Bingan Chen, there were so many refugees killed trying to escape this way that some people in Shenzhen even made a fortune from collecting the dead refugees. What had happened was that the Chinese government started a program that paid citizens 15 Yuan per body collected, because there were just too many dead refugees for them to handle alone.
Therefore, my father and his friends chose to swim across the channel instead. Their athletic build acquired from all of their farm labor helped them become avid swimmers. While this gave them a better chance at escape, they still planned their escape meticulously to better their chances at survival.
My father and his friends were all too familiar with the risks. They knew people who were caught, jailed, and beaten badly after failing to complete the same feat that they were about to do. But this was not going to deter them. They were brave, ambitious, and motivated to lead a life where the government would not keep oppressing them economically and physically.
This was actually my father’s third attempt at crossing the channel. In the first two times, he was caught by coast guards and jailed for several months. They would torture him by withholding food from him, so that he would starve. They would try to use propaganda to convince him to stay in China. And they would interrogate him for hours to try to get him to tell them who helped him and who else was trying to escape.
So, he knew that this third attempt would be his last one. Going to jail for the third time for the same crime would carry much more extreme punishments. This was a do-or-die situation for him.
He was at the shore now with his friends. There was no turning back once they started swimming. This time around, he had a new route of entry to Hong Kong and new strategies to keep him and his friends from getting caught again.
When my father arrived at the channel, it was in the middle of the night. He looked at his friends and silently nodded to them. It was time. With nothing except for two tied-up plastic bags filled with old discarded tennis balls and a hollow bamboo stick, my dad and his friends began their long and dangerous swim to freedom.
To prevent themselves from cutting their feet on the oyster shells, they would have to swim without stopping for about an hour across the channel separating Shenzhen, China and the New Territories of Hong Kong. And they had to do all of this while fighting the currents that could wash them into the open ocean and while avoiding the sharks that prowled those waters.
While swimming through the treacherous waters in the dark, he and his friends would occasionally have to stay underwater to avoid being seen by the coast guards. Using the bamboo sticks, they were able to stay underwater for long periods of time. This, combined with the darkness of the night, caused them to lose sight of each other during the journey. That was the last time my father would see his friends again.
Once they reached the shore, they were on their own. My father would later find out that all of the friends he was with made it across safely. Hong Kong wasn’t very populated at the time and welcomed all refugees. The government of Hong Kong saw Chinese refugees as sources of cheap labor and gave all of them citizenship.
The first thing my father did in Hong Kong was head to the nearest police station and register as a refugee hoping to gain citizenship to Hong Kong. Because my father never received a birth certificate, he actually never knew his real birthday. Since he arrived in Hong Kong on September 7
th
, 1966, he called September 7
th
, 1946 his birthday. He figured that he was starting a new life in Hong Kong anyway, so he might as well call that day his birthday.
After he got his papers, he rang up his older sister who was already in Hong Kong. She helped him find a place to live and a job as a Chinese herbalist. His older sister was also a refugee. Together, they thrived in Hong Kong, and my father became a great herbalist while reading herbalist books and studying under his boss. He eventually saved enough money from working to buy a plane ticket to the United States.
Lifehack #1: Be ambitious in the face of doubt.
These refugees were some of the bravest and most ambitious people in China. Their cheap labor and ambitions brought about Hong Kong's economic success in the late 20
th
century. Several of them even went on to becoming millionaires. Chen estimated in his book that 40 of the 100 richest men in Hong Kong were refugees from China.
This was no coincidence. One of the most important lifehacks that I had learned was to be ambitious even when doubt starts to flood your mind.
When I was younger, I used to be very afraid of roller coasters. The very first roller coaster that I had been on was Space Mountain, an indoor roller coaster that took place completely in dark at Disneyland. My cousin had brought me there when I was around 7.
Throughout the two-hour wait on the line, I was extremely nervous of riding it. I had an imaginative mind, so I thought of all the possible ways in which the ride could go wrong. My cousin, who was around my age, had no fears at all. I was baffled by his courage and felt inferior and embarrassed by my own cowardice. I wanted to go on the ride to show my bravery, but my body refused to cooperate.
When I finally got on the ride, my cousin was laughing and having blast, while I was clinging onto the handle bar as if it was my only friend in the world. But in the middle of the ride, things changed. My anxiety turned into excitement. When the ride was finally over, I no longer had a fear of roller coasters. I still got body chills and shaky nerves, but this time I embraced them. I didn’t fight those sensations. I let those sensations intensify and I played with them. They made me feel alive.
Later in life, I would go on many other thrilling adventures, such as water-powered jetpacking, skydiving, and being shot up via a giant slingshot. I would have missed out on many thrilling adventures if I wasn’t able to drown out the self-doubt and overcome my fears. You’ve probably been through a similar first-time roller coaster experience. Or perhaps you’ve once talked yourself out of asking someone out, because you let your self-doubt convince you that you were not good enough. And if you add your self-doubt to the doubt from your haters and peers, then you have a recipe for failure.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but we’re humans and not cats. So be curious and ambitious, and take risks. You don’t know how many things you are missing out on by fearing the unknown. As long as you plan accordingly to keep yourself afloat in case your ambitions fail, you will be fine. And even if your ambitions do fail, it is not truly a failure. You will learn from it and grow as a person.
Lifehack #2: Failure is not defeat.
There have been many people in history who were deemed as failures in the beginning. When rapper Eminem first rapped at a club, he was booed. He admitted years later that he almost quit rapping after that night because it was both extremely traumatizing and embarrassing. He was also a high school dropout who nearly died from overdosing on drugs. And he attempted suicide because he couldn’t deal with the drug habit and poverty.
The Beatles were infamously rejected by Decca Records when they first auditioned for the record label. In regards to their rejection, the Decca Records explained, “Guitar groups are on the way out… the Beatles have no future in show business.” They would later greatly regret that decision.
At a young age, Walt Disney was fired from his job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper company because his boss thought he lacked creativity. He later acquired his own animation studio called Laugh-O-Gram, where he hired a vast number of animators. However, the studio profits were not enough to cover the salaries paid to the employees and his studio went bankrupt. But that did not stop him. He later started a studio in Hollywood, CA and the rest was history.
As you can see, failing is not necessarily the same as defeat. It is more of a delay to your eventual success. If you try to shoot a 3-pointer in basketball, you may fail the first few tries. But eventually, with enough practice, you will succeed.
True failure is never getting started in the first place.
“Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail.”
– Bruce Lee
3
Something from Nothing
With nothing but the shirt on his back, my father, in his late twenties, moved from Hong Kong to the United States in the 1970s. Back then, the United States was very welcoming of refugees and gave my father a green card after two years of living there. He eventually got citizenship after living there for seven years.
When he first moved to the U.S., my father was so poor that he resorted to sleeping at a YMCA. His living situation was basically a mattress among numerous other mattresses on the ground of a large dorm room. It was as close to homelessness as you could get without actually being homeless.
But despite his poverty, he still had dreams of obtaining a better life for himself and his future family. He figured that he could do so by putting his skills at administering herbal medicine to good use in the United States.
Since he was not formally educated on administering herbal medicine, he would spend whatever extra money he had earned on medical books. He owned shelves upon shelves of herbalist medical books. Eventually, he co-founded with his older brother an herbalist drugstore in New York City’s Chinatown. That was also where he met my mother through a mutual friend and got married.
My mother also came from the slums. She and her family lived in the government projects in Hong Kong and had to borrow money to come to the United States in 1978. Since she also could not afford an education when she was younger and did not speak a lick of English, she was only able to get a job as a seamstress in a sweatshop in Chinatown.
After giving birth to my brother and me, my mother quit her job and became a homemaker for the rest her life. Even though she didn’t bring income into the family, my mother still played a pivotal role in bringing our family out of poverty and into the upper class. She was the support that my father, brother, and I needed to get through each grueling day.
With the support from the entire family, the herbal pharmacy that my father co-founded went on to become one of the most popular herbalist/acupuncturist drugstores in New York City.
Lifehack #3: Realize that you can create wealth from nothing.
Some people doubt that they can become millionaires if they start with nothing. These doubters are either misinformed or simply making excuses for themselves for not trying harder. By doubting that they can become anything more than their peers can, they are doing themselves a disservice by not even taking a chance at success.
My father’s story is proof that you can come from nothing and still make a decent living. And even during the great global recession of 2008, I was still able to make my first million dollars with only an investment of a hundred dollars or so. So, circumstance is not the deciding factor in your personal enrichment.
And there are many other success stories about people coming from poverty and making it. Eminem was raised in a trailer park. He is now a multimillionaire rapper, record producer, songwriter, and actor.
John Paul DeJoria had a pretty rough beginning as well. His parents divorced when he was two, and he sold Christmas cards and newspapers to support his family before he was even 10. He even became an L.A. gang member before he joined the military. He later took a $700 loan and created the John Paul Mitchell Systems. While living out of his car, he sold his company’s shampoo door-to-door. His system now makes around $900 million annually.
Guy Laliberté used to eat fire and walk on stilts in the streets of Quebec. He later founded Cirque du Soleil and became a multi-billionaire.
Oprah Winfrey was living with her grandmother wearing dresses made out of potato sacks until the age of 6. She was later sexually assaulted by two members of her family and a family friend. That forced her to run away from home at age 13. When she was 14, she became pregnant and gave birth to her son, who died shortly afterwards. She later got a full scholarship to college, won a beauty pageant, and got discovered by a radio station. She later became the first female African-American billionaire.
According to his biography, Sam Walton used to live in a farm in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. He helped his family out by milking the cow and delivering the milk to the customers. He also sold magazine subscriptions and delivered newspapers. By the time he was 26, he was managing a variety store. He later took a loan from his father-in-law to buy a Ben Franklin variety store in Arkansas. He expanded his store into a chain, and later went on to create Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.
Ingvar Kamprad also lived in a farm growing up. While growing up in Sweden, he used to buy matches in bulk from Stockholm and sell them to his neighbors. He realized that he could start selling other things. So, he started selling fish, Christmas decorations, and pens. He later took money from his father to create a mail-order business. Furniture was his company’s biggest seller, and he used local manufacturers to keep prices low. His company, IKEA, later became a multibillion dollar business. The name IKEA came from his initials along with the initials of his village and family farm.
Also from Europe, Leonardo Del Vecchio was given up by his widowed mother to an orphanage, because his mother could no longer support him. As an orphan, he worked in a factory, where he lost a piece of his index finger, making molds for auto parts and eyeglass frames. At 23, he opened his own molding shop that would later expand to the world’s largest maker of sunglasses and prescription glasses. His company, Luxottica, is responsible for brands such as Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley, as well as 6,000 retail shops such as Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters. His company also makes sunglasses for designer brands such as Chanel, Prada, Burberry, Polo Ralph Lauren, Tiffany, Versace, Stella McCartney, Vogue, Miu Miu, Tory Burch and Donna Karan.
The list goes on and on for the people who start with nothing, but later become millionaires and billionaires. You truly can make enormous wealth from nothing. And for those who doubt that, history has something to say to them.
Lifehack #4: There are no limits; only plateaus.
If you start putting mental or physical limits on the things that you do, then it will show in your work and in your life. Athletes sometimes reach a point where they are not physically progressing further for a few weeks or even months. But, they haven’t hit a physical limit yet. They’ve only hit a plateau. By changing up their routine and constantly pushing themselves, they can break through these plateaus.
That is why world records are constantly being broken. In 1945, the record for running a mile was held by a great Swedish athlete named Gunder Hägg at 4:01.4. For a long time, it was hard for people to imagine that anyone could run a mile in under four minutes. And that stood true for about a decade after Gunder’s record mile run.
But then in 1954, the elusive four-minute mile was achieved by Roger Bannister in a mile run timed at 3:59.4. The four-minute mile has since then been achieved by many male athletes around world. Imagine if Roger held the belief that the four-minute mile could never be achieved. He would have stopped before the four-minute mile and given up.
But he kept on believing that he could do it. And he never gave up training until after he did it.
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”
– Roger Bannister
This applies to life as well. If you continue to believe that you are limited by your circumstances or societal factors, then you will never break out of your plateaus. Instead of having psychological limitations and staying on the plateau, you should move beyond it.
The very first step to going beyond the plateau is to remove your fears. It is okay to be fearful of the unknown, because there is no hope without fear. But at the same time, there is no fear without hope. So rest assured that no matter how dire your situation may be and how fearful you are of the things to come, there is always hope and a chance to move forward.
It helps by knowing that there are others in similar or worse positions than you who have gone beyond their plateaus and achieved success. And it also helps by being around those who have experience with success.
Lifehack #5: Surround yourself with other successful people.
One of the other ways of staying in a hole and never achieving success is by surrounding yourself with doubters. And there will be many of these people on your way to the top.
These are the people who tell you that you should quit dreaming and should follow their own unsuccessful lives instead. These are the ones who are afraid of the unknown. They are only familiar with their own life, and have been spending so much time in it that they are satisfied with underachieving.
Often times, these are your closest friends or even your own parents. They mean well and aren’t really trying to take you down. Instead, they have seen many failures in their lifetimes, and perhaps have failed in their own past. Therefore, they are simply trying to save you from the embarrassment, financial loss, and misery of failing at your business.
If you keep listening to the doubt, you might start believing it yourself. That is why you should surround yourself with people who are already successful and don’t doubt that your success can be achieved.
And at the same time, be careful of those who are only interested in your money or mooching off of your success. They will cheer you on in the beginning and genuinely want to see you succeed. But when you do become successful, they will take credit for some of it and/or ask you to help them financially.
They will often say things along the lines of, “I helped you in the beginning, so now it’s your turn to help me. Without me, you wouldn’t have been successful. Don’t forget the little people. Don’t forget where you came from.”
These yes-men start off as cheerleaders, but end up becoming nothing more than leeches. When people start taking credit for your success when they don’t deserve the credit, then that is when it is time to part ways with them.
And on the flip-side, after you become successful, do not forget to thank and give back to the community that raised and molded you. You are not the only person in the universe trying to get through a tough life. Even if you feel that society never helped you reach your goals, you do have a moral obligation to give other people a fighting chance.