Three sassy and feisty daughters, one miniature sassy dog, and a diva shopaholic lady as his partner in crime – you could say my dad is one very lucky man!
To say that I am proud and forever grateful and appreciative of my dad is a complete understatement. My dad has had a tough upbringing. The youngest of 12 siblings and an immigrant from Vietnam, my dad started working very early to provide for his family. He immigrated to the United States at age 12 and immediately started working and learning English. He’s raised three daughters and has worked hard to provide a very fortunate lifestyle for my sisters and I. A businessman at heart, my dad is always on the lookout for business ventures and investments.
With my departure coming up (3 weeks!!), I can tell my dad is getting anxious and a bit nervous about letting his oldest daughter live in a foreign country. In the past few weeks, we’ve discussed my future and what plans I have for after coming back from Spain and what I could really want to do with my life. SCARY QUESTIONS, but I guess they’re good things to think about. Although my dad is a little wary of my life choices and my goal to create an unconventional lifestyle, he always gives me advice regardless. I’ve received business advice from my dad, life advice, and even the occasional relationship advice!! He’s got a lot to say, and although I’m a bit stubborn, his advice will eventually seep through to me.
Recently, I had a conversation with him about my future ideas and how I want to be able to create a business model or something that will make an impact on the world. This was after he had told me about his own idea about another possible business plan and how he gets anxious and excited when ideas like this pop into his head. Maybe, that’s where all of my odd anxiety and frantic excitement comes from when I have an idea of my own and feel the need to research and dive into it head on! We talked about how I become extremely enthusiastic about something and then after a few hours or days of research, I start to lose the excitement and enthusiasm I once had because of all the research I had done. A good point that he pointed out was that the reason I’m probably losing all of my motivation and excitement to start on my new project is because I’m doing too much research and finding all of the failure stories and scaring myself of failure. Wow, dad… you hit the nail on the head!
In turn, his advice for me was that doing research is good and very necessary if you’re going to invest your time, efforts, and money into something. But doing too much research (ie: reading those failure stories) is not worth your time. Reading failure stories scares you into thinking that your own idea will turn into shit! So, as my good ole’ Dad says:
“When you have an idea, research it and figure out how other people do it and how they’ve succeeded. Then, after researching all of that and avoiding the failure stories, find a way to make your idea different and better than theirs, because that’s how you’ll become successful.”
