Introspection of my life

What went wrong?

My personal loss for this year’s Startup ordeal comes out to be approximately $35,000 on the USA side. I have yet to talk to an accountant on the Canadian side. The pay I got while doing this barely covers the loss, with the Canadian side of things added on, I am probably looking at about a net loss of $10,000 after taxes. Inter country taxes across three different jurisdiction is a bitch.

I looked back on my life in detail and have finally understood the 3 major themes that are always associated with my failures.

Shortcuts taken will always come back to bite you.

This one is pretty self explanatory.

Everything I’ve done wrong is because I followed orders to the T.

As someone struggling in the field and knowing what’s going on, it is important sometimes to bend the orders from higher ups or your investors in order to achieve the only real goal in business: Making a profit and growing the customer base. Looking back, I realized that a lot of the time, the investors have no idea what the implications of their demands are and will often flip flop between what they want.

The final one. My dad

My relationship with my dad is very typical of every first generation Asian has with their immigrant dad. I thank him for bringing me to this world and would really like to resolve our differences, but looking back at all the things I did following his demands I see that I take a huge loss, every time I do so.

The reasons are many fold and I usually listen to him out of a self imposed moral duty.  Would I have been better if I went the exact opposite way? Probably, but I would never have been able to look back on my life and say: “Yes, that was the right thing to do.”

So with the end of this mission, I finally have closure within myself that I have fulfilled what I owe him and my conscious is now clear. The reason why things fall apart when following his suggestions is because the cultural view is too different. Dad never fully integrated into the western culture and still lives as though he is in Taiwan. There’s no way that anything he suggests is a good fit for my personality. In essence, whatever worked for him, will not work for me even if we took the exact same steps towards a goal. What I couldn’t stand was the mocking and constant put down of my own success while I was climbing. He has gotten better in the recent years, but most of my biggest achievements now suffered his verbal assault and we have yet to see the result of the recent achievements after we have stopped the charade.

Now that this final shackle is cut. I am putting together a 3 year plan to finally resolve all the monetary tie ups. Finally giving me a clean slate where I don’t feel obligated to listen to his demands anymore.