3 Lessons From My Dad

Today is my Dad’s 60th birthday. My Dad grew up in a tiny farming village in the Guangdong province of China. Born into a family of farmers, he charted his own course and became the first person in his family to go to university. A perpetual learner and tinkerer, one of the most valuable gifts he gave me and my sisters was the space to ask questions and learn new things without limits.

I wanted to highlight some of the most valuable lessons he’s taught me through the years. I think about these things weekly, if not daily.

Embrace the learning curve.

As a small child, I would get really excited at the thought of picking up a new activity or sport. However, it usually followed a similar pattern: get really excited, do it a lot with enthusiasm, encounter difficulty, get discouraged, lose enthusiasm, try to give up. 

I say “try” because my Dad would never let me give up (at least never in this context). He would simply say “oh you’re just hitting the learning curve”. According to him, everything in life worth doing has a learning curve and you need to conquer it and ride it out in order to get to the other side…to enjoyment. True enjoyment only comes after the curve, once you’ve put in the work. You’ll never get to the good part by giving up when it gets tough. 

It was helpful for me as a kid for this feeling of frustration to be acknowledged and labeled as the learning curve. My Dad would also actively identify when he was personally encountering a learning curve in his own life, whether it be learning a new skill or hobby. 

As an adult, I find the anticipation of the learning curve to be one of the most helpful things in navigating life and change. It is the single most important concept that has influenced the way I approach work and life today.

A few years ago, I encountered this graphic (below) on social media and loved it because I think it does a great job of illustrating the learning curve. It’s easy to start something on the left side of the curve. Everybody wants to get to the far right side of the curve. Where most people drop off is the “this is harder than I thought” part of the curve (right before the “dark swamp of despair”). The key is to persist through the swamp and tackle the challenges and learnings. 

There’s something you can learn from everyone. 

One of my Dad’s core personality traits is that he’s extremely optimistic and loves to encourage us to look at the bright side of a situation. Every time any of us kids would complain about a person who we didn’t particularly get along with (whether it’s someone we were put in a group with at school or a coworker at a summer job, etc.), my Dad would always ask “well is there something you can learn from them?”. 

Unsurprisingly, this question would often make us even more annoyed in the moment. 

But as I’ve gotten older, I think about this prompt a lot and understand there’s a ton of value in it. There’s at least one thing you can learn from every single person you encounter. So no matter how difficult it is to see at first glance, I always try to find that one positive thing you can learn from the person, or from the situation. If all else fails, the one positive thing can even be “this person is giving me the opportunity to hone my skills in dealing with someone difficult”. 

In today’s age of social media (and the algorithm favouring divisive opinions), we can be so quick to dismiss someone completely if they say just one thing we don’t agree with. This notion can be so dangerous, because that’s exactly how we close our minds to learning new ideas and gaining broader perspectives outside of what we already know. 

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

This phrase is sometimes parodied now in our family because of how often my Dad used to say it. But that doesn’t detract from the accuracy of the statement. The original sentiment behind this came from my Dad’s attempts in instilling some street smarts into us kids. He’d tell us that nothing comes free and if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Now that I’m older, I realize that this applies to everything. There’s a cost to everything in life, whether it’s a monetary cost, time cost, opportunity cost, the cost of hard work, or the most expensive one: the cost of your peace. There are no “freebies” and if you think you’re getting one…that’s probably a warning sign to re-evaluate what’s being presented to you. 

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Love you and thank you, Dad. I’m looking forward to many more morsels of wisdom from you in the next few decades. And I hope to share these thoughts with Astrid one day.