You know how in North American preschools there’s a slot reserved for snack time? In China, we had smack time. And smack time was all the time. Napping too long? Smacks. Playing incorrectly? Smacks. Smacking each other? Oh God, so many smacks.
“NO! VIOLENCE!” my teacher would scream at my classmates while raining down blows upon our three-year-old heads.
Now, before you dismiss my culture as barbaric, try to understand that growing up in China isn’t like growing up in the West. Because of the sheer size of the population, school is a highly competitive system in which you are expected to do what you’re told or face swift consequences.
It was in this environment that my father first introduced me to the concept of “chi ku,” which translates to “eat bitterness.” Eating bitterness is seen as strength in our culture. Accepting and pushing through pain without complaint or anger is how you build character. During the Great Famine, my dad’s generation ate bitter melon, an almost inedible vegetable, because it was one of the only foods available. Dad still eats bitter melon from time to time, to remind himself what suffering tastes like.
The Chinese can be a tad melodramatic.
When my teacher slapped me for fidgeting in my seat, I chi ku’d. When she kicked me for being unable to nap (for some reason I was nervous around her and couldn’t sleep), I chi ku’d. And while I never really told my dad what was happening, he had an inkling when I clung to his leg every morning, refusing to let go. Thirty years later, he admitted he considered taking me out of that school. But for him reality always overrides empathy. Sometimes your entire life turns upside down through no fault of your own, and you have to learn how to tough it out and survive. No one is coming to save you. He thought about helping me out. But he wanted me to learn how to chi ku. He wanted me to learn how to save myself.
The problem was that despite the stereotypes associated with Asian mental prowess, the fact of the matter is that I’m not particularly smart and I wasn’t that good at math. It can take me days to understand a basic concept that others breeze through. In junior high, I failed a reading test that 70 percent of the class passed, despite spending all my free time in libraries. In high school, physics and computers were my worst subjects. The first exams I ever took in those subjects I scored a shameful 60 percent. Luckily, my dad, being a mechanical engineer, was able to tutor me in those courses. But in English and reading, my parents couldn’t help at all. I stayed up late every night to painstakingly make my way through Shakespeare and guides on essay writing.
I knew I needed to work ten times as hard as my peers. I gave up my summers to take extra courses. That way my workload was reduced each fall and I had more time to digest everything. I used that extra time to get a leg up on the textbooks and the practice questions. By the time I graduated high school, those 60s had turned into 90s, and I got into the computer engineering track at the notoriously brutal University of Waterloo. Which, of course, just made my workload problem even worse. I was a regular fixture in the labs, study rooms, and libraries, studying for twelve hours at a stretch and occasionally all night.
It was all worth it.
Even in high school, I knew that getting the right degree was my ticket. And even though I graduated near the bottom of my engineering class, because I worked my ass off with lots of unpaid overtime during my internship, I quickly landed a full-time job. My boss didn’t care about my mediocre grades; he hired me because of my insane work ethic. Whenever he had extra work for me, I always said, “Bring it on!”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just bragging about how I became successful because I worked hard. What I realized much later was that I worked hard because I was afraid. I was afraid that this was my one and only chance at a good life, and I didn’t want to blow it. I was afraid of becoming a burden on my dad, who at the time was supporting our extended family back home. I was afraid that if I failed, I’d drag our family back down into poverty, after all the sacrifices he had made to get us out.
To paraphrase the words of Ed Harris’s character from Apollo 13, failure was not an option.
Many of my peers grew up way differently than I did. They had gone to summer camp and had gotten cars or tickets to Europe as graduation presents, but after graduation they ended up unemployed and living in their parents’ basements. This baffled me. I had started off poor and made it to middle-class; they’d started off middle-class, so shouldn’t they have been ahead of me?
What I later realized is that for them, that ingrained fear of failure was simply . . . missing. When I asked what they were doing to improve their lot, they would say, “I’m sure things will work out,” or “I don’t know, work’s not my thing.”
For them, failure was totally an option.
I was born into a situation where scarcity was all I knew. But, as we’ve discussed, that mind-set ended up being a blessing in disguise. Since I knew that things could always get worse, the Scarcity Mind-set taught me that money was precious and if I wanted security and autonomy in life, I’d have to earn it.
Look, I’m not trying to shit-talk my fellow millennials. We’ve been maligned as the “Me Me Me Generation” for long enough, told we have an Entitlement Mind-set that mistakes privileges for rights. This is an insanely broad generalization that doesn’t consider the economic collapse that happened right around the time we were making our way into the workforce. But sometimes I did feel like I was on another planet from my peers. When you’re poor in the developing world, there is no safety net. But here, there are systems in place to help you get on your feet. That’s a great thing—but when it runs up against that Entitlement Mind-set, people can become dependent on that assistance, which often comes in the form of Mom and Dad.
According to business and economics professor Paul Harvey, “a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations.”1 If you believe that you’re special, and all you have to do is find your singular passion and turn it into a perfect job, that’s a recipe for disaster. The reality is that the world owes you nothing. You only become “special” by developing skills that are in demand, which takes focus, grit, and long-term work. Other people can help along the way, but in the end, we have to save ourselves.
I didn’t learn to swim until I was twenty-four years old. That surprises my friends, since after retiring at thirty-one, I got my scuba certification and have since gone diving in Thailand, Cambodia, the Caribbean, and the Galápagos. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was terrified of water. There weren’t any recreational pools in my small village in China. After we emigrated, a few near-drowning incidents made me swear off swimming forever. So, it wasn’t until I was a full-grown adult that I decided to conquer my fear. I signed up at the YMCA, embarrassed but also determined. At first, I gripped the flutter board to my chest as if it were the precious birthday card my dad had sent me as a kid. But one day my instructor swam over and smacked it out of my hand. “If you fall off a boat, do you expect a flutter board to just magically appear?” He was right: it was time to give up my crutch. Learning how to swim has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve done.
When things don’t go according to plan, you won’t always have a backup. Given our economic reality of declining job stability and disappearing pensions, you can no longer rely on the government or your company to take care of you in retirement. My readers frequently write in with stories about how they were able to escape their bad circumstances. Some had help along the way, others had to struggle alone, but ultimately, they all saved themselves. For example:
Susan grew up in Alberta, Canada, with blue-collar parents. Her father, having gambled away the family savings on a failed business, abused alcohol. They lived in poverty and tiptoed around him. She knew she’d been dealt a difficult hand, but that didn’t faze her. Since her parents couldn’t afford to put her through university, she opted to go to community college, working part-time to pay her tuition and picking a program that let her complete her degree in two years. After graduation, she got a job working for a shipping company, which paid around $35,000 per year. Over time, she got a programming certification and became a software developer, making $45,000 per year. After seven years there, she got a PMP (Project Management Professional) certification, which, combined with her experience, enabled her to become a consultant earning $100,000 per year. She beat the odds of her background to make six figures after twelve years in the workforce.
Melissa grew up in Chicago in shelters, feeling so hungry at times that she developed an unhealthy relationship with food. She got good grades but hadn’t ever considered that college might be within reach. But her teachers didn’t give up on her. They even paid for her SAT and ACT exams and helped her enroll in an early college program. After obtaining five degrees and a PhD, she now earns a six-figure salary in the public sector.
Nick grew up in Dallas, Texas, with a successful salesman father. Nick’s dad was making a killing—but also got into a killer amount of debt. Nick grew up with the kind of life most kids can’t even dream of, but when it was time for him to go to college, his dad lost his job. The tuition money went to pay for the house, the maid, and the BMWs. For the first time in his life, Nick had to fend for himself. He worked his ass off, paying off much of his student loans by working part-time jobs while still in college. He chose a field—petroleum engineering—with robust job prospects and paid off the rest within a year of graduation. Nick tells me his dad’s refusing to give him money was the best thing that ever happened to him. While his siblings are still struggling with bad financial habits like their father and racking up mountains of debt, he’s built a portfolio big enough to enable him to travel the world and retire overseas.
The Scarcity Mind-set teaches us that money is precious. The Entitlement Mind-set enables us to kick the can of personal responsibility down the road. But we all need to learn to protect ourselves from those scary inevitabilities like layoffs and outsourcing.
We need to learn how to save ourselves. To do that, we build our own safety net. Your safety net needs to feed you, clothe you, and pay for the occasional kick-ass vacation to Aruba, all without relying on a job or the government—neither of which is as reliable as it used to be. If you become your own safety net, it won’t matter whether you started off with a Scarcity Mind-set or an Entitlement Mind-set. You’ll win either way.
I spent the nine years after graduating college coming to this realization, and my journey there was twisty and turny, full of mistakes and false starts and things I wish I had done differently. That first day, as I settled into my new job, I thought that I was on easy street. Smooth sailing from here on in. My time to chi ku was over.
Turns out, things were about to get so much harder than I ever thought possible.