novoEd #2 — long version, v1

Nat IP
Nat IP
Nov 2 · 3 min read

Recently I finished a business book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. It is a book about taking business from doing good to doing great. I felt there are lots of life lessons I can pick up from instead and I’m about to tell you one of them.

12 and a half years ago, I lost my father.

My father was diagnosed with leukaemia a year beforehand. That was shortly after the second time I left for New Zealand. The first time? Maybe I will tell you another time.

At that time, I was a university student who had a part-time job on the side. I was a part-time kitchen hand in a cafe at Auckland’s universities areas, with the hope to become a barista one day. The best part of the job is that the cafe was a family business, and my ‘colleagues’ and ‘boss’ are siblings. For someone who lived overseas by myself, they treated me like a family member and gave me lots of TLC — tender, love and care.

After the diagnosis of having leukaemia, my father went to do chemotherapy regularly and was recovering. I spoke to him every day, and that was adorable, especially we argued a lot when I was still in Hong Kong. And the argument was one of the reasons why I went to New Zealand that year.

As a student, during that time, Google Chat (known as Gchat) was the most popular instant messaging tool. The day before the day that changed my life, I was chatting with a family friend and updated him about this new job I had.

The night’s over after the chat. Next day I went to work. I had a full day shift from 7 am, and I put my phone on silent for the whole time. It was a busy day; I didn’t get to check my phone. Then around 3 pm, there was a call dialling into work, and that’s for me. I was confused. Who could that be? I swiftly ran over to pick up the phone, and that was the family friend. He couldn’t reach me on my phone and recalled us spoke of where I worked yesterday. He went to look up the cafe’s number on the directory and here he was. He delivered a piece of news. “I am sorry. Your father passed away in a coma because of a brain tumour explosion.”

What exactly I behaved afterwards turned into a blur to me, but what went into my mind stays with me forever.

While knowing he’s recovering from leukaemia which is a positive thing, and suddenly BAM there’s this unknown tumour in this brain exploded. There he went into a coma and left us without any pain (to him), which is a positive thing.

My mentality towards life changes. There’s no ‘the worst’ but ‘worse’. Things can go swimmingly well one day, and suddenly something hits you, and you are now in rock bottom. Or you think you are at your downtimes and things go into the spiral down instead. So there’s no point to be overly sad but keep going, especially for those you have no control over. As long as your light stays lit, you can always find it at the end of the tunnel.

This mentality resonates with one of the rules that Jim Collins suggested: The Stockdale Paradox. “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” In a nutshell, ones got to prepare for the brutal possibilities and stay uplift for the golden opportunities.

So if any of you think you don’t have the upper hand in life now, remember, there’s no rock bottom, but a tunnel with shining stars waiting for you, and getting to the end depends on you.

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