My Dad's Underwear
throwww.com
throwww.com
I just want to preface this by saying I don’t have a fb account, or twitter, but I come here everyday and appreciate all the help and support over the years and wrote this for this with the hn community in mind, given its meant to be motivational and not techie.
It’s coming up on a decade from the night my dad died. I was 16 at the time. I came home from playing tennis and my dads car was replaced by my one of my moms friends. It wasn’t very long after it happened. Initially I figured my dad was running late, not an unusual thing and I didn’t think about my moms friend being there very much. When I walked in my house, I was a little shocked to see my moms friend there with her husband. I usually only saw the husband at the synagogue and such, but my mom and his wife were best friends. I walked by the husband, who was standing there with a look of shock on his face. My mom on the phone, “My son just walked in I have to go.” She sat me down and told me, “someone came by the business tonight and shot dad in the head twice.” My mom didn’t know what to do, she stayed very strong, credit to her, scrabbled for a hot towel to lay on my forehead. I remember thinking that I have to remember these last sequence of events vividly because the rest of my life will never be the same. At this point it was around 7 at night and my older brother wouldn’t be home from a concert until 11, at which point of course he would know what happened. He dropped to the floor when he walked in the house and that moment still hurts me. The eldest sibling, my sister, turned 21 2 days before and came home around 820 to a house packed with cars outside and people inside. I am 100% positive she was thinking it was a surprise birthday party for her. I couldn’t listen when my mom had to tell her. Shes not all there mentally, my sister, so she doesn’t function like the rest of us. For sure she wont ever recover from this. Never. It’s still a mystery if any of us will.
I wanted to share a motivational story about shit. Quite literally poo. I grew up in an old factory town and my family owned a auto salvage business which my dad proudly ran for about 20 years. My dad had a super power than enabled him to work 7 days a week without a break on top of being severely ill with chrons disease. The guy had a hernia removed once (a year or so) and when the doctor came back to check on him he realized he removed a different hernia, not the one the surgery was intended for. My dad endured a lot of pain. He had a cyst centimeters from his tumor removed in 1999. Longest time he ever took off work. Still went back early though. Damn I miss my dad.
Every night when my dad would come home from work he would be filthy from working at the junkyard all day. Immediately he would strip down to his underwear and throw a bathrobe on and sit for dinner. All of his underwear, 100% of the time had shit on them. The chrons was vicious, and he was working too hard to let that stop him. I mean come on, this guy went to work every day despite being sick as shit and would come home beat to hell every single day. I had more than one person tell me my dad was a hard worker and one of the sheriffs at the trial commented that he had called my dad the hardest worker in the county. But thats the point; he had what it takes.
None of this was necessary, but we lived in a beautiful custom built home in a nice neighborhood. We weren’t rich by rich people standards, but when you grow up around poorer areas a little bit of money seems like a lot. And that little bit and some more my dad lost in the stock market before his life was taken from him. As well the business started to collapse immediately and even with my brother stepping in and my mom taking out loans the place just wasn’t meant to run without my dad. Somehow my mom sold it and paid her bills. But I am left asking myself was it all worth it? From 16 until 26 I felt like my dad sorta wasted his life torturing himself by working all the time and not enjoying what life has to offer. It seemed to me like time is now even more limited and I gotta make the most of things by enjoying myself. But recently my perspective has changed. I recognized that my dad loved the grind. Everyday he went out there to stuff his socks with money to bring it home. It was his duty and he persevered through more shit than anyone can imagine. Literally.
Those of you with dreams of starting a business ask yourself this question: “Do I want it enough to shit myself everyday?” If you can grind like that, I think you are on the right track.
Anyways, great platform, this piece immediately came to my mind when I saw your site; it inspired me to write. The timing is funny though. Credit to the hn crowd for posting the cached version immediately after I had posted the site.
This isn't macho cult bullshit, trust me they can't wait until they can retire. They're simply working men who'd go to the ends of the earth to provide for their families.
I can't speak for the rest of the world but this is the culture of a blue collar family in the American Midwest.
I am so glad I create software for a living. 40-50 hours work per week on average, more during a crunch, all in a climate-controlled environment. You can eat and drink any time you feel like it. You have flexible work schedules. And if your neck gets sore you're paid well enough you can go get a message and have it worked out.
We've got it made.
He gave mew a few shares of stock, I sold them for cash a few months later when I wanted to do something I just _had_ to do at the time. He also gifted me with a Bicentennial Coin set, still in plastic. It got spent, probably within the year.
He last gave me the life insurance policy, saying that when he set it up, it would require no payments. It had changed to needing annual dues, so he suggested I cash it in.
I kept it. Years later, after he had passed, my wife and I were trying to get our financial act together, and lo and behold - A whole life insurance policy has a cash value. We borrowed against it and paid of the worst of the debt I owed when we met. We paid it back.
It became the starting piece of our financial planning. We had life insurance, then we built up 6 months of living expenses.
We bought our first piece of investment property to provide for our own retirement (I seriously don't expect there to be much of the Social Security I have been contributing to - matches your complaint about pensions, I think). We borrowed again and made the down payment.
Now we have an extra $1000 cash flowing from the property, we are paying off the policy loan and looking for the next piece of property.
I wish granddad were here now - I think he would be proud. I still miss the hell out of him.
Just like you I wished my grandparents were still around, and I'd hope they would be proud too. That is still to a large extend my moral compass even today.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to ask yourself whether we could've been much farther ahead, as a civilization and a species, in terms of quality of life, human rights, technology and science, and so on, in 2013 given what we had accomplished already in say 1913, or even 13. I think the answer is a solid yes, we could've been 100 times ahead of where we are now. I wouldn't congratulate ourselves just because we have some professions where people don't suffer injuries at work, that's a pretty low bar we should've crossed ages ago. (I realize this is a tangent and I'm not really arguing against your main point...)
We still have quite a way to go, but we should not kid ourselves into thinking we have not come a long way already lest we begin to slip back again.
...for now. The bar to entry will be lowered as development tools increase in sophistication, programming languages become more abstract, learning resources become easier to grasp, and children are taught programming at a younger age. In the future we will likely see the market become saturated with programmers. This is not bad for society. However, competition will be significantly higher for less pay. I'm willing to bet that if you're in your 30s (maybe even 40s) you will likely see this play out before retirement.
[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...
I have no idea how the author reached this conclusion from his macabre story. Can't even tell if this motivational is satire or not.
What I do know is that working 7 days a week despite serious health issues is a terrible terrible idea that no one should emulate just because it worked for Random Guy's Dad. Seriously, we have to stop this macho cult bullshit.
He should have perhaps considered changing the Fruit of the Looms a couple of times a day, though.
Regardless, many people have health problems that make getting to an doing work a challenge. Meeting that challenge is way better and sitting at home.
Fetishizing work is a good way to get fresh college graduates to work their hands to the bone until they burn out. I don't think its a coincidence that out of all the professional circles I run in, the only place I see this attitude so strongly is the startup-focused world.
Anyways, in the piece it says its coming up on a decade, but actually today is exactly 10 years, so I wont be around most of the day. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
The article sums this up well where the son is now asking "was it worth it"?
A question for everyone not just those who want to run their own business.
the reality is that your dad knew he had to man-up, and being proud of himself and his family was his motivation.