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Life Lessons

What Fatherhood Has Taught Me About Building a Successful Business

These days I’m very busy with a lot of things. What I enjoy the most though is being able to play with my sons anytime I want. Time flies so fast.  It was only but a few years ago when me and my wife were trying hard to have a baby.  Now, all of a sudden, miracles are overflowing, make that double blessings in Ethan and Ervin, my two sons. 🙂 Now, I appreciate my parents more.  I sometimes wonder how much sacrifice they might have done to raise me up as a kid.

Being a father has taught me a lot of things. Some of them obvious and simple.  Some of them not so quite.  There are not many life-changing events in life that can ever be compared to becoming a father.  Fatherhood is life’s changing agent. For most people, boys become man when they start to care more for another human being who is their own life & blood. Here are a few of the things that fatherhood has taught me on how I can become better in building a successful business.

1) Be Patient

Raising a child requires a lot of patience.  That’s why I really admire my wife. She has done a fabulous job taking care of our 2 kids day in and day out without any holiday vacation at all. She’s one of the rare moms who take care their children 24/7. I love my wife for that.

In business, you need to have a lot of patience. Sometimes, there will be situations you cannot control, people who don’t agree with you or will be against you. That’s ok. Trust your instinct and go with your gut. More than that, however, you need to be very patient to yourself as well. No one is perfect and we all commit mistakes.

In building teams, sometimes it’s easy to compare what we already know and miss the point that your teammate is only starting out.  He is bound to make mistakes. It’s the only way to grow.  Realize that there’s a natural path to growing and being fast or slow is not the point.  It is in embracing the fact that we all are in our own little journey.  Surprises, challenges and triumphs are all part of the whole package.

2)  Be an Example

Lead by example.  Children learn fast by emulating what we adults do.  I think nature has invented it this way for faster way of learning.  In business, there are countless hours spent on reading, training and thinking and not much on doing. You can learn more from watching someone do their work for a day than reading up on it for a year.

I remember the frustration when it seemed like my reading of hundreds of personal development and business books did not bear any fruit, or attending seminars worth thousands of pesos but no result to show for it afterwards. I’ve also bought “coaching programs” that were a few tens of thousands of pesos along the way.  Until I came to the realization that unless I apply the things I learned, there’s really no result to be had. As Albert Einstein said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

It dawned on me that up until that point, I haven’t really done anything different at all. Yes, I resigned from my job to pursue a work abroad, but I was still the doing same thing, working as an employee at a job.  Around this same time 2 years ago, I eventually took the leap of faith and jumped from an employee to a full-pledged entrepreneur. If you ask me, “was it easy?”My answer would be a simple “no.” But I can tell you after 2 years working as a businessman that nothing I’ve ever done was more worth it.

3) Enjoy Every Moment

Whenever I see my two sons, I get reminded how precious time really is. One moment they look so small in your arms; after a while, they’ve grown so much you can’t carry them for long. It wasn’t so long before they were cuddly and cute. Now they are booming with so much energy it takes a whole lot of effort just watching them running around playing at home.  Whenever my patience is slowly running out, I always try to tell myself that this moment is something to be treasured for a lifetime. They won’t be kids for very long.  Everything about them, even when they become annoying, is always and will always be a blessing to me.  No amount of money can replace that.

Whatever challenges you are facing at the moment, embrace it and enjoy every little thing. It won’t last for long. One day, you will look back and cherise all the memories you’ve had and thank yourself for not wasting it worrying about things that are out of your control.

The same is true for business. The world of business is always changing. If you are not changing, your business is dying. In this day and age of information, there’s a great opportunity for everyone to become financially well, as long as you’re open to change.  The good thing about business is that as long as you enjoy every moment, you get to appreciate all the changes that you have to go through to get better and grow.  For until you grow, your business will not grow to the level that you want.

I’m still growing as a businessman, and as a father as well.  That’s make it exciting.  No one knows exactly how the future will turn out.  But as long as you prepare yourself and be open to surprises along the way, everything will work out for good eventually.

P.S. This month, I am looking for 4 new business partners in Metro Manila to mentor and coach to earn $40 – $200/week within 90 days.  This is for serious people only and not for those looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. If you would like to check if this is something you can do, contact me so we can schedule some time to get to know each other and see if we can do business together. The last time I opened up the invitation in my blog, my mailbox got so many inquiries that it took me 3 days to go through all of them. So if you don’t receive a reply from me within 24 – 48 hours, please resend your message (PM) again as I might have missed it or it got buried along with the other messages. God bless you!

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