My parents raised four children and each of those children are now self-made millionaires. The existence of wealth by itself doesn’t convey much meaning about the holder, but it seems to me that odds are long of having four children each with self-made financial success. It could be explained by luck, but I truly believe that early life experiences and my parents’ teachings helped us each achieve financial success.  I wrote about how financial insecurity in my childhood drove me to believe that having money makes life easier, and now I’ll touch on some of the other factors from my parents that contributed to my financial success – work ethic, empathy, education, and values.

Because I believed fiercely that having money would eventually make my life easier, and that how I made money when I was young was by working intensely and for long hours, I developed a strong work ethic driven simply by wanting more money. That desire also focused me on high-earning professions and wanting to be the highest-paid in that profession at whatever company I worked. Once I graduated college, I worked in “exempt” positions (not regulated to be paid over-time) and was paid for 40-hour-work-weeks no matter the hours worked, but I regularly worked 60-70+ hour work weeks to get faster promotions and pay raises. I have since come to realize that it is better to have a strong work ethic because you love what you do and want to work hard at it, but my work ethic was always been driven by my strong, albeit shallow, desire to earn more money.

One great skill of my mother’s is her empathy and how she uses it, which she passed on to her children.  Each of us has the ability to read other people and what that person desires, which is then weighed against what is personally wanted. I then use that knowledge to determine what a likely negotiated outcome could be, and try to navigate there (or closer to what I want). I’ve had this ability my whole life, and although it can be a struggle when empathy leads to sympathy, it has helped me significantly in my career. I’ve also seen it help my siblings in their medical, finance, and engineering careers.

My parents greatly valued education and they pushed their children hard. My mother didn’t go to college, but she adamantly drove each of us to go to the best possible college, believing it would help us be “successful.” I will later write about how I don’t think that going to the highest-ranked college should be a rule, but it worked out for me and my siblings. I wasn’t the smartest student in my 300-person public high school class, but I out-studied, out-worked (internships, sports, clubs), and out-brown-nosed the best of them to get myself into an Ivy League college. I now believe that the Ivy League college’s education didn’t dramatically help me to achieve financial success since none of my siblings went to Ivy League schools and still succeeded financially, but it exposed me to other students who provided mentorship (work ethic, aspirations, career paths) that I didn’t have elsewhere, and it also acted as validation to future employers who wanted that stamp of approval.

My parents also instilled in me strong values, like honesty, integrity, conscience. Remember the cartoons of the character faced with a tempting decision, with an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, each whispering into the character’s ears? I always felt like the angel and the devil each had their valid points to make, but when I took any action, the angel always had the steering wheel because of my parents. There have been countless times where I was tempted to take the “easier” path towards what I wanted, but there was a stronger force pushing me in the direction I deemed to be the “right” one. I find that now in my older years I can predict when I might get into those tempting situations and it is best to just avoid them in advance, if at all possible.  Why even let the devil whisper in your ear in the first place?