What my father drilled into me on coping with hard times

Many of us, out of bitter experience from the unexpected loss of our jobs and savings, and from mounting debts, feel that our hopes and dreams of a future paradise, a happy time for our children and a comfortable old age for us, are just dreams.

But to be sucked into the gloom and doom of your neighbours, friends and society at large, is even worse.

Somehow, you must continue to motivate yourself to remain confident, enthusiastic and focused.

I can’t offer you quick and easy answers, and it’s no point recommending motivational books or attending workshops on “secrets of success”. Such authors and speakers are financial success stories themselves, not because they are productive members of society, but because we are gullible enough to pay them good money to hear nothing more than a bunch of motherhood statements.

Motherhood statements, as anyone knows, are statements about the obvious, expressed in a clever, memorable way. Don’t you get tired hearing, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” or “Success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”?

These statements are of little help when the going gets really tough and you are bewildered, discouraged and fearful.

Without money, everything is hypothetical

My father used to remind me, back in the 1960s when we were out in the streets selling yong-tau-foo food for a pittance, that without money, everything is hypothetical.

At that time, I was most unwilling to continue being a street hawker; my dream was either to write a bestselling novel (and win the $1 million Nobel Prize for Literature) or discover a drug to cure all incurable cancers. Oh yes, I also wanted to become Billy Graham II, preaching to a boundless sea of people before me, and backed up by a troupe of beautiful choir girls singing so sweetly that donations for my preaching pour in like the cataracts of the Nile.

Guess what? My father was right. The lack of money is the root of all evil. Poverty is life-threatening because you don’t have enough money for nourishing meals, for proper healthcare, and for a safe and comfortable home to bring up your family.

If you want to achieve your dream and secure your future, you start by earning and saving money.

Ironclad rules of success

My father, a shrewd, practical man, also laid down several other ironclad – but not obvious – rules for me, if I were to become successful in my career and in money matters. The first and most important rule is: Honesty is always the best practice. Note that he didn’t say “the best policy”, because he knew policies are just good intentions, of little use until you put them into practice.

Practise honesty towards others, whether they are aware of it or not. While making a purchase, if you realise the cashier has unknowingly given you extra change, tell her immediately and return the money. When you cheat someone, you never know when that person will discover the truth and take vengeance. Worse, you’ve also created an enemy for life. So why bring unnecessary trouble for yourself by cheating?

My father also pointed out that a mindfully honest person cannot be cheated. What he meant was that if you deliberately cultivate honest practice in the way you earn your living and spend your money, you will not fall prey to Nuskin, Lehman Brothers and other scams.

Why is this so? Because an honest person refuses to take part in any scheme that promises too much for something, or something for nothing. Buy into this murky investment fund and you earn 20 percent in a year while everyone else is earning only a half-percent in their bank deposits. Even better, buy this carton of overpriced facial cream tubes, and sell them for twice the amount and you become a millionaire in five months.

Many years ago, when I had accumulated a considerable amount of savings, a production foreman in my old workplace suggested quietly that I give him $10,000 to pass on to a loan shark. At the end of every 12 months, I would get $2,000 in interest, but I must not ask how my money was used.

It was very tempting but I didn’t want to have any part in what loan sharks do.

Of Course there’s nothing wrong in a legitimate business, said my father who used to manage a provision shop in pre-independent Indonesia. You buy a gunny sack of dry spices at $100, add $2 for transport, $1 for shop overheads, and $5 for your labour, and selling it eventually at $108 retail. The $5 mark-up is what keeps you in business. Without it, you might as well be doing charity, and in the meantime, who’s going to feed and clothe you and your family?

So, my father’s second rule is an honest person should be clearheaded enough to separate charity from his money-earning activity. By the way, if you don’t earn enough, how can you help the poor? he used to ask.

The third rule in honest living is not to cheat in your employment. My father stressed that it is dumb to “steal laziness” in your work, the Chinese expression for working less than what you’ve been paid for. Say, you’re paid $2,000 a month, but because you spent nearly a quarter of your work hours playing computer games or writing on your Facebook, you’re in effect contributing only $1,500 value to your employer. Why is this approach dumb? Because you will be noticed by your boss, and you will be sacked at the next earliest opportunity.

The smart strategy, then, is to do more work than you’re paid for. You get into a kind of virtuous race where your pay is constantly trying to catch up with your work. If you put in $2,500 worth of work and you’re paid only $2,000, the universe (your employer, the general economy) becomes unbalanced! By-and-by, it has to right itself by giving you that additional $500! This is the law of karma or “you reap what you sow”.

In my experience, having worked for more than three decades, I’ve found that this law of equal payback always applied to any job I was in, without exception. I’ve consciously and consistently put in at least 20 percent more value in my work, and sure enough my salary has also gone up by an equivalent amount. So, here’s this little-known fact: the universe simply refuses to owe anyone a favour – if you give more than you get, it insists on paying you back so that things are in equilibrium again.

Making yourself retrenchment-proof

In any situation you always have a choice. You can choose to work hard and contribute more than what you’ve been paid, and so make yourself “retrenchment-proof”, and – heaven forbids – should you be retrenched, you can choose to work even harder looking for a new job.

Finally, my father said to be successful, you must be proactive, not reactive.

The word “proactive” has not been coined then, but he was already pumping my impressionable young mind with war cries like “show initiatives”, “take responsibility” and “accomplish more”. If you don’t have initiative, he reminded me, others will overtake you, and you will get nothing but leftovers.

My father is long gone, but the difficult economic conditions he went through in the 1960s, seem to have returned with a bang. And the best way to cope with the hard times ahead is to apply his old rules of honest, intelligent and proactive work.