Nathan Look's blog

Coming from China with just the shoes on his feet, my grandpa worked hard at everything he did. As a student, he was consistently at the top of the class. As an employee, he always tried to perform at his best. Finally, when he got married and had a family, he started up his own business as a corner shop. However, unlike other corner shops, he was always trying to find ways to optimize his business to exceed its potential. For instance, he would go to Safeway, and see what people were buying. He found that many of them were buying a certain type of chicken. Going back to the store, he talked to a supplier and was able to obtain a similar type of chicken. He and his family would work through the night preparing the chicken for the customers. Eventually, this chicken became a huge weekly sale where people would line up outside the store to buy some of the popular chicken. He was pretty successful then, but he had bigger aspirations. He felt owning land is what he should invest his money in, as it almost always goes up in value while being a steady cash source. After saving up and borrowing money from the bank, he was able to buy a duplex. This investment in a duplex later evolved into a multitude of apartments.

Now, as he tells this story and others, there is always an underlying theme; although hard work is a factor in any successful endeavor, a huge part of success is not blindly pushing ahead and instead find ways to market your product to make it appealing to the public. He frequently uses the example where although a rice farmer works hard to grow his crop, if that is all he does, he will always be a rice farmer. Whenever you are performing a task, always use your brain and have a plan to execute that task. Through hard work and brilliant plans, my grandpa was able to provide a very stable base for his family, and subsequently me.