 Oh-ha! And how you doing? Welcome to He Bites Your Talk. This is Gordo the Texar by myself today. Well, me and a half. So Andrew's out snowboarding the lucky guy, and I'm here. So I got Angus going to keep me company, but he promised he was going to keep his mouth shut. Well, it's open now, but he's not going to say much. Anyway, we got a little bit of a different show today. No guest. I've been asked to do a little talk, a little story, but please grab yourself a towel and a libation and sit down and join us right here now for a few moments in He Bites Your Talk. Anyway, I was asked by a few people to talk about how I was perceived to become so successful. And a lot of people know that when I moved to Hawaii, I had 500 bucks. That was it. That's all I had. Nothing else. And then over the years, I've been able to become pretty comfortable in my lifestyle and such. So there's really eight things that kind of helped me get there and the really life moments and what helped. So I thought what I'd do today is I'd just kind of walk you through it and hope that you'll take note of what these eight are. I wish I could say I could guarantee you, but it certainly worked for me. If you apply these success factors in your life, there's a high probability that you will have a very good and happy and rewarding life. So let's talk a little bit. We'll start at the beginning. So I grew up unbelievably poor and people would not realize how poor I am, but let's go back and we'll take a look at my mom and dad and go to start there. So my father was, my parents were born in Edinburgh, Scotland. And my father was an orphan and he was born an orphan and left at the orphanage. And on his birth certificate, and so, well, let me back up a little bit. So he was born there. My dad was barely five feet tall and my mom was 4'10". So I'm a giant in the family at 5'8". Now they have great grandchildren that are in their six feet, so there was something happen. Yay McDonald's, I'm not sure. But anyway, so they had an interesting life themselves growing up. But my father, more than perhaps my mom. So my father was dropped at the orphanage and this haunted him for his entire life. And I got a picture here. We'll show you of his birth certificate. And on his birth certificate is written the word illegitimate. And I don't know how you would feel if you had a birth certificate and on it it had the word illegitimate, which means you're not allowed. And the Scottish term that he would use all the time was bastard. And that stuck with him for his entire life. As long as I at least knew with him it always haunted him. It haunted him so much that he even, when he was 20, and I found the letter, wrote a letter to the government of Scotland and asked them to change his birth certificate and remove the last name which was Larkin to Bruce, the one he had chosen and they refused to do it. But that's how much it kind of haunted and played with him in his entire life. Now he never got out of grade school. He never went to high school. He was a desert rat in fact fought during World War II in the Sahara desert. So he had a very interesting background. Grew up entirely in the orphanage. He had a woman that kind of took care of him. Her name was Bruce. Last name was Bruce. And so that was the name and the reason why he picked it. Now my mom on the other hand, she was a single, she had her mom and dad, but she was the only, she was an only child. So she didn't have any siblings. So she had that kind of an upbringing. So you've got, you know, my father on his side, I got my mom on her side doing, doing their, their different kind of family upbringings and such. Both one thing they had in common was the military. My dad was, like I said, a desert rat British Eighth. My mom was a wren in the British Navy and, and did that as well. So they went through, through those scenarios together. And then in, in the late 40s, they, after the war, they moved to Toronto, Canada. And when they moved to Toronto and Toronto back in those days was farmland. My father was going to go work on the farm. He was a truck driver. He, that's what he was, his plan was to do. And I'll get a little bit into that and so on. But they come to Canada, they start living there and they have, end up having three sons, which I'm the oldest. And so they have, they have the three boys. Now, the three of us are, I mean, we're talking about dirt poor. I mean, you can see by the photo here, this was a, this was on the farm. This was a farmhouse. We, we spent a lot of time in that place living it. We had no running water. We had no in-house toilet. None of that kind, none of that kind of thing. But, you know, we were very proud. And, and so let's, so let's talk about, you know, this, you know, the success factor. So the first one I talked about was, you know, never take credit for successes and, and, and we never did for all the time that we came along. The other one was like this honesty and integrity. And so, you know, that my father and mother instilled that in us, but they had no concept on how to raise kids, but they knew that honesty and integrity was important. It was very, very, they were very, very strict. There was two ways of discipline. One was a strap and one was boxing gloves. And so my father would sit down and it would be one or the other if we did something wrong, either we get the strap or we would get, we get to go fight with that. So, and concussion number one, as I can still remember, right between the eyes and I was out like a light. And that must have been six or seven at the time. You know, in this day and age, that would be considered, you know, really not good. But back in those days, that was how we handled those kinds of things. So, but talking about how, how, how poor we were, I mean, we only bathed once a week. And I'm just trying to imagine now bathing once a week. And with three boys, and it was in a big cast iron tub. And with three boys, my mom kept a log on who was the first one in the tub the week before. So that meant every fourth week, you'd be the first one in the tub. So I can still remember sitting in the tub as number three, the third time, because we'd use the same water with a scudge floating around the top, with clothes pins floating around the top. And that was, that was how, that's how we got bathed. That was just how it was. There was just, there was just no other way to do it. The well was a long ways away and things like that. So we bathed once a week. The other thing I remember, and it's one of those things that will stick with me, is dentists. And I had two fakes my entire life. And we didn't have, the dentist was the barber. And I didn't realize that that was really what it normally was in those days, is that the dentist was the barber. And you would go to the dentist to have your teeth pulled. There was no such thing as filling. And the guy in front of you would be getting a haircut. And then you'd sit next and they'd take your teeth out. Because you had a toothache. That was the way it was. And that was it. Case closed. There was no, no vacane, no nothing to dull it or whatever. This one then they just yanked it out. And you didn't dare cry because there was no way that would be allowed. So, you know, we never owned a home. My parents never bought ever owned a home. We never had a new car. And our meals were pretty much standard throughout all the time. We always had enough money to have roast beef on Sunday because that would keep us going for a few more days over the course of the week. And then on Wednesday was bread and gravy. I still remember that very well. For years, I thought mushrooms were meat. Because with the gravy on them, they kind of taste like meat. And we had mushrooms and carrots. Oh, I hate carrots. They would cook carrots till they were mush. And it was, oh, I just can't stand looking at them now. But anyway, that was, you know, but still during those times, we just held our integrity. We held our honesty and we were very proud to be what we were, what and who we were. And now the next thing I want to talk about is what goes around, comes around over time. And this is really an important thing because over time, I believe what you do now and what you do in this present that the next time down the road something will happen, a positive in your favor. And I'm going to give you an example of one. So here's a picture of my brothers and I. I think I'm about, oh, eight at that point in time. We had strabismus, crossed eyes. Our eyes were like this. My father used to say, don't do it. Don't do it in his angus accent. He used to say, you know, you guys are going to be good taxi drivers when you get older. Because you can see across the road at the same time. But we had these eyes that went everywhere. And there was a public health system in Canada. And the Sick Children's Hospital said we wanted to do, which was then a state-of-the-art surgery. And they did surgeries on my brothers and I and uncrossed our eyes. Now to do it back in those days, they literally took your eyeball out of your head and did muscle changes and then put them back in. So I had ended up with a couple. One of my other brothers ended up with a couple of them. But that's how they did it back in those days. There was no laser, those kinds of things. We were in the hospital for well over a week. And ended up that the surgeon that did this work ended up being the eye doctor for the National Hockey League. So that that leaped him into that space. But my point on this, you know, what goes around comes around is that, you know, these kinds of like hardships are little, you might consider hardships, oh poor me. We didn't even look at it that way. And I remember one time, and I think it was for this, we went to get this photo taken. We had to take a bus for two and a half hours to get into town from the farmland. And I don't know what I was doing. I was agitating my mother so much. I could still see to this day the broom coming around from the side and hitting me on the side of the head and I was out like a light. Concussion number two. Anyway, so that, she knocked me down and out and boy, I learned to behave and was quiet when I got on the bus. What website I remember getting on the bus. But anyway, so, but she, you know, she had her way about taking care of things too. So that would be the number three. Now I'll come up on number four. And we'll look at number four, you know, that work extremely hard. There is no job too big or no job too small. And I cannot emphasize that. And I've seen it. I saw it just as early as a couple of days ago when someone, I was witnessing it at a job. The supervisor said, could you go do such and such? And he actually said, well, that's, you know, kind of like below me or beneath me or whatever. And I'm going like, just do the work. Just do the work. It's not that difficult. Just do the work. And so I got my first job at age eight. I sorted beer bottles, like green bottles and not in the green bottles. There was brown bottles and white bottles. And my job was to take the cases and put all the white bottles in one case and all the brown bottles in another. And why was that the way, done that way? In Canada they did house deliveries for beer. 110 house deliveries per day. My father did a beer deliveries. And I worked on the truck on the weekends on Saturday and sorted out beer bottles. And that was, that was my first job. You know, and then I, you know, other things I did. I delivered groceries on a bicycle without the speed shifts or any of those kinds of things. I peeled potatoes for a Chinese restaurant. And I didn't get paid for it, but I got a bag of french fries. And a bag at the end of every session, hours of peeling french fries. And they'd give me a bag of chips. And that would be what my, my compensation for it. Because there's no way we could afford chips. I worked in a variety store where the guy was a bookie. And I got to deliver the money back to, to Minto Street after my shift was over. I bagged groceries. I was a shelf stalker. I worked as a gas station attendant. I was a school janitor. I cleaned floors. I worked in a clothing store. That's where I got, you know, all this good choice of styling clothes and, and did all of those things. So there isn't, there isn't a job that is, that is too big. There isn't a job that is too small. So let's go over the first four and then, you know, we'll do the, we'll do the first four and we'll do a break. So number one is never take credit for your successes. And I never do. It's always someone else behind you who helps you do it. Whether it be your parents or your brothers or your fellow workers, they're the ones give them the credit. Number two, honesty integrity. That reputation follows you everywhere. You build that reputation and boy, it's terrific. Number three, what goes around comes around, but it's over time. Don't expect the immediate reward tomorrow. And then number, number four, work extremely hard. And there is no job too small and there is no job too big that you cannot do. So those are my four. We're going to take a break now and we'll go pay some bills. We'll talk about Angus in a second with his role in, is in all of this. Anyway, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you in about a minute. Oh, my name is Crystal. Let me tell you my talk show. I'm all about health. It's healthy to talk about sex. It's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about. It's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it. So I welcome you to watch QuokTalk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life. Join me. Aloha. I'm Reg Baker, the host of Business in Hawaii, the broadcast live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30. Today we were very fortunate enough to have Dr. Miller and her service dog, Muffin. We talked about the ADA and we covered some of the different do's and don'ts of having service dogs in your establishment and how to sniff out the fakes. Please tune in for Business in Hawaii on Thursday to find out all about service dogs. Aloha. Aloha. How are you doing? Welcome back to you watch QuokTalk. Gordon, the techs are here on my own today and we're going through the success factors that I've had in my life that have helped me become what I consider to be rather successful. I'm passing them on to you and hopefully you'll be able to take some of these to heart. I've got to start this second segment off with a comment that someone gave to me. Every moment in your life is an opportunity and that really is true. If you think about it, it's such a simple sentence. Every moment in your life is an opportunity. My opportunities come all the time. Doing this show is an opportunity and things have led up to it. Meeting people like Jay and such who have helped us along the way. Let's talk about success factor number five, which is one of my favorites, and that is have fun. You really need to have fun. I love to laugh and I love to make people laugh. It was one of the problems I had in school. I wasn't exactly a great student. My father made things pretty clear. Out of kind, didn't go to college. The university wasn't even on our plate when we were growing up. As a matter of fact, the fact that I graduated from high school was a first for the family. That was something that was not really pushed for us. One of the things, Angus is kind of like my dad at the same height by the look of his way of sitting here. He's kind of like my dad in a way. I reincarnate my dad in him because my dad used to make me every Sunday morning read the Scottish newspapers. He used to get them sent by mail from Scotland and he would make me read them in the Scottish dialect. If I didn't, I'd get a skit in the lug, which is a slap in the side of the head. He loved that country and I think he really wanted to go back. I don't think I know he did, but he loved that country so much he needed to hear the Scottish accent. He was the one that helped me kind of hang on to that kind of thing. We'll talk about having fun. I'm going to give you some funny stories about my folks. There's another story of my dad. One time I got a new pair of shoes and we were walking along the street and I had these new shoes on. He looked at me and said, hey there, Lada, those are your new shoes. I said, yes. He said, do me a favor, take bigger strides, they'll last a little bit longer. He'd be that kind of thing. That's pretty cheap. I can tell you some stories about how cheap he was. He was so frugal that they reused teabags. They would take teabags and they would hang them out on the clothesline to let them dry so they could use them to make tea the next day. That was the kinds of things he did. They might strike this from the show. He also reused his condoms and he washed those and hung them on the clothesline as well. He measured what I felt like growing up having to deal with that. The company Christmas party where he was working, they'd give us a Christmas gift. He'd take it back and said we couldn't get it until Santa came. That would be our big Christmas gift that would come every Christmas. Back when we were growing up, milk was delivered to your house. On the top of the milk, the cream would settle. He would take that pog off the top, scoop that cream off it, and he didn't put the thing back down. That was his breakfast. That was how he would get through the day. They would find you if you passed gas at the dinner table, a penny, and you had to put it in the jar. He ended up taking all the money and used it at the bar or the bugger. That's the kind of thing that they would do to us. That's where you'd get Angus saying, let Yerwin gang free when I have you be. That was another phrase that came from my dad. My brothers and I used to throw food at each other, the mushy carrots and the mushy peas that we hated. We would be flicking them at each other, those kinds of things. I remember when I started to become a teenager, my father was really struggling with the long hair and all kinds of things. I was going to a party and I had blue jeans on and he looked at me and he went, yet then I'm going to add blue jeans to a party. He refused to let me get out of the house wearing blue jeans. I had to go put slacks on. I had to get out of the house and then I had my brothers throw my blue jeans out the window so I could wear my jeans and go to the party because I wasn't going to wear slacks, no more slacks. Growing up in the 60s made it more, I think, more of a challenge for him because that was the time when everything started to get very rebellious. My father and I had a falling out, but rest is soul. That was all made amends over the years when I got older, but it was tough. It was really tough and I still remember because he was in World War II and went through a lot and they call it post-traumatic stress syndrome now, but back in my day it was called shell shock. He had been bombed so much that there would be times when he would relapse and go back into fighting the war again. He'd wake up in the middle of the night and turn the bed upside down and believe he was back in the foxholes fighting the war. I can remember my brothers and I holding them, getting them held down and getting them to the hospital and all this kind of stuff. That stuff never, ever, ever left him. But still, we still kept persevering, we still kept going and so on. One of the things that my parents wanted to do in life is funny, their goal was to get into government housing. I went to 11 different public schools in session, I'll talk about that in a second. Success factor number six, surround yourself with people smarter than you. I was not the brightest star in the sky, but what I learned along the way was I was able to surround myself with a lot of very smart people. Andrew and Christine Lanning are a perfect example of that. These are two very young entrepreneurial people who have made a really great career out of their business. They started up, I remember when they started it up and how hard they worked together on it. Again, coming back to that, I've been able to surround myself with all kinds of people. Like I said, I went to 11 different public schools, 11 different public schools. The longest public school I went to was high school for four years. You can imagine all the years before that and the times that I bounced around. In those days, when you went to a new school, there was obviously no internet, no Facebook. You dealt with the real bullies. Those were the ones that would test you out when you got there. And so it was never, all the time I went to a new school, I knew I was going to get into a fight. And during those times, coming back to the dentist thing, I think I was in grade five when I lost half my front teeth in a fight at the school. And now we had no money and my father went, hey, you lost the fight, tough. You're stuck. So from fifth grade all the way up to high school, I had only half my front teeth. You know, how much does that build confidence in you? So I had to find ways to do things to make up for it. And one was being kind of like the class clown or having fun with things and so on. And I ended up getting the nickname of gorgeous because my face was so messed up and so on. Everybody at school used to call me gorgeous. It was the weirdest thing of all. But we played on it and just managed to have fun with it. So that happened. Now what I did was, there was no way I was going to go to high school with no teeth and half my teeth gone. So I worked multiple jobs, saved up, it was $100. That was a lot of money back in those days. $100, saved it all up, went to a dentist, still remember his name, where he yanked out all the broken teeth and stuffed a partial plate, not your implants or anything, stuffed the partial plate in there and said, okay, don't take this thing out for a week. And those days, they would gas you to take out your teeth. And I still remember they gassed me and when I woke up, I had no recollection of anything. They were panicking because I think they couldn't get me. They couldn't arouse me. I was bleeding like a stuffed pig and they just were in a state of shock. So you got to surround yourself with smart people. So the other thing you need to do is, once I finished, was in school and those kinds of things, high school had a great time. I played football on the high school football team. Our high school was the championship in our division, last two years that I got to play. I got to play in the All-Star game in my last year in high school. I even got to play football a little bit for two years after I finished high school. And then the real world set in because out of kind, then I go to university, I had to get a real job and I got a real full-time job and I was working for the city and county of Toronto delivering mail and I was in the buildings department. Now, when I was in the buildings department, what I did was surround myself with smart people but at the same time I was in planning and permitting and I decided to go to night school to look at architectural classes and how to read plans and so on. So that started it to go there. Now, while I was there, I was able to get into the city's computer system illegally. It was before the hacker term was coined and I got caught. The end result to make a long story short was they offered me a job in the computer department at the city so I went down and started working in there and then I started going to night school and taking computer classes. In those days, there was no degree in computer science or MIS or anything like that, like those kinds of things but I volunteered to work the midnight shift as well because I could get the work done and I would have this large multi-million dollar mainframe to myself for about four or five hours and I wrote code and learned to do a number of things and such like that, which also led to the next part which is my move to Hawaii. My next success factor is kind of, I call it be nice and when I got to move to Hawaii, I got to move to Hawaii because a bank of Hawaii was looking for someone that knew how to make computers talk to each other and I applied for the position and I wanted a green card and they said, it's all I wanted was the green card and they said, we'll get you your green card, 11 months later I'm here in Hawaii. I moved here in January with 500 bucks and my family and we land here and it's just beautiful weather, it's terrific. I'm now working for Bank of Hawaii and then through this thing I started to do a whole bunch of other things and that was volunteering. I got with the bank, I volunteered with a number of things that they had going and I ended up working for a number of companies like Queens Medical Center, Campbell Estate and such. The Santa suit one was, I volunteered to be Santa. When Kapolei was just being developed, I was working for James Campbell Company at that time. I volunteered to be Santa every Christmas. We'd do 700 photos for free at the Kapolei Shopping Center and I would sit there all day. I'd go through two suits because they'd be so sweaty. I'd go two suits and we would take photos day after day after day. I can still remember this one lady, I think it was in around the last time that I did it. She came in and she said, it's the same Santa. She had pictures of her kids with the same Santa for over seven years. That volunteering stuff and being nice, that comes around and those kinds of things. Then I'm going to hit the last one and we'll call it closing circles. You've got to close the circles. There are things from the beginning to the end where there'd be your family, your friends, the people you meet and so on. When I first moved to Hawaii, I didn't realize until I got here, my goodness, there's a lot of Asians living here. I was like, wow, I've never seen that many Asians. As a matter of fact, there's more Asians here than I am. I think I might be a minority, which was also kind of like, wow, how amazing is that? But it made it real comfortable when they gave me a Chinese name, Hao Li. Anyway, so that was my part of coming in and closing circles and always thanking and giving everybody a chance to contribute to your life and at the same time, you'd give back. The other thing that I love to do and I encourage you to do, I had great mentors when I was growing up and here. I mentor now with a number of individuals across this state. Those are my eight success factors. You can go back and you can revisit this and play it again. My favorite thing again, every moment in your life is an opportunity. Every moment in your life is an opportunity. And as we like to say, please come and see us again. Watch us and we'll talk. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Zuri. Everybody for helping me get through this. We've done it really well. And as we always say at the end of every show, how are you doing?