Читать книгу The Social Capitalist - Josh Lannon - Страница 14

Although Josh had never done what he was told to do as a kid, I, for the most part had. My mother was from Vietnam, and had married my dad who was an American soldier there during the Vietnam War. After his tour of duty, my mom left her homeland, her culture, her family and friends to begin life with my dad, who became a deputy sheriff in South Dakota, so that one day my brother and I would have a better life. For her, this American Dream was synonymous with a good education and job security, the kind that led to a good, stable salary and a retirement package.

My mother had grown up in a country that didn’t offer the same opportunities as we have in the U.S., and who therefore pushed me to have the life that she herself had never had. I did just as I was expected –I earned good grades in school and enrolled in a journalism program in college, all the while wondering what else was out there.

When I was a young girl, I went out to run errands with my mother one day. I was always curious about buildings and certain one’s in town always caught my attention. I pointed to an office building with beautiful architecture. “Whose building is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know, rich people’s,” my mother said.

This only led to more questions from me: “Who are the rich people? How did they get that building? How can we be rich and get a building, too?” Although I didn’t yet know how, I intuitively knew that I would travel the world and have money some day. So I questioned my mother’s beliefs about success because, from my early experience, I also knew that my family didn’t have what most rich people had. While I had a pretty good upbringing, lots of friends and was happy, I knew there was a bigger world out there. Success, I had already began to see, was elusive and tenuous. I watched my parents work hard for very little reward; we weren’t able to do a lot of extra’s that cost additional money. Money was tight and they couldn’t seem to get out of the cycle of working paycheck to paycheck.

According to my parents, college was the way out of that cycle, at least until I found a different answer, so that was the path I took. With two years of college under my belt and $300 in my pocket, I left my small town home in South Dakota, determined to taste some freedom of my own. I wanted to see something new and exciting – for my best friend and me that meant Las Vegas. With no job or any sort of a plan, I enrolled at UNLV, put a deposit and first months rent down on an apartment and moved the big city. It took a couple months before I got my first job at the Children’s Museum. I had run out of money, had borrowed from a friend to pay rent and was starting to worry when this position came along. It was a great first learning experience (although I probably didn’t say great at the time) in dealing with the emotional roller coaster of money. A few months later I got a second job at a local bank.

And as “good girls” from South Dakota do, I also partied hard. Nearly every evening, I went out drinking with my girlfriends. On one such Friday night in December 1993, I walked into Dylan’s, where Josh had begun working as a bar back, and boy he was mesmerized (that’s a story for some other time!). We didn’t actually meet until 1995 (he had been sending me free drinks for 1.5 years), but we fell deeply in love very quickly, and five years later, we were married.