This YouTube monologue recounts the speaker’s childhood experiences: parents emigrated from Sweden and ran a busy salon business; parental conflict and divorce when the speaker was four; economic hardship and moving to low-income housing; the father’s alcoholism (he drank until the speaker was 15) and its emotional toll; and how these hardships ultimately fueled the speaker’s drive and entrepreneurial mindset.
My dad had this dream of. He was like the LeBron James of hair color and design in Sweden. Like, I'm not joking, like up here with like the models and the crazy hair in the 60s. And so he was a hairstylist and moved to the states in the 60s. And they started this business and they were doing successful business, my mom and my dad, but they were doing everything in the business. You know, they were cutting the hair, they were sweeping and ordering supplies. And it was, it was a tough go. Who here's Read the book E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Yeah, so it was the entrepreneurial myth. There was no freedom in this business. And my first memory as a kid was, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was four years old. They were just at each other, yelling at each other. And I remember I took this barstool and I climbed up on the barstool and I put my hands over their mouths to stop fighting. That's my first memory as a kid. And so these businesses that we give our lives to, it has all sorts of collateral damage. In the divorce, my mom got custody of my sister and I, we actually moved out of the house into horrible situation. Just low income housing. Not too far away though. And I used to come visit my dad. The cool thing about that was on the weekends I got to see my best friend. So my best friend in the world lived right across the street from my dad. So that was like the motivation. And I remember on Friday nights, you know, my dad would come pick us up and he had this way that he honked the horn. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Could still hear it. So I was at my friend's house across the street from my dad's house. And I remember I was playing behind this bush that was like right in front of their house. And Joe, who was my best friend, big Italian family, all the kids. Who's Italian in here? Anyone? Yeah. So multi generations living in the same house and grandmother doesn't speak English. You know, every time I come in, she's like, how do you say eat in Italian? Manja. So always I'm eating and this is my, this is my family, the Rota family. But one time, this was in either the third or fourth grade. So how old is the third or fourth grader? Like eight or nine years old. And so parents divorced at four. I'm eight or nine years old. And I remember her asking me, where's your dad this weekend? Right across the street. Like, I could see the house. My dad is passed out drunk in that house. And so I thought everyone knew he was an alcoholic. The amount of shame that I carried in my life and just all the chaos that came from that, it was a lot to bear. Ultimately, it ended up being a really unfair advantage for me in business and just my drive. He drank until I was 15 years old, so I really didn't have much of a father figure. Luckily, my mom was successful. She owned a business, and she went after it.
