Survive, Then Thrive: A 40-Year Reflection
Survive, Then Thrive: A 40-Year Reflection
Written on the flight returning to Canada from Tanzania
February 21, 2026
Today I turned 40.
I am writing this on a plane from Tanzania to Toronto. As I write this, our flight has passed Ireland and is about to cross the Atlantic Ocean. We just finished a nine-day safari trip and are on our way back home.
The trip was a blast. It has been a birthday week. My wife celebrated her birthday on February 15 in Tarangire National Park, and I celebrated mine on the last day of our trip, which now continues on this flight home. Our birthdays crossed three continents: Africa, Europe, and North America. Because of the time difference, my 40th birthday will last longer than 24 hours.
Turning 40 makes you stop. It makes you look back, whether you want to or not. So I started thinking about what the first 40 years have been, and what the next 40 should be.
I settled on something very simple:
My first 40 years of life: Survive
My next 40 years of life: Thrive
Twenty-Five Years in School
Let me start with my first 40 years, which I spent mostly, not entirely, but mostly, in survival mode.
Looking back, I spent 25 of those 40 years in school: 6 years of elementary school, 3 years of middle school, 4 years of high school, 4 years of college, 3 years of a master's degree, and 5 years of a PhD. After graduating from college, I spent an extra year preparing for the graduate school entrance exam because I failed on my first attempt during my final year.
During my three years pursuing a master's degree in accounting, my real focus was on applying to PhD programs in the US. I had to take the TOEFL because English is not my native language, and I had to take the GMAT. I took the GMAT twice and the TOEFL three times.
When I think about my undergraduate years, I still do not really know what I learned professionally. My major was business administration, and even now I do not know what that really means. In terms of friendship, I carried almost nothing forward from those years. Maybe that says something about that period of my life. Maybe it says something about me. I think, unconsciously, I was already preparing for what was coming.
In my last year of college, I worked hard for the graduate school entrance exam and still failed. I only understood why after the fact. In formal terms, I had been using passive learning instead of active learning. At the time, of course, I did not have that vocabulary. I just knew that I had worked hard and still lost. The next year I changed my method. Then I passed.
That pattern would repeat itself many times in my life: work, fail, adjust, work again.
Leaving Home at Fifteen
If I go back further, to middle school, I was one of the top students in my grade. That gave me the chance to compete for a spot among roughly 1,000 students selected across the province to attend prestigious high schools in the mainland. These schools were thousands of miles away. If I got selected, I would leave home at 15 and come back only once a year during the summer.
For me, that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I could not wait.
I studied as hard as I could in eighth grade. I slept four to five hours a night. I was selected and sent to one of those high schools.
One thing I do seem to have is a talent for hard work. Once again, I became one of the top students. But this time I was competing against students who had also been the best in their own regions. Everyone there was smart. Everyone there worked hard.
In one sense, going to that high school was a gift. In another sense, it was an escape.
Back home, life meant hard manual labor before school, after school, and on weekends. In high school, I did not have to do any of that. I just had to study hard in a clean classroom. I ate food I had never eaten before. I had every reason to work hard and no reason not to.
But in another sense, that high school was like prison.
Several hundred students from my hometown lived there under strict rules. We could not leave campus except for two or three hours on Sunday afternoons, and only with a permission note. Departure and return times were recorded. If we came back late, we lost the privilege the following week. Not everyone went out at the same time. Female students went one Sunday, male students the next, alternating every other week.
We woke up at 6 AM. After a full day of classes, we had mandatory evening study for about three more hours. We got back to the dorm around 10 PM. Some of us kept studying in the hallway after the main lights were turned off at 10 or 10:30. The next morning the same military routine started again.
I do not know what that kind of life does to a 15- or 16-year-old in the long run. You would have to live a second life to compare. But I do know what it gave me: lifelong friendships. My high school classmates and I can still talk as if we saw each other yesterday, even if ten years have passed. We are that close.
I will write more about those years another time. They deserve their own piece.
Turning Points
Leaving home at 15 and going thousands of miles away was the first real turning point in my life. It was the first step toward a life different from the one I was born into. Those four years taught me how to be independent and how to make decisions on my own.
The second major turning point was coming to the US for my PhD.
I came to Washington State University in 2013 to pursue a PhD in Operations and Management Science. I still remember the moment I received the offer letter. It was the middle of the night. I immediately forwarded the email to a close friend already in the US, a friend from high school who was already doing his PhD in physics, and asked him to check one thing carefully: the funding.
That part mattered more than anything else. I had no money. My family had no ability to support me financially. If the PhD was not fully funded, I simply could not go.
He confirmed it: full support. I did not need to pay.
For the next few days I kept checking the WSU system over and over, cautiously, very cautiously, almost afraid I might accidentally hit the reject button.
I stayed at WSU for five years, from 2013 to 2018, and finished my PhD there. Along the way I also earned a master's degree in Statistics, one of the best decisions I have made in my life. I had a great time there. I enjoyed every moment. I love WSU. I love Pullman. I will always be grateful for what that place gave me.
Of course I worked hard there too. That part never changed. But WSU felt different. It felt expansive. It felt alive. The first three years I was there alone. Then in the summer of 2016, I married my wife and she joined me in the US. Those five years were full of memories, full of joy, and full of gratitude.
After WSU, we made another bold decision. We accepted an offer from Ivey Business School in Canada even though we had several offers in the US. We had never been to Canada. We had not even visited. But we believed it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So in June 2018, we packed everything and moved.
We built a life from scratch in a new country. Now it is 2026. I am in my eighth year at Ivey. We have a home here. We have friends here. And most importantly, we are proud Canadians.
Why I Call It Survival
So far I have said little about why I call my first 40 years "survive." Let me say it directly.
I grew up in a life where respect did not just come to you. You had to earn it. For me, the clearest way to earn it was to outperform students who came from better conditions than I did: better family situations, better financial conditions, more support.
Being a good student did not require money. It did not require connections. It required hard work. Hard work was one of the few things I could control.
I kept telling myself I was not as smart as the people around me. So I had to work twice as hard. Three times as hard. I still tell myself some version of that even now. Maybe that belief is not fully true. Maybe it never was. But it drove me. It still drives me.
I was fighting hard to earn respect and to become someone instead of nobody.
Some people might say you should not care about respect from others. Maybe that is true when you are older and already have some place in the world. It is not useful advice to a boy who is trying to survive and trying not to disappear.
For the big moments of my life, leaving home for high school, coming to the US for a PhD, these were not small decisions. They were huge leaps for someone like me.
Until I was 15 years old, I had never been to a city more than 40 kilometers from home. After being selected for that high school, I traveled to the capital of our region for the first time. I saw the capital of the province. I saw other cities. I rode a train for the first time. I saw a much bigger world outside our small town.
Then the PhD took me to an even bigger world.
Coming to the US was exciting and refreshing. I was full of energy. Overseas travel opened my eyes to different people, different cultures, and the natural beauty of the world. It gave me perspective. It broke some of the fixed mindset that naturally grows out of a small, hard world.
My Father, Fear, and Resistance
I did not have much support from my family through most of my first 40 years. That was not because they did not love me. It was because they often did not have the ability to support me, even when they wanted to. And often they were scared. I was trying to do things that looked nearly impossible from where we came from.
Two incidents stand out very clearly.
The first happened during my last year of college. I decided I would apply to graduate school instead of going back to my province to find a job. When I told my dad, he was angry. Very angry. He told me to come back and find a job, just like my peers. He asked me, "What happens if you fail?"
I kept insisting on a different question: "What happens if I succeed?"
We argued on the phone for about an hour. It was heated. In the end, he realized he could not change my mind. He told me to do what I wanted. But he would not support me.
And in practice, that became true for the next five to ten years.
I lost my dad on January 10, 2024. Since then, I hear those conversations differently. At the time, all I could feel was opposition. Now I can also see the fear inside it.
He was not looking at the world from comfort or abundance. He was looking at risk through a life shaped by scarcity. In his eyes, I was not being brave. I was pushing my luck too far.
But back then, I could not live inside his fear. I had to live inside my own possibility.
Of course, I gave him a perfect chance to say "I told you so" by failing on my first attempt. When I told him I would try again, it made him furious. During the summer of 2009, when I briefly went back to my hometown, he would not talk to me. I went back to the city where I had done my undergraduate studies and prepared again. Life was hard. I had to support myself. I had to keep finding places to stay. I do not even remember how many places I lived in during that year. Fortunately, I found part-time work that kept me going while I studied.
In the spring of 2010, I was admitted to a graduate school in another city. I started my master's degree that fall. It was a three-year program.
Those three years were another chapter of survival, mainly financial.
The school gave me a small stipend and waived my tuition, but it was nowhere near enough. For most of those three years, I ate one meal a day. I simply could not afford two or three. I found part-time jobs, but they barely covered anything beyond the basics. Since I only had one meal, I made sure it counted. I would ask the chef to fill my plate as much as he could.
I often wondered why I had made my life so hard.
But this was survival. Sometimes "just enough" is all you get.
The second incident came during the second half of my first year in graduate school. I told my dad I wanted to go to the US for a PhD. He was furious again, and honestly, I understand why. From his perspective, I was taking an already unlikely path and making it even more uncertain. My peers were getting jobs, government positions, faculty positions, real careers. I tried to explain that a PhD would be fully funded and that my family would not need to pay anything. But the conversation ended the same way. He could not stop me.
The PhD Application Journey
The PhD application process was much harder than preparing for the master's entrance exam.
The TOEFL cost money. The GMAT cost money. And given my situation, that was not a small thing. For the TOEFL, I had to travel to another city because all the spots in my city were full. To make things worse, I had to take these exams multiple times to reach the scores PhD programs wanted. Each application cost money too. I did not have enough to apply everywhere I wanted, so I applied to ten schools and hoped one would say yes.
No one did.
I failed again.
But I was stubborn. I decided to apply one more time. My first failed round happened during my second year of graduate school, so I still had my third year left to try again. This time I did not tell my parents. I just said I would come home after graduation.
Another round meant more exam fees, more application fees, more pressure, more uncertainty. But I never seriously thought about giving up. One reason I made it through that period was my friends. More than one friend helped me, not just emotionally but financially too. They encouraged me to keep going when the whole thing looked unreasonable.
After almost two years of hardship and repeated effort, I got the offer from WSU in February 2013. Full scholarship.
That day I called my parents and told them they would not need to pay anything. They were happy. They were proud. My dad said, "Apparently, we couldn't stop you."
On August 6, 2013, I took the flight to Pullman, Washington.
Pullman
I landed in Pullman in the afternoon, and everything smelled fresh. Looked fresh. Felt exciting.
That was the beginning of an unforgettable five-year chapter.
Again, I did not have much money. The stipend was just enough to support me. After rent, food, and basics, there was not much left. But compared to what came before, it felt like luxury.
I did not have to eat one meal a day anymore. I could have three meals. I could live in a nice apartment with my own room. To someone else, that might sound ordinary. To me, it was not ordinary at all. It was pure luxury.
It was luxury for someone who had spent years hungry, unstable, and pushing against closed doors.
My years at WSU were smooth in a way the earlier chapters of my life had never been. Smooth, but still exciting. I loved WSU. I loved Pullman. I had nothing to complain about, only gratitude.
Then in the summer of 2016, another life-changing moment happened. I married my wife, and she joined me in the US. We spent the last two years of my PhD together. Finances were tight, but we had enough. And after everything that came before, "enough" felt like abundance.
The Ivey Chapter
The last eight years of my life, and of our life together, have been in London, Ontario, with Ivey Business School. At least the first three years were still survival mode, both professionally and personally.
Professionally, I was now faculty, not a PhD student anymore. Ivey is known for case-based teaching, and that required a lot of additional training and preparation. At the same time, I was trying to build a serious research agenda. Class by class, semester by semester, year by year, I got better.
I would not say I have mastered case-based teaching. I would say I am comfortable now. But comfortable is not the end of the story. There is still a lot for me to learn. In that sense, the survival mindset still helps me. It keeps me learning. It keeps me from getting lazy. It keeps me moving.
Personally, it took us about three years to get our financial footing. Even though our income was much better than before, our expenses were also completely different. We were building a home from scratch. Furniture, bills, daily life, all of it added up. Those were the years we followed Dave Ramsey closely, spending in cash and avoiding credit cards. Slowly, our finances improved. Slowly, life opened up.
The Cost of Survival
When I say survival, I mean something concrete.
My parents spent most of their lives surviving. I spent most of my childhood with them, surviving too.
We did not have enough. We had just enough not to starve.
The first time I owned a coat was in high school. There were many months when I would run out of money for food in the last seven to ten days and skip dinner. Sometimes I ate one meal a day. Sometimes two. The clothes I wore were often hand-me-downs from classmates whose parents could send them more. My parents could not.
During my master's program, I once went three straight days without eating because I had no money.
That kind of experience does something to you. It gets into your body. It gets into your relationship with food, money, risk, even comfort. Back then I did not have a choice. If I did not eat, it was because there was nothing to eat.
The difference now is simple.
Now, if I want to eat, food is there.
That difference is not small. It is enormous.
The Long Game
Life was harsh for my parents. Life has not been easy for me either. I have spent most of these first 40 years in some version of survival mode, trying to get through one chapter after another.
But the positive changes you make over a long time frame can be revolutionary.
From time to time, I look back at my own path and compare it with classmates who were considered geniuses, or who were simply luckier, or who started from much better conditions. The lesson I keep coming back to is not complicated.
Take responsibility for your life. Work hard. Stay persistent. Keep making repeated progress. Take action.
Compounding takes time. For a long time it looks like nothing is happening. Then one day you look back and realize the distance between where you started and where you are now is almost unbelievable.
Persistence matters. Being proactive matters. Taking action matters. Those things can change a life.
Survive, Then Thrive
You must survive before you can thrive.
I believe I have survived the first 40 years of my life, Phase I. It took 40 years to get here. It took struggle. It took memory. It took repeated failure. It took risk. It took help from other people. It took longer than I wanted.
As I said, I have never moved through life believing I was the smartest person in the room. Usually I believed the opposite. That belief pushed me. Maybe too much at times. But it pushed me.
And still, I got here.
I survived.
If you do not survive, there is no thriving. Survival is not the opposite of thriving. It is the prerequisite.
So what comes next?
The next 40 years. Phase II.
Thrive.
That does not mean there will be no more struggle. There will be. There already is. But I believe the formula that helped me survive will still matter in the years ahead: stay persistent, be proactive, take action, and do not be too afraid to take risks.
There is still so much to learn. So much to build. So much to understand. So much life left to live.
And that is exactly what makes thriving worth it.
Thrive, thrive, and thrive.