Explanation:
From the time I was a young boy, I have been fascinated with astounding feats of accomplishment. I would sit in wonder listening to stories of my parents and grandparents and their adventures in the world. Jews who came from shtetls in Minsk, Lodz, Krakow, places of which I had never heard. They came with only a few suitcases and a deep reservoir of hope.
They came in search of a better life, even though they didn’t know exactly what that meant or what they would have to sacrifice.My parents, and those like them, achieved something remarkable. They became successful entrepreneurs, doctors, artists, philanthropists and scholars. They bought homes, raised families and sent their children to universities. Many achieved this in the first generation, and most by the second. I am fascinated with understanding the conditions that allow seemingly ordinary people to achieve extraordinary success in the face of extreme adversity. I have studied these lessons and have tried to apply them to my life and the clients I have served. When I listened to my family share their stories of coming to America, I distilled three conditions that seem to be common among immigrants who have achieved great success.
1. Commitment
The people I know who have attained what seemed unthinkable all focused more on commitment than belief. When I asked my mother if she believed that she and her family could have escaped the Holocaust and reimagined their life in America, she answered with little emotion: “We didn’t have a choice”. I have heard stories of how scared and confused immigrants were, not knowing if they would reach their destination or how they would survive once they arrived. These immigrants had to summon the will to prepare them for a radically different life.
When I have been faced with extreme adversity, my fears severely challenged my belief in myself. Yet my commitment was the force that propelled me forward. When my wife and I bought our first home and it was almost destroyed by fire soon after, I was in a perpetual state of fear. In retrospect, I can’t really say how strongly I believed we would succeed in our quest to rebuild our lives. Like my mother escaping the Holocaust, I didn’t think I had a choice. In some unknowable way, that commitment turned into belief.
2. Action mmigrants understand the absolute necessity of action. By action I mean consistent, planned, organized action over long periods of time. My grandfather’s commitment still strikes awe in me 50 years after hearing it. Joachim Shultz had a thriving business selling finely-made artists brushes in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler coming to power.3The concept of community has shifted radically since my grandparent’s time. Then community was rooted in where you lived; in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish immigrants who came from the same communities in Eastern Europe joined lantsman societies.
