How to keep going when your million-USD-fam-biz got SCAMMED twice?

What happened:

I wanted to end myself since Monday. Today is Thursday.
- How the hell did I let “these sh*t” happen in our fam biz, Thai Hemp Wellness, and I don’t see a freaking way out of this crisis!!!!! What a freaking piece of sh*t I am!!!!
But I didn’t – because it won’t make the company debt, the debtors, nor the troubles disappear. And the other 9 reasons why it won’t be beneficial right now.
I didn’t even want to look at my family. Locked myself in my room for days and barely spared them a glance when I stepped outside. Too guilty and UPSET.
Taking a leave from work – to get psychological help.
I attended the Integrity Seminar – Leader Call.

🕯 What I discovered during the call 🕯

1) I held onto this massive racket – a racket that I want to prove I was right.

Right: I told my parents that it was a bad idea to buy and develop the land in Chiang Rai. See, I was right that we are having SOOOOOOOOOO many troubles. We were barely okay emotionally with each other before and now we have this to fight about?!?!?!?

2) The craziest realization was that I wanted to take “revenge” on my parents:

This realization is buried deep inside the brain stem that I didn’t even know this thought was hiding in my unconscious. There were times I reacted insanely towards them that I believed I was under the black magic of our former business partner.

To Dad: for forcing me and waking me up to see him fight with mom in the middle of the night when I was 7 years old and for threatening her to chase her out of the house
To Mom: for repeatedly saying that she wished she never gave birth to us and how dumb she was for marrying dad and how horrible marriage is
To both of them: for comparing me with my younger sisters

Reaction:

All these times, I resisted and rebelled against them – either losing my temper and screaming at them, silently went against them and constantly hurting myself
To be their worst nightmare come true – by ultimately killing myself – so my mom can finally realize what she wanted and suffer the guilt of “killing” me
To serve them right: now you get a depressed and suicidal first-born child

DANG…….. Yeah……. You can say that I am an ingrate, rotten to the core……This is like some third-degree psychological Makjang… I need to apologize and restore with them…….

3) I didn’t even want to live.

I couldn’t let go of my racket to be right. I knew that the ultimate effect on me is that I don’t even want to be alive. No need to talk about giving anyone love, empowerment, etc.

4) The turning points:

🔄 P Kae (my Integrity Seminar Leader): Yes, you could be right. Rightfully right about the land in Chiang Rai. Until you let go of your racket, you will be stuck in the whirlpool of frustrations and agony. Too suffocating to stay, too hopeless to leave.

First of all, are you committed to letting go of your racket – to prove that you are right?

🔄 P Don and P Por (other Group Leaders) shared about their experiences – especially how P Por let go of her racket of her parents. She did it for herself. She wanted to be able to move forward.

I realized that I wanted to move on too and become a space of fun. P Kae then shared how inspiring I was during Landmark Forum – full of possibilities. Her sharing made me remember that I always want to make education a fun, loving space for Thai children. There’s no right and wrong. You can be anything you want to be and there will be space for you to thrive. You don’t have to be rich and fly off to the U.S. to get a better future. You can have it here in Thailand. Along the way, I gave up my commitment and tucked it under a mountain of perfectly crafted reasons. I desperately wanted love and acceptance, success with the 6-figure salary in my account, and to look good in front of my peers and my exes.

You are not good enough to teach.
You are not specialized in anything.
You never teach anything legit before.
You can’t even help your brother in his studies nor tutor your cousin.
You even failed that O’level Psych exam.
There’s no hope for education. Go and do something else. The system will NEVER change.
Be rich and successful and then give money to the schools. Or fix other parts of the society. Maybe you can improve the education that way.
Look, your MBA friends are richer and more successful than you.
Look, without you, the LXD team can do it too. And do it even better.
People even said how irresponsible you are. Let’s go do something else.
Escape to your family business – go be a boss and then get lots of money so you can prove it to everyone and all your MBA friends. Let’s them see how they wished they have accepted and love you.

Wow, look at these reasons.

What do these reasons give me?

The perfect escape. To run away and close my eyes to the areas and people I found sketchy.
Blame it on everyone else. Blame it on myself.
A 6-figure salary and the highest-valued car in the company + the largest dose of being wholly miserable
All luxuries: Invisalign + Mac Makeup + iPhone 12 + the latest MacAir + being abe to cash out the 10,000 baht dress for a 3-HOUR social event like it was nothing + a truckful of fear of losing all these luxuries
All the dark fears: I am terribly scared of being in debt or bankrupt. I don’t want to face my mess and I became scared of all the debtors. I don’t even want to know how much debt we owed.

5) I realized that holding onto my racket also freed me from being responsible for my words and my lack of integrity. I promised to get work done but I didn’t take action. My lack of action contributed to more conflicts being erupted.

“Yes, I’m willing to let go of my racket“, I declared in front of other group leaders.

Letting my racket down for me to be the inspiration and the fun space for Thai children – no right and wrong.

And to stand that my family being happy and joyful.

This also reminded me of my commitment when I was at Harvard – or what I called passion. A passion in which even if hell breaks loose, that passion can still get me out of bed – ” My passion lies in teaching. I want to give spaces for students who are similar to me or are being called lazy. At least, to me, their ‘laziness’ is the way that I can help them to find out about their interests and passions. Hopefully, help them to where they truly want to be. That is to me what teaching is. and where my passion/interest lies. or whatever you call it.” – me in 2017.

I was so zealous to learn. There was no right and wrong. It’s just a different way of expressing and learning. It’s just so reassuring to hear that at the most revered institution on earth, we are promoting diverse ways of learning and expressing. So it IS possible to be diverse and thrive.

To be honest, our company just got “scammed” twice. In 6 months.

By two sets of business partners.

One was a literal scam – frauds and embezzling.

The other one just left us this morning – with half a million in their pocket during our financial crisis. At least 10 phone calls all day from the debtors ringing me up to PAY UP IMMEDIATELY.

If I were to stand on the “right and wrong” platform, I would point my 101 invisible middle fingers at them, calling them insanely abusive words, and head dive into a tormenting whirlpool of self-blame for trusting – AND BEING THE ONE WHO TRANSFERRED THEM MONEY!!!!

But if I were to embrace the Universal Design for Learning and apply it to business, it would mean that they have different ways of doing business. Yeah, they were supposed to be honest and truthful. I was so livid at the first business partners and have replayed 100 scenarios of how I will go after their lives. This business is built on ALL my parents’ lifesaving and our houses on collateral. It was incredibly exhausting. Truth is they are not honest and truthful. Instead of being toxic over what happened, I am going to reflect and learn from what did not work and what was missing. In the future, I can set my eyes out for the red flags and share these red flags with other people too. Just like this article.

What I am going to do:

1) Nightmare ⛔️🚫 Reality. Compared to letter-grade in school, the financial loss does sound a million times scarier. Yeah… All money that my parents have, the ticking interest, the growing expenses… It would sound that way if I let fear paint the future for me. I can rationalize that getting an F = no respectable job hire, forever-stuck-in-low-paying-job, debt, miserable life, no respect nor love. Same as 300 million bahts loss = debt, miserable life, no respect nor love. If I let fear consume me, I would be allowing this probable future to ACTUALLY become true. You know what, the company is still surviving. My nightmare is not a reality. But it will be if I live like it’s real!

2) And yes, I AM indeed scared to death. HOW THE HECK CAN I TRUST ANYONE FROM NOW ON?!?!?! It’s freaking tiring to distrust everyone. Are you telling me that I need to be a scammer to survive this???? Was I “too good”? WTH!!! AND MY PARENTS HAVE NOT RESOLVED THEIR DECADES-OLD RESENTMENT OF EACH OTHER!!!! How are we going to work together????? I can’t go on just believing that the divine and the holy spirits will protect and help us!!!

✨ Or I can take this as my learning experiment – canvas for all to-be entrepreneurs. To do business in a way that I would like to experiment and be open to new ideas to try. And to share it too. It would be like a Korean reality show. There’s nothing more live and authentic than me live-sharing my way to rebuild our business. Whether it flounders around at the beginning like Knowing Brothers or sizzle down from greatness like Running Man or go through multiple hiccups like I Live Alone or came to an end like Infinite Challenge, just watching them gave me profound strength. This week also allowed me to discover a KPOP boy band called “Seventeen”. What drew me in was their show called “Going Seventeen”. Instead of each member focusing on themselves to look cool, outshine each other, or secure the limelight, they focus on making the show fun. Fun to watch even for non-fans. Going beyond the conventional KPOP Idol show. The members and the staff could have opted for a simple or easy-going show. But they chose to provide fun – even when it means longer working hours, losing, hurting, making mistakes, making a fool of themselves, and what I dreaded the most – conflicts. There were also moments in the show where I thought that if I were the members, I would feel so belittled, hurt, and possibly leave the group – just like the majority of boy bands who disbanded. But no, they resigned their contracts and remain intact as a group.

These all strengthen my commitment that whoever meets me will be inspired by who they are and who they can be and have fun to go back home.

My show will be “Going Thai Hemp Wellness” – featuring me and possibly others of my team participating in a variety of activities depending on an “episode’s” main concept and quality content (what you can enjoy and learn from doing business).

Yes, it might sound like I’m fooling around. However, I think that by stressing over it and making the already-serious crisis more serious, I am going to pass away first from the literal stress before solving anything.

Stay tuned to the first episode: The Great Reset

Going Thai Hemp Wellness