Harley Finkelstein

Every time I had a silly idea about a business,

My father would come home with a business card that said my name and the business name.

And it was this very simple physical device that was the equivalent of him saying, you absolutely can do this.

You have the capacity.

You have the willpower.

You have the entitlement.

You can do this.

You have the permission to go do this.

And I ended up DJing 500 bar mitzvahs after that.

Started my own DJ company.

Hired myself.

And that was sort of my relationship, I think, with my dad over my life, which is that I don't think I fully understood the baggage he was carrying with him his whole life.

but he was unequivocally supportive and loving of me.

And even when years later, when he went away and we lost all our money, it was tough for me to hate him because ultimately what I really believed was he was doing it for me, that he was going, he was taking massive risks with his own life and his own freedom in order to give me and my two much younger, one of my sisters is 10 years younger, the other is three years younger,

He was doing it to give me and my siblings a much better life.

And he was willing to risk what ended up being five or six years of federal prison time to provide that for us.

And as I sort of reflect on my upbringing and my childhood, it'd be difficult for me not to credit

his transfer of confidence to me with kind of how I ended up.

So I have anxiety now.

I am constantly trying to do more, feel more, build more, have more.