A friend of the family passed away Christmas of 2022.

He was my dad’s friend and father to 7 children who were also our buddies. We one by one went our different ways as we graduated university. Some went to the US, others stayed, some married, had kids. One from our side briefly dated one of theirs, and my brother is a neighbor to two of them in the US. But, on the whole, I haven’t seen most of those kids in over 30 years.

Until the wake of their dad.

I got to see all of the 7 back home, in the Philippines. The middle boy, M.V., was one of my best friends in college although we were from different universities. I got to meet his him, his wife and one of his daughters in 2015 in the US. Seven years later, today, I got to see the full extent of what my “nephews” and “nieces” have become, thanks to the hard work of their dad.

This is how his kids turned out. They all went to the best schools: Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, all on full scholarship. The two oldest girls, newly married, are employed as software experts in Google and Disney, one of whom is credited with a published VR technology. The oldest boy was offered scholarships in several top schools and chose Harvard.

M.V. though very intelligent was not what we call “academic”, but he in an extremely hard worker. He also had a little something to prove: middle children often do. I recall him telling me that he solved all the problems in one of his engineering textbooks and shared the answer sheet to his classmates. He married young right after college and migrated to the US, where he worked for a software company before founding his own consulting firm.

They never had a lot of money and they still live in a rented apartment. To raise 6 kids and give them good education they had nothing but hard work to rely on. It was not easy.

Education in the US is very expensive. The yearly tuition of just one kid could nearly wipe out one’s yearly salary. The only way his kids could get the education he wanted for them was through full scholarships. This is hell to process.

Aside from showing exceptional scholastic performance, there are tons of documents to fill out. This grueling chore has to be repeated every year. And every year, M.V. is audited by the universities, a process requiring even more paperwork. It was so hard that M.V. has closed his business in order to work full time administering the scholarships for the kids who are still studying.

The boy, M., in particular, is something. His SAT scores are perfect in math and nearly perfect in verbal, stratospheric enough to be offered full scholarships by several top schools including Harvard and Princeton. One question on the application form for Harvard asked “What did you in the summer, and what did you learn?”

M. could have done a regular summer job like most kids. But instead, the dad suggested that 1) his son design and build a product; and 2) that he shadow his dad in his consulting work. For the product part, M. designed and programmed an educational app that used virtual reality technology, with the help of his sister. For the shadowing part, he wrote that he spent the summer dusting the innards of computers.

For someone in high school to design and build a virtual reality app is impressive. But what I found more impressive was what he said he learned from shadowing his dad. M. wrote on his essay that he learned the value of preventive maintenance.

There’s a management adage called the 1-10-100 Rule. It says that it costs $1 to verify your work, $10 to repair a mistake, and $100 to control damage from use of the product. Preventive maintenance is that job, least glamorous, but that makes all function efficiently and effectively. It’s a minuscule investment all things considered.

Preventive maintenance summarizes the whole of M.V.’s strategy. He invested in the unglamorous job of filling out the tortured paperwork, but by doing so he also demonstrated what great work really involves. Work is grind, grind pays.

As to not having a house? “What does a house add to all this?,” M.V. asked me. “Nothing”. You don’t own a house until it is fully paid for, and until then it is a liability, not an asset. Grant Cardone, wealth consultant and author of The 10X Rule, has never owned his own house either.

Today their eldest daughter’s family lives in their own house. On Lake Tahoe, of all places. That’s very expensive, but it’s also very Google if you’re a top performer.

I’m so glad to have met M.V. again.

Then my phone rings; it’s his brother. M.V.’s siblings were downstairs in a shop called Marketplace, and were about to go to a karaoke bar. Could I drive M.V. there? I said, “Sure,” but changed my mind. “We’ll be done in about 15 minutes. Could you guys wait?”

They did. So M.V. and I went down to the ground floor, passing for cheese rolls first chez Mary Grace, which does not exist in the US, and I was able to say goodbye to the whole gang: Some of the Best Friends I’ve Ever Known.