Opportunity Costs

I went home to Sac to have din­ner with the fam­ily today, and as we sat around the table and talked about fam­ily news, I couldn’t help but to think…

I get my love of ser­vice from my fam­ily. My dad doesn’t work the best job he can, but he does one that he hopes will be mean­ing­ful and reward­ing. My grand­fa­ther actu­ally cre­ated a non-​profit agency to help Viet­namese immi­grants and made it a cor­ner­stone of the com­mu­nity in Min­nesota. He was the gov­er­nor of his province back in Viet­nam — although, the province was small, so it might be more com­pa­ra­ble to mayor of a large town. Both of them are born lead­ers and bril­liant speak­ers. They could have been very, very suc­cess­ful in busi­ness. My dad could have used his com­puter skills and moved in a very dif­fer­ent direc­tion… we had moved to Sil­i­con Val­ley at a crit­i­cal moment in the tech world. My grand­fa­ther could have just as eas­ily made a for-​profit cor­po­ra­tion to enrich himself.

Because of their choices, though, my fam­ily has never been in the best finan­cial con­di­tion. Not that I’ve ever wanted for any­thing, but we have had to scrape. At the moment, we’re not in the best shape — you didn’t hear it from me, but we’re going to be buck­ling down a lit­tle over the next year.

All of which makes me ques­tion my own life choices. I’ve been mooching off my par­ents for twenty-​two years. I know that they are happy for me find­ing a path that will make me happy, and I know they are proud of my involve­ment in ser­vice orga­ni­za­tions. How­ever, I know that this isn’t what they had expected for me. I know that they were look­ing for me to look out not only for myself, but also to help them look after my sis­ters and my family.

It makes me won­der how dif­fer­ent things would be if I had sucked it up and toughed it out with com­puter sci­ence. If I had grad­u­ated on time with my orig­i­nal major, I would have been work­ing for three years already. That’s three years I could have been actively help­ing my fam­ily with the mort­gage, with Dong Ha’s tuition and other col­lege costs, and with a new car for Gio Linh.

And instead, I was just another mouth to feed. A sink­hole in the fam­ily bank account.

Was it worth it? Did I make the most of my time?

Life is all about oppor­tu­nity costs. You get some­thing by giv­ing some­thing else up. There is an equal and oppo­site reac­tion for every action you take. Kinda like this video:

(The band is “The Spinto Band,” and the song is called “Trust vs. Mis­trust.” Check them out, they have some really great songs and their videos are very interesting.)

Tags: Computer, Dong Ha, Family, Gio Linh, Videos, Viet, Work