The Immigrant Work Ethic My Parents Gave Me

My parents came to Canada with nothing and built a life through sheer effort. That example shaped everything I have done since.

I do not romanticize struggle. There is nothing noble about hardship for its own sake. But there is something fundamentally valuable about watching two people refuse to accept their circumstances and instead work relentlessly to change them. I watched that every day growing up. It became the lens through which I see everything.

What I Saw Growing Up

My parents immigrated to Canada and did what millions of immigrant families do: they took whatever work was available, lived well below their means, and poured everything into their children's futures. There were no shortcuts. There was no safety net back home. The equation was simple — work harder or fall behind. They chose to work harder.

What I absorbed from watching them was not a philosophy. It was a standard. This is how much effort a person puts in. This is how early you wake up. This is how you respond when something does not go your way — you do not complain, you adjust and keep moving. That became my baseline, not because anyone sat me down and explained it, but because it was the only version of adulthood I had ever seen.

The Difference Between Comfort and Complacency

One of the most important things the immigrant work ethic teaches you is how to distinguish between comfort and complacency. My parents wanted comfort for their family — a stable home, good food, a safe neighbourhood. That is a reasonable goal. What they never allowed was complacency — the belief that what you have is enough and you can stop pushing.

I see this distinction play out in business constantly. Entrepreneurs who came from difficult circumstances tend to keep building even after they have achieved financial stability. It is not greed. It is an ingrained understanding that stability is not permanent unless you keep reinforcing it. The world does not owe you the continuation of what you have. You have to earn it every day.

When Cloud Pharmacy became profitable and well-established, I did not coast. I started Canadian Web Designs. When the web agency was running smoothly, I co-founded Bird Sitting Toronto. When my wife Samantha and I built that into a legitimate operation, I launched Cloud Care Clinics and began planning the compounding pharmacy. Each new venture was an extension of the same principle my parents modelled: you do not stop building because things are good. You stop when the work is done. And the work is never done.

Gratitude as Fuel, Not Paralysis

There is a version of the immigrant gratitude narrative that I reject. It goes like this: your parents sacrificed so much, so you should be grateful for what you have and not ask for more. I have heard this from well-meaning relatives and community members my entire life. It is well-intentioned and completely wrong.

Gratitude should not make you smaller. It should make you more ambitious. My parents did not sacrifice so that I could settle for a comfortable salary and a safe career. They sacrificed so that I could have opportunities they never had — and the best way to honour that sacrifice is to seize every single one of those opportunities.

I am grateful every day. That gratitude does not make me content. It makes me hungry. It makes me feel an obligation to build something worthy of what was given to me.

What I Am Passing Forward

Samantha and I are raising our daughter Amelia with a version of this ethic adapted for her reality. She is growing up in a comfortable home in Toronto. She is not going to experience the material scarcity my parents dealt with, and I do not want her to. But I want her to understand the principles underneath: that effort is non-negotiable, that you do not wait for opportunities to come to you, and that the people around you — especially the ones who built the foundation you are standing on — deserve to see you make the most of it.

I am not going to manufacture hardship for my daughter. That would be absurd. But I am going to make sure she understands where the family came from, what it cost to get here, and that the expectation is not gratitude expressed as passivity. The expectation is gratitude expressed as action.

The Work Ethic Is the Advantage

In a world of equal access to information, equal access to tools, and relatively equal access to capital, the differentiator is effort. Not talent — effort. I have met brilliant people who accomplish nothing because they cannot sustain the work required to convert intelligence into outcomes. And I have met average people who build extraordinary things because they simply refuse to stop.

My parents were not extraordinary by any metric the world uses. They were ordinary people with an extraordinary tolerance for hard work. That tolerance is the single greatest inheritance I received. No financial asset, no education, no connection has been worth more.

If you come from a family like mine — immigrants who built from zero — do not treat that background as a story you tell at dinner parties. Treat it as a competitive advantage. Because it is one.

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Related reading:

• Being a Dad and a CEO at the Same Time — Passing that work ethic to the next generation
• Multicultural Marriage: What Nobody Tells You — When two immigrant families merge
• How I Bought My First Investment Property at 27 — What that work ethic produced financially