If you had the chance to erase one moment from your life, what would it be and why?

For those of you who grew up with the Western mindset, this may sound barbaric and abusive and I totally agree but for a lot of kids growing up in China as well as immigrants from there in the West, it's a reality. Growing up with with Chinese parents in America, I assumed the worst of both worlds: that if I rebelled, I would get kicked out of the house like I kept hearing about in music and movies there. Little did I know how much leverage I had even as a kid due to filial piety and the East Asian dogma of raising kids so they will be your "retirement plan". I think it was around 8th grade when I had a teacher who was fervently against grade inflation and I always brought back exams where I got B's, C's, and less and I was literally being beaten on a weekly basis. When I was little, there wasn't much I could do but by the time I was a teen, I probably had enough strength to fight back and seriously intimidate my dad into cutting this behavior but for some reason, it never crossed my mind and it continued till nearly when I went away for college. It's something that still affects my psyche this day, decades later.

So I guess thanks to the academic pressures created through the threat of being beaten for less than perfect grades landed me in a prestigious university in the US but that pressure went away once I was gone so I had mediocre grades there. I did graduate but my grades weren't anything to write home about which limited my prospects of graduate school. However, this time, since I'm now an adult and not always physically home, my parents relied on emotional manipulation instead of physical beatings to get me to comply with their wishes. Not sure why but I ended up complying again even though I had 0 interest in grad school or the subject I was studying.

I guess this is an extension of #2 and there's no way I could have seen it beforehand but I wasted what could have been a couple years of a golden opportunity to jump start my career during the couple of years before the financial crash hit and unemployment skyrocketed. Instead, I graduated from grad school then with so many years of schooling and 0 work experience into a labor market with double digit unemployment rates. And it doesn't help that I had 0 desire to move back home either (if you read #1 and #2, it's pretty obvious why.) Nevertheless, my parents provided financial support for grad school since that was one of my conditions for complying and I ended up stashing the excess money for a rainy day which allowed me to embark on a nearly 10 month job search in 2009 to early 2010 when I applied to nearly 2000 jobs before I landed something, right when my savings ran out so I didn't have to move back home. Oh, and did I mention I ended up renting the cheapest place I could find in the area after graduating so to stretch my dollars? It was a $500/mo "room" in someone's house and there wasn't even a kitchen so I had to cook outdoors on the outdoor gas range they provided (but fortunately, thanks to being on the California coast, it rarely got too hot or too cold.)

A few times I did try talking to my professors either after class or in office hours, I found them intimidating, impatient, rude, and just plain unpleasant to talk to but I didn't see the big picture at the time that it was a golden opportunity to pick the brains of some of the most intelligent people in the world and many would kill to have a slot at the university I was attending and would milk opportunities like that even if they encountered relatively mild resistance.

So back when I had an Engineering degree from one of the top Engineering schools on the West Coast plus two Masters degrees (including the one in Finance), I was barely making over $40,000/yr. And it stayed that way for years even when I tried desperately applying everywhere for a better opportunity. I thought I needed to network, network, network like what the career experts said. Thing is, I've been a loner much of my life and never really kept up with my friends so I didn't feel like calling any of them out of the blue to ask for a job or something. The only other option I thought I might try was networking by going to networking events. Keep in mind I was in Southern California at the time, famous for their legendary traffic jams and I already had a 1 hour commute each way to my work, and I ended up going to networking event after networking event with nothing to show for other than maybe a handful of new but superficial connections I added onto LinkedIn. Needless to say, after a few years of this and countless new events plus miles on my car, I got completely burnt out and went back to upgrading my skills and applying for jobs online and voila, I more than doubled my salary.

A lot of entrepreneurs I've read already started researching and planning their endeavors while in college or early in their careers, but I was stuck in the mentality of "just get good grades, graduate, and a job will appear that will make you rich". Sure, that's what I was brought up with and I didn't know any better but almost nobody I know who is wildly successful followed that simple and naive formula.

Remember how I said I had zero interest in the subject that I was studying in grad school? Well, that was Finance (nevermind the fact that I had my Engineering undergrad degree from one of the top Engineering schools in the country.) I also loved computers and programming ever since I was a teen but for some reason, my parents strongly discouraged me from pursuing a career in that. They had a strong aversion to tech in general and thought that because they couldn't understand it, it must not be worth pursuing. I'm not a psychologist here but I feel that I wasn't "rebellious" enough as a teen and young adult (esp thanks to #1) and I never bothered to challenge that. And thanks to some bad timing, I graduated with a Masters in a Financial discipline in 2009, one of the worst possible times in history and could not earn more than the median US salary (despite trying very hard to find a new job) until I switched to coding like around 2016.

This is something niche that maybe @JamesAltucher knows but it's one of the most difficult certifications to obtain in the Financial industry. I spent about 400 hours of the little free time I had left after my grueling commute, going to networking events, etc. in the ~1.5 years studying for all 3 levels of this exam, passing them all, only to find out that my yearly salary would still remain below $50,000 a year for many years to come, despite nearly everyone I know who had this charter making well over $100K/yr. When I told people how much I was making with the charter, they literally thought I was joking or something and if not, they said something like "if you're making so little despite this certification, there must be something wrong with you so sorry, I can't help you."

Maybe I had an extreme case of Wrap Rage but one day several years ago, I had a bunch of cardboard boxes that were clogging up my home and I needed to throw them all away. Problem is, you can't just throw the boxes into the dumpster; you must flatten them out. Well, I'm one of the most mechanically-challenged people in the planet and struggle with tearing apart these boxes into flat cardboards before they could be thrown away and the thought of having to flatten the whole dozen boxes I had laid out in front of the dumpster fueled my impatience and even anger. So I decided to take that anger out on the boxes themselves by jumping on them and flattening them that way. Well, a couple of boxes in, I lost my balance and fell straight onto the concrete pavement, breaking my left wrist in the process. Long story short, I had to get surgery to fix my wrist plus several months of physical therapy, costing me about $6000 in medical bills even after insurance.

Maybe because I was still bitter over how he treated me throughout my childhood, but during the early years of my career when I was (just barely) able to support myself financially, I pretty much disconnect myself from my parents emotionally. I still visited them if I had the time but I didn't really care what was going on with them. Fast forward to about 7 or so years ago, my dad started to have signs of memory loss right when he retired. I didn't think much about it then but it was probably due to his age and I thought it was normal to have memory loss when people get old. Another couple of years later, he was having serious issues with his daily life like driving, cooking, etc. Many relatives including myself urged him to get help but he said he was fine and my mom thought it wasn't a big deal. Things started to go downhill fast around the start of the pandemic and I lived thousands of miles away so I couldn't safely visit. I was able to visit shortly after I had gotten my Covid vaccine, but by that time, he was in the advanced stages of the disease and he ended up passing away later that year.