Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, director, CEO, Chief Strategist, and founder
I think the drive comes from being poor. I’m just going to be really honest with you. My drive to do what I do is because we came to America from Vietnam in 1975, escaping communism, and landing here with nothing. Having lost everything. Our culture, our country, our money. Everything that we had was gone. It vaporized in the course of about 24 hours, having to flee the country. My parents were here. They don’t understand the customs or the culture. They don’t really speak the language well, so we grew up poor. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were poor.
We went to secondhand shops. We lived because of the generosity of other people, of the country and the support systems that were in place. Whenever I would desire something, I would ask my mom. You go to the toy store and the general rule is you can look at everything. You can’t ask for anything. You just go home with hopes and dreams. I would spend a lot of time fantasizing about all of these things that I saw in magazines and comic books. They have ads targeted towards kids. I wanted the X-ray vision glasses. I wanted to be like the strong man on the beach, and not the nerd who gets the sand kicked in his face. I wanted all those things. The way to that was through money. I hustled as a kid. I had many different businesses that failed. Everything from catching crayfish to washing cars, selling popsicles to kids that were younger than me. Selling candy, ninja stars. Everything that I could think of.
This is what drove me, that I saw money as a means towards freedom. That’s what’s pushed me. That pushed me very far, because that’s why I started Blind. I wanted to have this freedom, and I wanted to use that freedom to surround myself with super creative human beings, to create what I would have… my ideal office space. A place where I would’ve wanted to go to work, if I were to go to work for someone else. That went for a really long time. It came into clarity this one day, because I was talking to my financial planner. I asked him, his name is John, I said, “John, you’ve got to just tell me. How much longer do I need to work so I can retire?”
He goes, “Okay, let me look into your books.” Then shortly, he’s like, “Well, given what I know about you and Jesse, you have everything squared away, and the amount of money that you spend, you could’ve retired years ago.” I looked at my wife and I’m like, “Honey, you kept telling me five more years.” She would just keep extending that. That was a never ending five more years. She’s like, “Give me five more years.” Because for her, financial security was really important. She didn’t want to worry about, oh my God. We’re going to run out of money. In that moment, I had to come to this realization that I don’t need to work anymore. If I work, what is it for? What’s the point? What’s the purpose of this?
This is when I started to think about, why do I get up every single day and go to an office if the money isn’t the motivation? I need to find something deeper, something bigger. Something that’s going to be more meaningful. People call this your genius work, the work that matters. That’s what I needed to find, and I found it in The Futur.
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/r2N4qePR0h4
- https://thefutur.com/team/chris-do
- https://justcreative.com/2020/08/31/chris-do-podcast/
- https://twitter.com/thefuturishere/status/1017460052901421056
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