My parents left Iran with one suitcase and a few hundred dollars. They didn't speak English fluently. They didn't have jobs waiting for them. They didn't have a network, a safety net, or a five-year plan. What they had was a conviction that the country they loved was no longer a place where they could build the life they wanted for their children. And that conviction was enough to make them walk away from everything they'd ever known.

I've told pieces of this story before, in interviews, in conversations, in the margins of my book. But I've never sat down and written the whole thing. And I've never connected it, directly and explicitly, to the way I think about investing, risk, and building a life. So I'm doing that now. Because as I get older, and as I watch my own kids grow up in a world of abundance and opportunity, I realize that the most important lessons I carry aren't from college, or from medical school (which I dropped out of), or even from the nightlife industry (which taught me more than both combined). The most important lessons came from watching two people with nothing build everything.

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