As told by Isaac Smith
Coming back to UVU felt like the right decision. It felt like the right place for me to be in my life.
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My parents taught me really good principles of determination and a good work ethic. As immigrants, if you wanted the same opportunities that American kids had, they always told me you had to work three times as hard. So, throughout my whole life, if I wanted to get ahead, I needed to work harder than the guy next to me. Because whenever I'm relaxing, I know someone else isn't. That stuck with me.
I love my parents, and I respect them. My dad was an executive in Chile. He was doing very well and managing hundreds of people, but he gave up everything so we could have a better life. When we immigrated to the US, my parents cleaned houses and did car detailing for decades.
I regret that I can't give them everything, but I can give back a little bit of what they gave me. I'm not gonna say they've been perfect parents, but they were perfect parents for me. I'm very happy to say that I have a good relationship with them; I have dinners with them almost every Sunday. They have always been an inspiration for me.
I've always liked business and inventing stuff. When I was 12, my parents got me a Windows 98 computer for Christmas. I taught myself Visual Basic, how to build a calculator, and a few other programs. I also remember, when I was probably nine or ten, I went to the store and bought a ton of cupcakes and lemonade to make a little lemonade stand.
For the longest time, I actually did not believe in the importance of a college education. To put it quite frankly, I thought I didn’t need it, and that I had the skills and ability to make it happen on my own. I decided to become a software engineer. I figured I could just go to a boot camp and get a job, and I did just that. I went to a boot camp and got a high-paying job right afterward. I did that for a few years.
Following that, I did a startup and invested quite a bit of money. We built this cool health platform during the height of COVID. We were confident it could help the world and help us recover quickly to keep everybody safe. However, it didn't pan out.
I failed things before, I’ve had Kickstarters that didn’t work, and I've gotten bad grades on tests, but this whole thing was a lot different. Because when I failed, I lost a ton of money.
That experience made me realize I needed to have consistency in my life. I needed to have something that gave me that bedrock foundation to build my career on and give stability to my family because I have two kids.
I decided to get a college education and formalize the experience I've learned from starting several businesses. I needed to formalize that to make it something solid.
Coming back to UVU felt like the right decision. It felt like the right place for me to be in my life. Meeting Breanna Hale at the Entrepreneurship Institute and seeing the energy here — it's hard to quantify in scientific or business terms, but it felt right. I hadn't experienced that kind of energy in a long time.
If I could summarize everything, it’s that you gotta get back up.
Something I don’t share with a lot of people is that my mom suffers from chronic diseases. She’s dealt with cancer and stuff like that. There were times when she was on her deathbed, but she never gave up her desire to keep living and fighting. That inspired me when I failed, and I was at the bottom, and I’d fallen from such a high spot into unemployment. Her words came to my mind: “You can cry today. That’s okay. But tomorrow, you gotta get up.”
You can’t stop moving. You have to keep going and trying. If you have a business that’s succeeding, that’s great — keep scaling. Or if you just failed and you’re at the bottom, it’s okay — learn what you can from that and then move on to the next.
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