Prove Yourself: Essential Lessons From My Successful Startups

By Dr. Kingsley R. Chin Chin

Like millions of immigrants throughout our history, who have found their way to the United States, Dr. Kingsley R Chin has fulfilled the American Dream and in his book, Prove Yourself, he describes in heart wrenching emotions, anecdotes and priceless business and life lessons for anyone who has the desire for financial freedom whether it is to own your own business or rise up to lead in any organization and build a working team to succeed.  Woven throughout this book is an infectious tenacity to succeed that will pull you to want to identify your desire and pursue it until you too succeed. Prove Yourself is a story, an attitude and a mindset you can get behind, a book that can inspire you and lift you to the next level of personal and professional success.  So read on, join the movement to prove yourself.  Because today might be the day you change the course of your life and prove to yourself that you’re worthy of enjoying the life of success and financial freedom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634134460

Book preview

Introduction

Do you wonder what the future holds for you? Do you wonder if you are destined to succeed or fail? Is success about your luck? Can you learn how to succeed? If you want to succeed, how do you start? By now you may want to scream out the question, How do I succeed?

Let’s start with the simple but personal question, do you feel the desire to prove yourself? If you ever felt the need to prove yourself, then you have that essential first spark called desire.

As I embarked on writing this book, I thought of how early in my childhood I first felt the need to prove myself. For me it began in Buff Bay, a tiny seaside town in Portland, Jamaica, where I was born to a single, teenage mother. I thought of how this strong desire drove me to make it all the way from Buff Bay to the best Ivy League schools in the USA, to work on Wall Street, to graduate with a medical degree with honors from Harvard Medical School, to become a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon, and to be the chief executive officer of the KICVentures private equity firm, with a net worth of over a billion dollars and growing. The question is: If I did all this, are there lessons and principles that can be learned? Why shouldn’t you learn these lessons? Read on to learn how you can also develop the principles of success to improve your life’s journey, to start your own business, or to rise through the ranks of any corporation.

This book describes real business experiences and recounts private anecdotes from my journey to illustrate lessons that became successful life and business principles. Written in twelve powerful chapters, it promises to help you on your journey to success. As you read, you will likely see similarities in your life. When you do, contribute to our blog, ProveYourselfBook.com/blog to share your own lessons, and join our movement to empower new entrepreneurs to build multimillion dollar businesses. Prove to yourself and to others that you will succeed, and when you do, you will enjoy the respect and lifestyle of successful people.

If you have never felt the need to prove yourself, you will have that feeling by the end of this book. When you feel like proving you can desire something and accomplish it, whether it is to prove to yourself or to prove to others, you will experience an inner force awaken inside that will urge you to succeed and make an impact in this life. Society needs people like you to start businesses and to discover new and better ways to do things to keep the engine of our civilization going. What if we all decided not to create any businesses? Our society, more than ever, embraces and rewards innovation and sees the value in chasing success. Everyone has the potential within themselves to start and build a successful business or to rise through the ranks and become a well-respected leader.

You don’t control the situation into which you were born, and if you are not in a great position with a lot of resources right now, believe in yourself that you can control where you end up or where you are heading. Like many people who desired success and achieved it, I grew up poor, and was not privy to many resources or financial wealth. This made me first realize my true situation, and I became hungry and developed a desire for success, financial security and independence, but I had to come up with a plan and start the journey to learn how to succeed. It began with observing and listening to anyone around me who seemed to have success, and then using what natural gifts I had to pursue my own success journey. I started by setting small reachable goals, laying the foundation of getting an education, being inquisitive to learn from others, honing my athletic abilities and sharpening my competitiveness. Essentially, I began to prepare to be successful early in life and you too will also need to go through a process of preparation in your own life.

Because of this preparation, when the opportunity knocked on my door to go to Columbia University in New York City on a soccer scholarship, I was ready to answer the call. And when I landed in the USA and New York City, I had arrived in a place where I felt resources were at my fingertips, and that I could prove to myself that I was capable of achieving my greatest desires in life. I could finally prove to all those who helped me—my mother, my siblings and other relatives, my friends, my community, and my country, all those who paved the way for me to have the opportunities some of them did not have—that I could rise to the highest level in life and business. Through trial and error and being willing to learn quickly, I discovered what is necessary to be successful. My question to you is this: Since I have done it, why shouldn’t you learn from my lessons? If you are already on the path to success, then this book should reinforce many of the fundamental lessons you have already learned, and you can enjoy reflecting on your own experiences as you share mine.

In a nutshell, when you read this book, you will learn lessons that will prepare you to reach high levels of success at a faster pace, because time is limited. As you read each chapter, take notes and create visions of how you could apply these lessons and refresh yourself over and over. Be smart and sensible, and learn principles from others and use them to succeed. Avoid being stubborn, not-so-smart, and thinking you already have all the answers. Too often if we are stubborn we keep repeating the same mistakes—not even realizing it, hoping for a different result each time—thinking we are trying something different or that with just more time and money we will succeed. Or we may choose to stay in our situation, afraid to lose what we have and not seeing that we really have no control, and life is passing us by as we work our fingers to the bone to maintain our current lifestyles. When we find ourselves so deep into our situation, we are afraid that if we take our eyes and try to look somewhere else, we will lose what we have. Or we feel we just don’t have the time to spare to look forward. If this sounds familiar, be mindful of this scenario, because in the end you could be missing key opportunities and trading health and time for wealth while being sucked into a vicious time vortex.

The more friends you make, the more likely you will get out of trouble or save yourself if you are heading into bankruptcy.

If you are not changing and seeking new opportunities and partnerships that will help you save time and give you independence, you are standing still by working to maintain what you have or going backwards because the world is moving by you. By reading a book like this you are being smart because you are preparing for when opportunities come, and you will learn that even if you are on the right path for success you will be in a better position if you find ways to collaborate with other successful people. The more friends you make, the more likely you will get out of trouble or save yourself if you are heading into bankruptcy. In sharing my story, there is nothing in it to suggest that I was destined for a successful life. Nor was I simply lucky. If anything, I was always searching for new opportunities, and new relationships, and preparing along the way.

Success will be your vindication, and you will get great satisfaction from knowing you have proven yourself.

This book will help you on your journey if you can learn from my experiences, struggles, and victories. It will hopefully inspire you to have the confidence to believe that you too can feel empowered to live your life in pursuit of success and financial independence. By believing this, you will realize you can achieve your greatest potential. And the rewards of a successful lifestyle are worth every sacrifice along your journey. You will be energized to act on your desire to succeed. You will appreciate that your greatest resources are your time and health and you must treasure both while you still have them. You will learn about the value of money, and that success is an individual journey but you don’t have to feel alone at the top when you succeed, because you will have the tools to surround yourself with a core management team to buy into your vision and build alongside you because they will feel a sense of ownership. From sharing in my experiences you will look at your life and see that every person who turned their back on you or closed a door in your face will become your motivation to focus your efforts elsewhere, and surround yourself with the right people. Success will be your vindication, and you will get great satisfaction from knowing you have proven yourself. But, when you achieve the objects and lifestyles of success, remember to put people first and share your success, to make lives better for those who helped you and those whom you can help. Read on and join our movement. Prove yourself now.

Dr. Kingsley R. Chin

Chapter One: Start with a Desire, Then Satisfy a Need

I did not wake up one day and decide I wanted to start a business or rise to become a CEO. Most entrepreneurs I know did not either. It all started with the desire to succeed, to obtain financial security and the lifestyle that comes with it.

This is an important lesson: It is essential that you recognize your true situation before you embark on your journey.

When that desire builds strong enough you will know it is time to take that first step to embark on the journey to start your own business. For me, I had no idea what the journey would be like when I embarked on developing what has grown to be a portfolio of health-tech and information technology (IT) companies valued over a billion dollars and expanding quickly. It did not matter that I did not know how long it would take to succeed, or if the journey was going to be hard or easy. It did not dissuade me that I knew I did not fit any stereotype for a successful entrepreneur; I was going to have to prove myself and be self-reliant. To be self-reliant I knew we needed to have our own source of cash to grow our businesses so I also started the private equity company KICVentures (Kingsley Investment Company Ventures) to fund our startups. This is an important lesson:It is essential that you recognize your true situation before you embark on your journey.

When you feel the tinge of disappointment just remind yourself, these are the people who are placed in your way to help point you in the right direction, to focus you on finding another path, and to force you to rely on yourself.

There were many naysayers along the way—or you might call them haters. They did not tell me to my face that I was not going to succeed. It was what they did not say, or how they said what they said, or the way they avoided helping me, even when they knew that they stood to benefit by working with me to pool our resources. The hardest pill you will swallow will come from the ones who you thought you could count on to support your businesses, but they made it clear you would never get their support over your competition. Some may still talk with you as if everything is all cool as long as it does not involve your business, while others will stop returning your calls because they expect it will be a call about your business. Others you know are so caught up in themselves and their success they will make themselves too busy to see any benefits in helping someone else they know succeed. You will learn that complete strangers are more willing to help you because they can see past the jealousy and preconceived ideas of your capabilities to find ways to help themselves form a win-win relationship. All of these realizations should fuel your desire as it fueled mine. Your success will be your vindication and you might be pleasantly surprised to see your haters turn to cheerleaders. When you feel the tinge of disappointment just remind yourself, these are the people who are placed in your way to help point you in the right direction, to focus you on finding another path, and to force you to rely on yourself.

I remember that in 2005, when we decided to start our medical device company called SpineFrontier Inc, several of my colleagues said there were too many spine medical device companies, and wondered why I wanted to start another one. Others saw no hope in us succeeding before we even started (to them a spine surgeon had no business starting and running a spine company), so they wouldn’t entertain the idea of investing money or time. I was equally amazed that surgeons did not see that they were all customers and not business owners and that was compelling reason enough to join forces and build SpineFrontier and share it as their own. It should not have been a question of whether we would succeed or fail. A close surgeon colleague of mine was told by another colleague to