My father is, on most days, the most deliberate person I know.
He does not do things by accident.
He does not forget things.
He does not act without having thought through the action and what it is supposed to accomplish.
When I was seven, he explained to me why he always put his keys in the same pocket.
Not because someone told him to.
Because he had decided, after losing his keys twice in one year, that the cost of inconsistency was greater than the inconvenience of habit.
He was not lecturing me about keys.
He was teaching me about systems.
The keys are always in the left front pocket, he said.
Not as a rule.
As a decision.
When you make a decision, you stop wasting time on the question.
I am now eighteen years old and I still hear that sentence at least twice a week.
His name is David Park.
He is fifty-one years old.
He owns three small businesses: a dry cleaning operation with two locations, a car wash, and a commercial cleaning company.
He built all three from nothing, starting with the dry cleaner when he was twenty-nine, working fourteen-hour days for the first five years, and expanding only after each operation was stable.
He wears a suit to work.
Not every day.
But more days than not.
He has opinions about clothes that he does not impose on others but that he lives by personally.
He will not go to Home Depot in his yard-work clothes.
He has his reasons.
My mother is Christine Park.
She is forty-eight.
She has been a hospital administrator for fourteen years at the same institution.
She started as a coordinator and is now the director of patient services, which is the kind of career trajectory that happens when you are both skilled and patient and willing to do the work that other people find unglamorous.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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