Success Is Also Getting Back Up (Advice My Father Gave Me Before He Passed)

Matthew Gottesman (0:02)

Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.

Welcome to episode 885, and a continuation of the relaunching of old classic podcast episodes from a few hundred ago. This was from, success is also getting back up, and this was advice that my father gave me before he passed. And so it's a very deeply personal episode, and I'm very proud of my father, God rest his soul. And he gave me some really great advice about trusting yourself, your path, your art, getting back up after taking a few falls, and how do we persevere through that? So episode 885, Success Is Also Getting Back Up, Advice My Father Gave Me Before He Passed.

Welcome to episode 508, Success Is Also Getting Back Up. And this was some advice I want to share that came from my father before he passed. He passed in 2019, but I had a very interesting, unique interaction with him in 2016, when he ended up in the hospital. And I'm going to get to that here in a minute. But the idea here is that we often look at success. And I was one of them for a very long time. And I still sometimes wrestle with this. But we often at times look at success as when I achieve some sort of goal, or I have proven I can do it, or you've made the company successful, or you won the race, or whatever might be as an end result. And why not? That's the way we've been taught. That's the way that society measures a win. Success is usually an end result. And I know Maya Angelou always used to say, success is lacking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it. And I firmly believe that she was absolutely right. And I learned a very valuable lesson from my father about success, which I'm going to share with you momentarily here. I was on a phone call, Zoom call earlier, and I was telling the story. And I've previously told, I believe, this story or part of this story on this podcast. But I also realize that there's thousands more listeners now. And I want to share a personal story because, you know, there's not sometimes enough of those online about, you know, parts of my journey, except for here on the podcast. I always share with you guys, like I'm sharing with just one person, even though I realize there's like tens of thousands of you. So I really appreciate it.

And I want to share this story about success from my father. I had a very, I still do, even though he's passed, I'm very fortunate to have had such a great relationship with my father. He was a very steadfast, strategic, entrepreneurial, integrity-driven, hard work ethic man. And his follow-through and consistency, that's probably where I got it from, if you're wondering, because some people always comment on my consistency. I could actually even feel my father being like, no, you probably have it down even more than I do at this point, but that's where I learned it from. I want to give him a lot of credit. And I had a great relationship with him. He was a mentor and a best friend. He was always interested in what I wanted to build. And he raised me very independently, he and my mother, independent thinking.

You can't just automatically make up your mind based off of what somebody tells you or what you see in the media or just any of this stuff. You've got to live experience, create, get experience, and make the best possible decisions you can in that moment. And so it was 2016, and he had led a very healthy life. But after having a few problems internally with it, like with it physically, he ended up finding that he had a stage four cancer, that a lot of the doctors, and we had some friends in that world that sent some top doctors. And they told him, you've only got maybe five, six months with the cancer. And by the way, that's not what he passed from years later. But he was told that, and God bless my mother. My mother was like, okay, well, we'll take it from here. And my mother firmly believed in health, holistic health, nutrition, good food, good environments, prayer, meditation, all the things, holistic. I mean, this natural system, this natural body that we've been given, not to say that there couldn't ever be a use for hospitals and whatnot, but she just didn't want them to tear at him and use a lot of things against his system. She wanted to help heal the system. And for those of you that were wondering, yes, she did it. She actually helped him. He went home, she took him home, and over four or five months, practically healed it to nothing. So much that the doctors even asked, how'd you do it?