Insight for Entrepreneurs: Giving Without Expectation

One realisation has been growing quietly in me over the past few years: the areas of my life where I perform the best are also the areas where I expect nothing in return. With my daughters, my wife, my family—I give everything I can, yet I never measure, never demand, never look for repayment. I simply want them well. I want their moments to be good moments. And strangely, without effort, that becomes the space where I show up strongest.

It made me ask a difficult question:

Why do I not live this way in business? Why do most of us treat our work as a transaction, not a relationship?

Many people were raised with an older mindset—especially in Chinese culture—where giving comes with a hidden contract. Parents expect children to repay them one day. They give, but they also expect to collect. That expectation creates disappointment, pressure, and distance. It turns love into accounting.

But real love does not behave this way.

And real compounding—whether in family, business, or investing—doesn't behave this way either.

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Treating Your Business Like a Person You Love

As I shift my focus back to our own ventures and value investing, I am training myself to treat the business more like a person I care about deeply:

I want it to grow well.

I want to give my best to it.

I want to build moments with it, not rush to the destination.

And I want to ask nothing in return—not today, not tomorrow.

Of course, business has numbers, targets, financial realities. But beneath all of that, a business is still something you nurture. Like raising a child, you can guide, teach, support—but you cannot demand the timing of its progress. If you raise a child for return, you are destined for disappointment. And if you build a business only for return, you lose both gratitude and growth.

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Luck vs. Creation

I’ve seen people who only look back at one or two proud moments in their lives—moments that were mostly luck. Good timing, easy markets, the right place to be born. They think those peaks were achievements, but in truth, they didn’t build them. They were given.

When a person stops growing, every “best moment” becomes a memory instead of a foundation. They cannot recreate it, because they never learned how to build it.

I don’t want that.

For my family or my ventures.

I want the best moments to be every moment along the path—not because they are spectacular, but because they are part of a living, growing thing I am nurturing with intention.

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Practice, Don’t Chase

Wisdom, like compounding, doesn’t come when you ask for it. You cannot switch it on at the moment you need it. You must practice it long before the results appear. You must give your heart to it. You must trust the process.

The same applies to work:

Give fully. Expect nothing. Grow steadily.

This is the way to avoid disappointment, and the way to let gratitude—and compounding—take over.

When you learn to give without expectation, everything you build begins to grow on its own.

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