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He took his position in front of a brick wall in the backyard.
The two pot plants either side of him became our goal, much to the dismay of my mum.
And I proceeded to attempt to kick one passed him.
I was thirteen years old.
He was 51 at the time, and he had spent the majority of his adult life as a laborer, working on assembly lines and in meat factories.
A lifetime of backbreaking work meant that he wasnât inclined to play goalkeeper, but he did so anyway, to appease my pestering requests⌠and to be my dad.
My dad moved to Australia in 1971.
He didnât speak any English.
He had a fifth-grade education.
And he had little money to speak of.
His objective? To save up some money and return home to provide a better life for his family in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, then part of Yugoslavia.
Months later though, he had saved up enough money, not to fly home, but to fly down my mum and infant brother. The trip was a far more luxurious journey than the two-month ship voyage my dad had to endure. As an aside, 48 years later, weâre still yet to move back â somehow, I donât think itâs going to happen!
My parents initially settled in Whyalla, a steel city in South Australia. Incidentally, this is the location of a delightful story my mum often tells. Finding herself in a grocery store, on the lookout for eggs, but with little command of the English language, she tried using sign language to get pointed in the right direction. But that didnât work. All she got were odd glances and shoulder shrugs in return. She then took the cashierâs notepad and pen and proceeded to draw a picture of a chicken with eggs underneath it, circling the eggs. That did the trick.
Despite this inauspicious start, they moved to Melbourne shortly thereafter and both began working double shifts for the likes of Ralphâs Meat Company and Smorgon Steel.
By the end of the decade, this work ethic had earned them what would become an investment property in the then industrial suburb of Yarraville, in Melbourneâs inner west, and theyâd go on to build and live in a 4-bedroom âMcMansionâ in the working class, immigrant-dense suburb of Sunshine.
It was around this time, in 1983, that I was born.
You could describe my childhood as Aristotelean, in the sense that my parents had cultivated a life for me and my sister at the mean of excess and deficiency. They bought me an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System when I was six, but it would be another twelve years before I upgraded my gaming console (a second-hand Xbox that I had bought for myself in 2002).
Super Nintendo? Nintendo 64? Fuggedaboutit!
Similarly, having scored my driver's licence in 2001, I quickly tired of driving my parentsâ 1994 Toyota Camry around (I know right? Who wouldâve thought such a thing), and decided to buy myself a very Australian 1996 model Holden Commodore. My dad said heâd match me dollar-for-dollar, so I scraped together $6,000 from countless $15 an hour, half-day shifts at retailer Target, and was on my way to cruising the city streets with Motley Crueâs Kickstart My Heart blasting through the carâs mediocre sound system.
This was another example of his toeing the line. He strove, whether deliberately or otherwise, to give my sister and I enough â not too much, to the point where it might make us complacent, but not too little, to the point where it might have a debilitating effect on our development. But just enough to lay the foundations for us to build upon, echoing Malcolm Gladwellâs sentiments in the book, Outliers: The Story of Success.
I didnât know it at the time but these principles would serve me well almost two decades later when I entered the entrepreneurial domain.
He also sought to instill an appreciation of mathematics, income-producing assets, saving and the power of compound interest! On incoming-producing assets, heâd often play handyman at my first investment property, or bust out the jack if my car was playing up â which, as a banged-up, decade-old car, happened often.
Despite having grown up on a small village in Eastern Europe, he tolerated and even entertained some of my more antisocial, pop-culture tendencies, such as growing my hair long, dying it black, and wearing skull-adorned t-shirts with distressed ripped jeans. He bought me my first stratocaster guitar and Marshall valve amplifier when I was just13. I recall him haggling, successfully, with the shopkeep, despite not having any idea about musical instruments. He paid cash, of course.
Given Australiaâs time zone, weâd wake up at ungodly hours of the night to watch football (aka soccer). I still remember having our eyes glued to the screen at 6am one Monday morning in Melbourne, watching the heroics of Brazilâs Romario, before witnessing Italyâs Robert Baggio embarrassingly miss what would become the decisive penalty of the 1994 FIFA World Cup.
Having made the transition from teenager to young adult, I discovered what young adult males tend to discover at this age, alcohol, parties, and women.
My 20s could be characterized as play hard, work hard.
While I often found myself at the bottom of many a bottle most weekend nights, I did manage to earn a bachelorâs degree in business, and a masterâs degree in accounting, before scoring a gig at Ernst & Young and commencing my short-lived ascent up the corporate ladder.
Despite the association with a big brand name, for most of my twenties I was still just a punk kid on a modest, mid-to-high five-figure salary, living for the weekend.
This was something that my dad ultimately frowned upon. He didnât approve of my alcohol-fueled reveling and believed that I wasnât living up to my potential. To some degree, maybe he felt that I was putting his sacrifice and hard work to waste.
To translate as best I can, âI never thought a degenerate would come out of our familyâ, he once told me. I think he said it, not to hurt me, but to inspire me to change my ways.
Still, despite our differences and frequent verbal jousting, whenever I hit a milestone, such as passing a difficult exam, scoring a pay-rise or a promotion, my first instinct had always been to pick up the phone and call him. It had always been to let him know the good news before anybody else. Like most males, I sought validation from my dad.
But when I was 27, he was diagnosed with myeloma, a type of cancer that develops from plasma cells in the bone marrow. Over the next 18 months, he would frequently be checked into hospital wards, receive blood transfusions, and then be checked out.
Then a few days before Christmas in 2011, he complained of intense pain in his legs, and so it was off to the ER again. I recall having tickets to see Finnish metal band, Children of Bodom, play that night. As such, I was a little deflated to be spending the evening in the hospital for what I anticipated would be another routine check-in/check-out procedure.
But he wasnât going home that night.
After several days of fighting for survival, with the team at the Alfred Hospital taking all sorts of measures to help turn the tide, my sister and I were pulled into an office by one of the doctors and told in no uncertain terms that there was nothing else they could do.
He only had days to live.
I remember breaking down crying moments later, before being consoled by my brother-in-law. I held back the tears and put on a brave face â something I would continue to do for the ensuing months that followed.
Having spent New Yearâs Eve by his bedside, it was on the morning of 2nd January, while at home working out, and trying to sweat out the negative emotion, that my sister walked in and gave me a solemn, tearful look.
I knew that he was gone.
I gave her a hug, and so began the first day of the rest of my life without dad.
Before, during and after the funeral, I felt numb. Like none of it was real.
We spend our childhood and later years fearing the loss of a parent, as if it will be the most painful thing one could endure and be our undoing. But then it happens, and our survival instincts give us no choice, but to accept, adapt and move on.
I tried to move on with my life as best as I could, and in many ways succeeded in doing so.
Or so I thought.
It wasnât until a year later, when I scored a job offer to take on a role I had coveted with Australiaâs largest investment bank, that that instinct, to let him know the good news, returned.
For a split second, reality was suspended and I reached for my phone to let him know the good news. For a split second, he was still alive. And then reality set in. It was at this point, fourteen months after he passed away, that it finally sunk in.
My dad â that tower of strength who had always been there for me, who had worked his fingers to the bone to provide a better life for his children, who had instilled in me fundamental values that still serve me today â was gone.
And no amount of success in my own life was going to change that.
Since his passing, Iâve gone on to find success as an entrepreneur with several ventures, and have become a published author; feats that dwarfed anything I had achieved while he was still alive. Feats that, I think, would have lived up to, or surpassed his hopes and dreams for me.
Part of me will always wonder, and will always want to reconcile the irreconcilable; the idea that he left this world disappointed in me.
My mum, whose presence I am more grateful for now than ever, tells me that he wanted nothing more than to see me reach my potential, and that if he knew what I had achieved since his passing, that heâd be dancing in the streets like Mick Jagger and David Bowie.
While our relationship was strained at times, for the most part, deep down there was a mutual respect. This respect is now manifest in sharing a glass of whisky, or Macedonian rakija (a fruit brandy), with him upon visiting his resting place on Fatherâs Day.
Do I regret the decisions I made while he was still alive? Not entirely, because in life, we often have to take a long journey in order to find the answers that may not be so obvious to us without taking these steps.
While he may no longer be physically present, his spirit lives on in my attitude, world view and approach to work.
At this point, Iâm reminded of Tim Urbanâs blog post, The Tail End. If one or both of your parents are still alive, chances are that youâve already spent more than 95% of your time with them already. Put away your smartphone and make the time you have left count.
Nowadays, I try and visit mum at least once a week, and when I do, I still see those pot plants lined up against that brick wall, and I canât help but smile.
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Steve Glaveski is on a mission to unlock your potential to do your best work and live your best life. He is the founder of innovation accelerator, Collective Campus, author of several books, including Employee to Entrepreneur and Time Rich, and productivity contributor for Harvard Business Review. Heâs a chronic autodidact and is into everything from 80s metal and high-intensity workouts to attempting to surf and hold a warrior three pose.