After decades of business failures and financial anxiety, one man realizes that his greatest success is his daughter—
I’m a loser.
It’s not pleasant to admit, but as I’ve written before, this blog has no filters and no restraints. Everything here is transparent.
My life is a continuous chain of failures of every kind. I took on countless projects—attempts to build one-man financial empires from scratch, just me and a computer. Every single one of them ended in disappointment.
I poured my energy and soul into all of them, yet none ever reached what could be called a real victory (with the exception of tasks within my salaried jobs, where I often did quite well).
Over time, I turned into a modern-day Don Quixote, fighting a system that fiercely protects the status quo and keeps people like me in our place—likely because I never truly had the mental strength to challenge it.
Failure is deeply embedded in me. It runs through my veins, threatens to crack my arteries, and feels like a core component of my DNA.
It’s a terrible way to live.
Fifty-Two Years of Missed Potential
Fifty-two years filled with a constant sense of missed opportunities and unrealized potential.
Years spent chasing some undefined achievement, hoping that even a minor success might give my life a sense of meaning.
Every once in a while, when the illusions fade, I try to analyze it logically:
How did a child once considered “full of promise,” by himself and everyone around him, turn into a bitter man weighed down by failure?
The answer was always the same: luck.
That mysterious factor separating losers from winners, masters from servants. Luck always seemed to evade me, as if something inside me repelled it.
Luck became my excuse for the painful truth that people less intelligent and less hardworking than me had succeeded.
Some people are born lucky. Others struggle to create luck on their own.
Stability First, Life Later
The logic that always guided me was simple: first establish financial stability, only then start a family.
So I never seriously considered bringing a child into the world until my financial ambitions were fulfilled.
But endless failure and advancing age eventually forced a reckoning.
When I finally decided it was time to become a father and began the surrogacy process, a kind of fear I’d never known before crept into my heart—then attacked aggressively.
As the long-awaited day approached, heavy doubts overshadowed the growing excitement:
How could a failed 52-year-old man provide for a baby girl in a hyper-materialistic world on a mediocre salary, working as an unskilled employee?
When It Was Just Me
When it was only me, things were manageable.
I’ve always been anxious by nature, and my financial future has never stopped worrying me—but I learned to live within my means.
My lifestyle was simple and isolated: work-home, work-home.
No nightlife. No brands. No car. No unnecessary spending—just basic food.
For nearly a decade, I’ve followed a healthy vegetarian diet, so most of my expenses go toward fruits, vegetables, and legumes.
I know how to live frugally.
That discipline helped me pay off my mortgage in six years instead of twenty.
But until then, it was only me.
Now Someone Depends on Me
Before the birth, I knew a baby would disrupt the balance.
Suddenly, my past business failures felt heavier, more tangible, more threatening.
It felt like a massive hammer striking my head, shouting:
Wake up, child. The game is over. Welcome to reality.
There is now another mouth to feed.
A helpless baby girl who depends on me completely and naturally expects me to provide everything she needs.
And once again, the ugly doubt raises its head:
Am I actually capable of this?
One Last Attempt
My personal history made it clear that things could not continue as they had.
For more than five decades, I lived under the illusion that hard work and talent guarantee success.
If that were true, I wouldn’t be writing this confession of failure.
So, in a final desperate attempt to prepare financially for the coming transformation of my life, I tried launching several YouTube channels.
The fantasy was simple: massive views, generous payments from Google.
As always, I was convinced it would work.
Like all my ventures, it required no financial investment—only persistence and passion, two things I’ve always had in abundance.
As you may have guessed, this project also ended quietly, without success.
A Mother’s Perspective
At the beginning of the surrogacy process, I told my mother about my new life path and shared my financial fears.
She was ecstatic about the idea of me becoming a father and quickly reassured her anxious son:
“The moment your baby is born, your luck will change. You’ll see.”
I told her my greatest fear was the opposite—that my failure would somehow cling to the child, that my bad luck would become part of the next generation.
Still, I kept her words close.
History has proven she’s usually right.
I’ve Already Won
Today, I’m home on parental leave, spending my days and nights with Sara.
We’re learning each other, shaping a shared life as a family.
A deep bond has formed between us. Each passing day my love for her grows—and so does my sense of financial responsibility.
Every time I look into her smiling, life-hungry eyes, I know there is nothing I wouldn’t do to secure her well-being and her future.
This is the essence of my life now. My reason for existing.
A few days ago, I joked again with my mother about winning the lottery—so I could give Sara everything and never work another day in my life.
She sighed, shook her head, and looked at me with the expression only a mother can give her blind son.
She didn’t need to say anything.
Her eyes said it all: Wake up. You’ve already won.
The First Victory
They say old age brings wisdom.
If that’s true, my 76-year-old mother is the wisest person I know.
Sara herself is the luck.
My first real victory after an endless series of defeats and disappointments.
A child of consolation.
A strange thought crossed my mind recently:
Now that I’ve accepted my failures and learned, somehow, to live with a permanent sense of defeat—is it fair to expect a three-month-old baby to fill the voids carved into me over a lifetime?
The answer is unequivocally yes.
She has already done so effortlessly.
One mischievous smile of hers erases cracks and heals fractures that decades could not.
There is no doubt my mother was right.
I’ve already won the greatest lottery life has to offer.
And maybe I’m greedy—but I wouldn’t object to winning the other lottery too, the liquid one.
Only now, instead of dreaming about a mansion and a Lamborghini in the driveway, I fantasize about just one thing:
Securing Sara’s future.
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Read Next
If you’d like to read more about Sara and our life together, here are two more posts you might enjoy:
Beyond the Blog
Alongside this blog, I also give talks about late fatherhood, surrogacy, and the emotional journey of becoming a parent later in life.
Sara and Me 