The person in my life who has shown me a lot of perseverance is my dad. He has been teaching me life lessons since I was a little kid and I've always wanted to turn out to be like him one day. He's the person I go to for help and he'll always be there for me no matter what. 

My dad always wanted me to respect everyone and have great manners. He would always bring me to his business to show me how to greet customers and respect them to create loyal customers which also works with friends too. He taught me that not everything will get handed to you and that life can be really hard sometimes, even for him when he started his business from the dirt and is still paying off loan money over time.

My dad brought me into his business at a young age and wanted me to learn that not everything is given to you and you have to work for a lot of it. I have been helping him and pushing through all of these problems for the past 8 years. The main reason he wants me to do all of this is because he wants me to become a man and learn how to do things on my own, which he ended up teaching me. I started going to the laundromat by myself whenever he would tell me to or he would be out of town and that was something he was planning on doing since he bought the laundromat.

He also was a main factor in my hockey career. He would always push me to be my greatest and wanted me to become the best hockey player I could be. I always remember as a kid it started out fun with spring camps, but when I got older it got way more intense and I'm thankful for that because it taught me to push harder and harder than the other kids out there. He wanted me to have the best experience with hockey even though he would get mad a lot after games, but I would rather have that than someone telling me everything is gonna be fine when I know that won’t make me grow as a hockey player.

When it doesn't even involve hockey or me being at his business, he still finds a way to make me do something at home a lot. Even if it's just doing the dishes or taking out the trash to do landscaping for a whole week or building a new deck with him, he always finds a way to keep me busy and that teaches me to not be lazy and keep up with myself when I'm going to be living alone and I'm going to need these types of skills in my life as an adult. Out of all of my friends, I still think that my dad makes me do the most work because I’m always the most busy or my dad will just make me do something randomly and I feel like his personal butler sometimes. In the long run, he has been teaching me since a little kid to push myself to the best and not to live like a bum, and to keep myself clean and the place I live clean.