Five Lessons From My Father

My beautiful dad passed away last week. He taught me every single thing I know about business and life, and to honour his memory I want to pass on some of that knowledge.

Writing is my form of therapy. It helps me process my jumbled emotions and rearrange them into neat, coherent sentences that are just as useful for myself as they hopefully are for others. I used to write a lot, originally for magazines and newspapers and then for the first community website I started in the mid 2000s. As that business grew larger, I swapped writing for editing, and then editing for managing teams of people who all sat in front of their computers just like I used to with an empty screen and a full mind.

Since finishing up working full-time at Junkee Media, I've now rekindled my lifelong love affair with writing through books. However, last week I wrote the most important words I'd ever written. It was something no one ever wants to write, but a sad reality for many: I wrote my father's eulogy.

My dad, Phil Duggan, was a titan of the strata management industry, starting a business with a friend 45 years ago when no one had heard of the area, and growing the company, Bright & Duggan, into one of the leading strata firms in Australia almost five decades later. On top of his business success, he and my mum raised my siblings and I – Andrew, Rachael and Chris – with love and compassion to be supportive, kind and entrepreneurial.

My dad was one of the greats, and I wanted to share just some of the things dad taught us, modified from his eulogy:

1. Life is way better when shared generously with others.

My dad shared every part of his life deeply with everyone he met. His relationship with my mum, Anna, showed us what a healthy, equitable, independent and supportive long-term relationship looks like. He gave my siblings and I everything we could ever need, and then some, and set us all up in our own fulfilling lives. When I got my first office of my own in my early 20s as a freelance writer, I could see how proud he was. He turned up one day with a box full of stationery items like staplers, pens, scissors and hole punchers to help set me up the right way (although I never quite figured out which holes I was meant to punch into what documents with that hole puncher!).

2. The only measure of success is the quality of your relationships.

Nothing puts life into perspective like holding your father’s hand in his final few days. At that moment, nobody cares about how big your house is, how fast your car is or how many zeroes are on your bank account. The only thing that matters is the strength and depth of the relationships you’ve been able to build along the way. Dad was fortunate to forge meaningful friendships in so many areas of his life, and we were all very lucky that Covid restrictions eased right on the day of his funeral meaning 600 people could farewell him in the manner he deserved. We joked that it might have had something to do the strange coincidence that my dad walked the Kokoda Track (twice!) with a young kid named Dominic Perrottet many years ago (that's dad and Dom below).

3. Treat everyone you meet like family.

Dad had such a strong conviction about who he was as a person, and in doing so helped countless others figure that out for themselves. He had a lot of firmly held values, and drew on them to help him navigate life’s ups and downs, of which he had more than his share. Dad’s values were honesty, generosity, hard work and fairness, and he infused them into every part of his life. It didn’t matter if you were one of his four children, his hundreds of staff, his dozens of cousins or anyone else he met along the way, he treated everyone the same positive energy, empathy and enthusiasm as us. Phil’s dad passed away when he was just 22 months old, so he had no father to model his behaviour on growing up. Instead of this holding him back, it fired up something inside him, inspiring him to become a father-figure in some way to most people that he met.

4. Thankfulness is the key to happiness.

Long before gratitude journals were even a thing, before Oprah and gurus everywhere realised how important it is to be consciously aware of gratefulness, there was our family dining room in Lane Cove. Every night, when we sat down for dinner and all six of us squeezed around the dinner table, we’d begin with a simple ritual initiated by my dad. It was called, creatively, “I had a nice day today because...”. Over a typical evening meal of spaghetti Bolognese, cottage pie or beef stroganoff cooked by my mum, we would move around the table as each of us would finish that sentence and talk about something that happened during their day that they were thankful for. It might be a little thing that happened in class, or an interaction with a friend, a nice comment, or a tasty lunch, but it instilled into us an appreciation to always be alert to the good things in our lives. It’s a tradition that’s still carried on in all our family households, and certainly contributed to raising all of us to be able to see the positive side in almost any situation.

5. Don’t leave anything on the field.

Dad was able to do every single thing in life that he wanted to: grow a successful business, love deeply, raise a loving family, travel the world, and push his body to its physical limits (even with only one lung after his first bout with cancer 27 years ago). In his final days, dad was visited by a priest in the hospital to perform the last rites. All of us family members shuffled out of the room as the priest went in. After about twenty minutes, the priest emerged with tears in his eyes. He had spoken with hundreds of people in their last moments and this is what he said, word for word, to our family: “I have never seen anyone so peaceful and so positive in the last moments of their life. He has nothing to regret and has enjoyed every moment of his life.” The priest then turned to my mother and siblings and told us something we all knew deeply. “He said he has a great love for all of you, his family, and that he was ready to go.”

But here’s the thing about great people: they don’t just go, because the values they lived are passed on to everyone who meets them. My dad showed everyone who was lucky enough to meet him a model of how to be a great father, a great husband, a great grandfather, a great neighbour, a great cousin, a great in-law, a great colleague and a great friend so that we can live our lives with his memory and his example never far from our minds.

?That is how you honour a great man like my father.

My dad passed away after a valiant fight with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that’s treatable but not curable. If inclined, please consider a donation to his preferred charity, the ZAMASA Foundation via www.PhilDuggan.com.au