I first met Silver Kung in the Himalayan Mountains.

I had traveled to a spiritual retreat in Rishikesh with my twenty-eight-year-old daughter Amparo, and there we encountered Silver and his wife Doriya. Over the course of a marvelous week together, as we walked ancient paths and sat in contemplation, Silver shared the story of his life. The mountains have a way of stripping away pretense, and what emerged was a tale of such hardship and resilience that I found myself urging him, by the week's end, to put it all in writing.

This book is the result of that encouragement. I am honored that Silver trusted me with his story and honored still to introduce it to you.

As Silver spoke, I thought of Lincoln. In the winter of 1842, a bankrupt Abraham Lincoln wrote to his law partner Joshua Speed that he had become "the most miserable man living." The future liberator of four million enslaved souls and preserver of the American union believed, at that dark hour, that he was destined for failure.

He was wrong, of course, but he could not have known it then. The path from despair to destiny is rarely visible to those walking it.

Here was Silver, a young man who at twenty-seven found himself saddled with ten million dollars in debt he had not incurred, unable to afford baby formula for his infant children, dismissed from teaching positions because his personal misfortune reflected poorly on institutions that prized appearances over character.

In the rigid hierarchy of Taiwanese society, he had been consigned to failure before he had properly begun. His own father believed him to be brain damaged. His classmates abandoned him as though misfortune were contagious.

And yet Silver Kung did not merely survive; he prevailed.

The man who graduated from high school with a 2.7 grade-point average, earning the nickname "Mr. 2.7" that his daughters still tease him about, would go on to found Siegfried Capital, a global asset management firm with just over three billion dollars under management. The student whom no respectable school would admit became a professor, an advisor to sovereign wealth funds, and a citizen of the world whose business acumen has been recognized with Bloomberg's highest honors.

This is, in one sense, a rags-to-riches tale as old as Benjamin Franklin and as enduring as the American Dream itself.

But Silver Linings is something more than a success story. It is a meditation on resilience, yes, but more precisely on what the Greeks called thumos, that ancient fire in the chest that refuses to be extinguished. Not the mind's decision to persevere. Not the heart's choice to hope. Something older. Something the body knows before the mind can name it.

Thumos is what rises when they tell you what you are not. It is the heat that answers humiliation. It is the part of you that stands when standing makes no sense, that walks when the road offers nothing but more road.

Silver's father called him damaged. His country called him failure. The banks called him debtor. And something in him, something beneath language, said: No. I am not what you have named me. I am what I will become.

That is thumos. The spirited refusal to be erased. We made a film about it. Watch it. You will know in two minutes whether this fire lives in you.

Silver's fire carried him across an ocean. From Kaohsiung to Wichita, Kansas, of all places. He went looking for what authoritarian cultures and rigid class systems had denied him: a second chance. The America he found was not perfect, but it was perfectible, and it was open. It rewarded curiosity, creativity, and persistence over mere memorization and compliance.

It valued what a person might become more than what they had been.

The pages that follow contain practical wisdom for anyone seeking to build wealth and navigate the treacherous waters of global finance. Silver writes with refreshing candor about the "boiler rooms" where stock prices were manipulated, about the corruption and familial politics of doing business in Southern Italy, and about the quiet discipline required to spot opportunity where others see only chaos.

His account of building Siegfried on the principle of radical transparency, opening his books completely to any investor who asked, is a rebuke to an industry often shrouded in opacity and self-dealing.

Yet the deeper lessons here are not about finance. They are about character.

Silver Kung is a man who reads voraciously—three to five books and five to seven movies every week—because he understands that knowledge is the one form of capital that cannot be repossessed by creditors or confiscated by governments. He is a man who sits alone at restaurants before opera performances, content in his own company, because he learned early that solitude is not loneliness but rather the crucible in which self-knowledge is forged.

He named his company Siegfried, after the dragon-slayer of Germanic myth, because he knew that the path to victory required confronting monsters.

What you cannot fully glean from these pages, however, is what strikes you immediately upon meeting Silver in person. There is a warmth to him, a ready smile and an open curiosity that puts strangers at ease and turns acquaintances into lifelong friends.

I saw it in those Himalayan evenings. He leans forward when you speak, genuinely interested in your story, your struggles, your ideas. This is not the effect of a man who has forgotten hardship; it is the generosity of spirit that hardship, rightly metabolized, can produce.

Silver's capacity for friendship is extraordinary. He writes movingly of Jennifer Chen in Wichita, of Irene and Annie in New York, of the church members who welcomed a lonely foreign student into their homes. These were not transactional relationships cultivated for advantage. They were bonds of genuine affection that have endured for decades, because Silver understands that wealth without friendship is poverty of another kind.

Most striking of all is his devotion to his family.

The love Silver bears for his wife Doriya radiates through every chapter of this book. She was, as he writes, his light when the path was dark, his strength when he faltered. They held each other and wept watching The Pursuit of Happyness because they knew intimately the desperation Chris Gardner had endured.

Together they climbed out of that darkness, and together they have built a life of meaning and purpose. His daughters Celine and Irene are not merely heirs to his fortune but partners in his philanthropic vision, traveling with him to impoverished villages in the Mekong Delta, learning firsthand that privilege confers responsibility.

Consider the name of the family trust Silver has established: DCIS Capital. The letters stand for Doriya, Celine, Irene, and Silver, in that order.

Most men of considerable achievement would place themselves first. Silver places himself last.

This small detail reveals something essential about his character. The man who was once invisible to his own family, a pariah whose failure was posted publicly for all to see, has built his legacy around the primacy of those he loves. The trust is not a monument to his own success. It is a gift to his wife and daughters, an assurance that they will never know the deprivation and humiliation he endured.

"There is always a way forward," Silver writes, and this simple declaration is the book's animating conviction. It is also, I would suggest, among the most subversive and radical ideas one can hold in an age of cynicism and despair.

To believe in a way forward is to reject the tyranny of circumstance. It is to insist, as Lincoln did after his own season of darkness, that the future remains unwritten.

The greater inheritance Silver leaves is not financial. It is the example of a man who refused to be defined by the cruelties of fate or the failures of others' imagination. It is the demonstration that defeat, rightly understood, is merely prologue. And it is the reminder that success means nothing if it is not shared with those we love and used in service of those who struggle.

"One generation plants the trees," goes the Chinese proverb that Silver cites, "and the next enjoys the shade."

You are reading in the shade right now.

Silver planted this. Page by page, memory by memory, he put his hands in the dirt of his own humiliation and made something grow. Not for himself. He already knows what he survived. He carries it in his body, in the way he puts his name last, in the way he leans toward you when you speak.

No. He planted this for you.

You, who have been told what you are not. You, who have swallowed the verdict of small men in small rooms. You, whose name has been synonymous with someone else's disappointment.

This shade is yours now.

Rest in it. Feel how it cools the burning. Let it remind you that someone walked the sun-scorched road before you—and lived.

But do not stay here.

Shade is not a destination. Shade is a gathering of strength. Shade is where you sit until you remember that you, too, have seeds in your pocket. You have been carrying them all along, waiting for permission you never needed.

Here is what Silver is telling you, if you listen:

Your story is not their story of you.

Your story is a tree that does not exist yet. It is waiting in your hands, in your choices, in the first terrifying step you have not taken.

Plant it.

Plant it in the rocky soil they said would never hold you. Plant it in the silence where your name should have been spoken with pride. Plant it in the ground you will claim as your own, that you will call, at last, home.

One generation plants. The next enjoys the shade.

And then—because this is how it has always worked, because this is the only thing that has ever mattered—they plant again.