Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.


If I had to choose a person that has had a significant influence on me, it would definitely be my father. He is the most caring, professional, determined person that I know. He has taught me so much. From small things like teaching me how to draw the face of the cartoon he draws, to life changing things like the example of how he treats my mother after twenty years of marriage, and the way he carries his job.    

As a child my father was very poor. He lived in Argentina until he hit the age of eight, when they moved to Venezuela. My father has a very large family about twenty people from both sides. Both sides of the family were and are in the same situation just enough food for each one, and fathers working late hours. In my father's teenage years he started playing the drums in a community church near his house in Maracaibo, Venezuela. He would play every week and rehearse as well. Music started becoming his every day life. 

To make the story short, he began singing in the Sunday service. After that, he sang at bars and local restaurants, but he knew that that the life he lived as a child wasn't enough for him or for his future family. So he decided to make and to be the difference. He knocked the door of every record company in Venezuela, with a record he had recorded at his own expense. Until one record company named SONO-RODVEN, picked him up and sent him straight to the studio. After years and months of hard work, my father's sweat finally paid off. He became one of the biggest Latin American singers ever. He has had several #1 songs in the billboard charts and has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide, and has inspired people like me all over the world. 

This has taught me to follow and chase my dream. To not settle for what I am now, and to dream bigger. To treat my future wife when we reach our twenty years of marriage, the same way I treated her on our wedding day. The way he prefers helping others more than helping himself. He founded two foundations one in the service of helping poor children around Latin and Central America and another in the service of helping kids with disabilities. He taught me and still teaches me to dream big, to live for the future, and to live for others.

Ricardo Andrés