Whole-heartedness

David Cantong was two years old the first time his family took a leap in the dark. His parents had left Ecuador for Los Angeles for his father's job sponsorship, only to be blocked at the border by an old quota law limiting how many people of Chinese descent could enter the country. His mother went ahead pregnant, not yet knowing it, and gave birth to David Cantong's sister on American soil while his father searched for a way to bring the rest of the family over.

A lawyer drafted a letter, and it was sent to Robert Kennedy's office. It worked, and he, his father, and his brother were let in. Somewhere along the way, the letter itself got lost. “I would have liked to have had that letter,” he says, “as a memento.”

When David Cantong was nine years old, his father bought an upright and paid for lessons for both him and his younger sister. She quit almost immediately, but he kept going. When his father asked him, “you want violin or piano?”, he chose piano. The first teacher wasn't much, and he remembers her taking her shoes off and putting her feet up mid-lesson, but his godmother knew someone better. 

David auditioned for a teacher who'd won an international competition at twenty-one and studied under some of the great names of her era. He got in, and within about two years, he was performing.

In sixth grade, an art teacher who'd scolded him for turning in an unfinished mural, assuming he was lazy, came up to him in tears after his first school performance and apologized. “I’m so sorry for treating you the way I did,” she told him. He'd simply been spending his time somewhere else. By twelve, he was written up in the LA Times as one of three gifted students of his teacher, playing a Bach piece. By his senior year of high school, he was invited to perform at the Shrine Auditorium in front of five or six thousand people, on a nine-foot Bösendorfer concert grand, for a Latin American Catholic charismatic convention. After he played, he got a standing ovation, and they asked him back the next night for an encore.

"It was just me and the piano," he says of that performance. "The audience was just an afterthought."

He talks about being "in the zone" almost religiously, and in a way, it was for him. He dedicated his performances to God, and the devotional energy of that room, he says, was "the winning recipe." Afterward, girls from the choir lined up for his autograph. He decided his signature needed to look the part, so he started scribbling it differently.

But he didn't become a concert pianist. The reasoning he gives is plain: "I have to want to eat, sleep, and drink music. In order to compete, you've got to be all in something. I was like ninety percent, but I wasn't all in." He thought about the life that would require—years alone in a practice room, then years alone on the road, city to city, motel to motel—and set it against wanting a family, and chose family. 

A high school friend who went on to organize fundraisers told him that people who could play like he did were rare. “If I had that talent, I would be in Vegas making money,” he told him. David turned him down, standing by his initial decision.

Years later, with a climbing adjustable-rate mortgage and a house he was determined to hold onto, he sold the black Steinway grand from when he was young. He sold it, he says “to make good on the mortgage.” It covered about seven months of missed payments, and he never bought another one. He composed one piece in his life outside of that world, a piano composition called "Amoretti" that he wrote for his late wife. It's technical enough now that his hands, worn down by trigger finger, are no longer able to move the way they used to. He found the sheet music again after losing it for years. He talks about wanting to get it copied clean and framed for his kids, a project he hasn't started yet.

He raised four children with that same all-in-or-not-at-all instinct. One became a firefighter and EMT after chasing a football scholarship. One is a combat medic and embassy-extraction specialist about to start medical school at Tulane. One is finishing a PhD at UC Santa Cruz and five hundred pages into a first book. One is finishing nursing school. His late wife died before this conversation; his mother died in 2023. 

He talks about his father—hardworking, self-taught, always studying, always recording himself reading aloud to fix his diction—as his clearest role model. At his funeral, he remembers, “everybody said, oh my God, he was so smart… he was well read.”

Now, in his sixties and recently diagnosed diabetic, David Canton’s hands are too worn for the music he used to play, but he is starting something over almost entirely from scratch: an AI-powered marketing agency. He's paying for two AI subscriptions, training a chatbot version of himself, and building out automated workflows he doesn't fully have customers for yet. “I have all my ducks in a row,” he says, though he hasn’t made any money from it yet. The way he describes it is in the exact language he used fifty years ago to explain why he walked away from the concert stage: "I'm all in. Eat, sleep, and drink AI and marketing." 

At the end of our conversation, I asked him to write down one piece of advice for his eighteen-year-old self, on paper, and sign it. He laughed and warned me I was about to see his “fancy signature”—the same scrawl he’d started using after the Shrine Auditorium. What he wrote down wasn’t about piano, but about reading. He didn’t get serious about books until 2018, and he wishes someone had told him decades earlier: “Don’t waste time. Even if you don’t have time, just wake up a half hour early and read for half an hour.”

It’s a small thing next to the Bösendorfer and the five thousand people at the shrine. But I think that might be the real answer to what’s worth being all in for—whatever keeps you learning, keeps you building something, and keeps you showing up for the people around you.