As a child I instinctively knew that what I was doing was right. Giving. Helping others. Those things felt natural to me, but I lived in a household and my household had rules. Those rules were shaped into “truths” or “facts of life.” And even though I accepted them on the surface level of my behavior, I never internalized them. I simply couldn’t.
For instance, I refused to accept that my humble birth, or the limited resources would in any way keep me from the beautiful things, places, or experiences that I had seen and rightly determined to have as part of my life. As a child I had no idea how I was ever going to get from the point A of my reality to the point X of my inevitable future, I just knew that I would.
What had started as an idea, the notion of seeing something that on its polished exterior seemed so much better than my own life, and, therefore, something that I would attain, had somehow morphed into a belief. And as we all know, beliefs need to be defended far more fervently than our ideas.
My belief that I would somehow rise up from where I had come to something more or better was not easy to sustain. It was under constant attack by family, friends, and poverty in which we lived, not to mention my own limitations.
There are few things that I remember of my childhood more vividly than the nights that I cried myself to sleep with righteous indignation for the injustices that I perceived.
But through it all, the lessons and the “truths,” I never faltered in paying homage to my own belief. And that one belief was what got me through the injustices, making my life bearable. There were other lessons that came and went, some stuck and some didn't.
Like my grandfather impressing on me the importance of unity in the family—the whole, it’s us against them! motto —but experience showed me that personal ambition could trump family so long as someone could say that said ambition was ultimately to benefit the family. Personal ambition, of course, was a synonym for money.
And money, in all its extensions and forms, was as omnipresent as religion in providing contradictions and impediments to learning other lessons like honesty.
Regardless of how insistently any adult impressed upon me the importance of honesty, there was never any shortage of instances where one of those same adults lied to achieve the most insignificant of ends. I would always try to feign ignorance whenever there was an adult in the room, lying, so as to avoid being subjected to the “talk,” where the importance of always telling the truth would again be explained to me.
Then, because we were Catholic, God was added to the importance-of-truth equation as the Omnipresent Punisher who could never be fooled. Nobody else seemed too concerned with God’s wrath, and it wasn’t clear to me why I should be either.
Which was exactly what I thought when I lied about my age, first for the fake ID, and second for my first job at age twelve. Because of my height, the lie that I was older was easy to sell. Simply another mask to be added to my system of self-preservation that I had devised as a child.
And when my mother and family learned what I had done, instead of anger or punishment, or being sent to the confessional, they were proud of me. The lesson being: lies are bad unless they bring you something good like money; but, there was an addendum: so long as nobody gets hurt. It wasn’t until the following summer when I learned the importance of that.
Once a year I would travel to what seemed like the foreign world of Krypton to visit my cousins. Those visits were so much better to me than what any theme park could even get close to. It was my only living insight into how a family was supposed to function.
The parents, the children, the respective roles that each played, was as fascinating to me as the fictional world of Tolkien. The children were children, the parents were parents, and meals were shared around an actual dining room table.
There was no stress, no late notices or overdue bills, and the topic of money was never touched upon. The experience made me think that maybe there was no money on Krypton. But it was there, it just wasn’t scarce and therefore not the center of all things.
During this one particular summer my cousin and I had the task of collecting and smashing cans to be sold to the recycler. If I remember correctly we intended to use the money for admittance into some fair or circus that was in town. We determined that we could yield a little more on our payment if each can weighed a little more.
Kind of like Amazon stealing tips from its drivers to boost the profits. We were probably not the first children to have ever done such a thing, but quite possibly we were the most enthusiastic at bringing the scheme to fruition.
Each and every can was packed with mud and when my uncle placed the bag on the recycler’s scale, and the scale bottomed out, that led to an unforeseen consequence that my cousin and I had overlooked—that my uncle would be humiliated, and that said humiliation would roll downhill toward us. We were forced to wash out each and every can, one by one, a task that took hours.
Then, when we arrived home we were taken into the bedroom one at a time to be lashed with a belt and buckle—a beating worthy of Krypton! The tears that I shed that day were as real as they were earned, and they taught me a very important lesson about integrity.
I had always feared my uncle, but after that particular summer I respected him, more than he ever knew. He imparted a valuable lesson to me, one that like-wise resonated with my childhood hero about doing what was right for the sake of being and doing what was right.
There was no profit scheme behind Superman’s moral compass. Whether it was a cat stuck in a tree or a villain in a mask, he would do the right thing because that was who he was. Unfortunately, having Superman in my life one week out of the year was no matchr for the Kryptonite of my adolescence, where money was becoming more and more important.
As a boy my hero was the Man of Steal, but as a prepubescent teen my hero was anyone who had money and thereby the freedom to choose whatever life they wanted for themselves.
The pages that I secretly cut out of the magazine at the doctor’s office or the library were not supermodels in bikinis or exotic cars—those were merely the inevitable markers of my destined success—rather, the true effigies of my devotion were anything and everything written about capitalist moguls like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, or even Pablo Escobar.
I knew that there was things, secrets, or some sort of knowledge that they had, and I needed it.
Prior to age twelve if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you a school teacher and a fighter pilot. But by the time I was twelve I was only aware of three careers that would keep me out of the oppressive jaws of poverty.
A doctor, a lawyer, or a businessman in a suit at a big company. My answer to that same question was that I was either going to be an obstetrician or the president of a Fortune 500 company, like Coca-Cola, I would say.
When I shared this with my aunt, the one I visited on Krypton once a year, she insisted that education was the only pathway that would lead to either of those outcomes. And just like that, from that moment onward no amount of pessimism or circumstance could deter me. Education was the panacea to what I most feared.
Fortunately for me I was a quick study when it came to entrepreneurship. Whether it was selling lollipops at school, tacos in the street, or newspapers door-to-door I knew how to spot an opportunity and capitalize on it. At age six I was introduced to the board game Monopoly, though `I didn’t initially understand that it was indeed a game to be played for fun.
I couldn’t understand how they—they meaning everyone else around the board who wasn’t me, could be so haphazard with their winnings, with their money! The game was as serious as life to me. By age seven I was unbeatable, by age ten I was winning by such margins that I was paying other players to roll the dice or move my piece. Money from a very young age represented both freedom and happiness.
To have it was to know success, and to not have it was to be on the blunt end of one injustice or another. A normal fear for most might have been sharks or clowns, but for me poverty was the equivalent of a shark painted like a clown, and there I was treading water in the chum. And in consideration of all this one might have thought that business would have been a natural fit for me, but that was far from the case.
Like I said, I was a quick study at entrepreneurship, but, as I would later find, an absolute failure at business. The former was a talent for identifying an opportunity and seizing it. The latter, however, required that I compete in a marketplace against other businesses for the sales and marketshare in order to survive, for which, surprisingly, I was not equipped.
It was one thing for me to sell candy to a captive market, or tacos on a street corner when being a kid inspires pity, and something altogether different for me to exist in a market place where the demise of others was essential to my own survival.
Why do you think I paid other players in Monopoly to roll the dice or move my pieces? It wasn’t because I was a Machiavellian tyrant, someone like Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump, in the making. I didn’t want to put people out of the game. Paying them for a service was a legitimate way to keep them in the game, and perhaps give them hope for a comeback.
Can anyone imagine Amazon doing what I did? Mega corporations like Amazon and Wal-Mart have destroyed more companies and lives than Covid-19 ever will, because that is the nature of what business has become.
In the mid 90’s I was sitting in an auditorium with thousands of other students for freshman orientation. There was a speaker who was talking to us about the sacrifices that needed to be made for success. We were going to be confronted with hardships, obstacles, and temptations as students and we were going to have to prove ourselves worthy of success.
She encouraged us to take a moment to look to our right and left, because only one out of every three would graduate. The collective tension in the auditorium began to rise, it was palpable as we began to internalize what she was saying.
She next asked us the semi-rhetorical question of how many of us believed we would make it to graduation within four years. A question that brought me to my feet. I was the only one. A few others raised their hands, but I was the only one on my feet. There I was, standing on pure adrenaline.
Her words had challenged or maybe threatened my stated purpose and even after most hands were lowered, there I stood, still standing. Perhaps I could hear the clownsharks circling me in the shallows.
But the speaker was encouraged, maybe even impressed, by what she probably saw as the confidence that had brought me to my feet. Little did she know it was fear.
She asked for my name, then for my prospective major. When I blurted out Business, then a Fortune 500 president, as confidently spoken as though I had been telling her my favorite food or football team, she didn’t laugh or mock like many of my fellow students did.
Some even told me to sit down or keep dreaming! But her gaze was as serious as my sentiments, and stayed that way when she solemnly told me that maybe I should stay standing a little longer.
“ You’re going to have to get accustomed to standing alone,” she insisted. “Because success is a lonely place to be.”
I wouldn’t have admitted this then, but at the moment I had no idea what she was talking about or just how true her statement would prove. How could success be lonely? If I had the fame, the millions, and the beautiful things, didn’t it stand to reason that I would be surrounded by people at all times? Of course, I was yet to know the difference between sycophant and friend.
Without a doubt life is a process of confronting truths. And as such, there are few truths more jarring to the ego than to learn that your idea of success, the very thing you have pursued doggedly year after year—being a millionaire, fame, power, beautiful things and experiences—is a false idea that has nothing to do with happiness, and therefore is nothing more than an empty shell of appearances and pretense.
Business to me was just a means to an end. The end being, me, as far away as humanly possibly from poverty. What were my natural or innate skills? I was good with numbers and possessed a natural charisma, a combination that made most people think that business would be a good fit for me.
But there was a missing ingredient, something that everyone just assumed that I possessed because I knew a thing or two about hunger, and they were all wrong. I lacked the killer instinct for business.
A difficult statement for a man to make, right on par with swearing off sports, drinking, or women. And yet, it was one of those fundamental truths that I would eventually have to confront.
Paths in life can often be like train tracks that we get stuck on. We allow ourselves to believe that we are so invested into them that a course change can often seem inconceivable.
But how many of us were equipped at the age of seventeen or eighteen to choose a career for the rest of our lives? How many of us could conceive who we were and what would make us truly happy or “successful” throughout the trajectory of our lives? There was no crystal ball, I simply made a guess based on a very limited knowledge of the world and an unwillingness to confront my clown sharks.
I stepped into the business world of Gordan Gekko convinced that all I had to do was don my business mask and everything would be fine, and success inevitable.
But the mask could not save me from my own condemnations, or the undeniable truth that scaling the corporate ladder was a lot like throwing myself into the cold plunge of ethical degradation where there were other types of sharks swimming.
The connundrum of my life was that I wanted to have the money, all the while loathing what had to be done to have it. The world of finance is not a normal business of selling a product or service to someone who may or may not have an actual need or want for it.
It was about bringing people’s own personal clownsharks into the realm of very realistic possibilities and then telling them, sometimes screaming at them, that if you weren’t entrusted with that which they most cherished then their absolute worst fears were going to materialize. Getting people to hand over their money is not easy, and if you tell the truth you don’t get the account.
If you don’t get the account then you don’t meet your quota, or your monthly expenses, or, for that matter, your mortgage payment. A demoralizing dilemma of daily survival is the world of finance.
I had to start drinking by noon just to make it through the day. And even with the big corner office with the balcony along with plenty of accolades for how good I was at “closing the deal,” I wasn’t happy.
People congratulated me on a regular basis for my success and yet, I didn’t feel successful. There were the things I could buy and exotic places I could go, but at the end of the day they equated to nothing more than empty pretenses. Because there was no getting away from who I was.
Somehow I had allowed the ridiculous clownsharks to turn me into a shark and dress me in a suit. What had happened to the young teen who delivered food to the homeless or visited the elderly out of kindness? What had happened to my general affinity for helping others?
The upper echelons of management started to pay closer attention to me. I was invited to the president’s private club for lunch. He had presumably heard that I was receiving competing offers from other firms and he wanted to make his pitch. He wanted to impress on me that he had it within his power to make a millionaire out of me, and all I had to do was stay the course.
Little did he know that his efforts were only serving to push me towards a decision that I had subconsciously already made. I just wasn’t yet strong enough to admit to myself what that decision was.
I was going to have to jump back into the treacherous waters of the unknown and swim again, clownsharks be damned! The tectonic plates at the foundation of what I believed to be success were shifting. Rather than be measured by the ones and zeros of my bank account I wanted to be comfortable with who I was in relation to what I did.
I was no longer going to be driven onward like some sort of animal of burden under the yoke of life fearful of the lash. There had to be more to life than just chasing the carrot around the track.
I was never going to fix all the problems of the world. I don’t know what to do about sex traffickers, poverty, the issue of qualified immunity, wrongful convictions, global warming, political disfunction, immigration, war, or the fact that, despite my innocence or what the Constitution says, I may still die in this cage.
Like many of you I don’t possess the answers. But I know what we can’t do. We can’t accept that this is the best we can do. It’s up to us to become the hero of today.
Whatever the challenges of today are, we have to internalize them, make them our own, and then devote the totality of what we are to changing them. As children we believed in the impossible, and somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to be talked out of who we are.
Edward Snowden wrote, “that diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving common goals.” I tend to agree. To sit back and wait for a better tomorrow is not enough, not when it’s within our power to bring that tomorrow into today.
Thank you for reading and look out for next week’s publication: The Broken Egg - The divides that separate us as a nation.
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