CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

I was born in a working-class family. My grandfather on my mom’s side was an auto mechanic; on my dad’s side, a plumber. Both were hardworking, everyday people. A generation prior to that, my ancestors were German and Swedish peasants who immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s. I remember looking at the census documents of my great-great grandfather, Peter Frederick Lindberg. He was listed as a “day laborer.” His own great grandfather worked to dig the Got a Canal in Sweden, living in a hut alongside the great dig.

My ancestors lived a long, hard, grueling life. I feel an extraordinary obligation to not waste the hardship they lived through. I am grateful for their struggles and grateful for the gifts of perseverance I inherited from them.

Instead of dating a lot in my 20s, I built a business. By 2000, when I was 30 years old, I had built a $5 million business from scratch with no outside capital. I bootstrapped it. By the year 2001, the business was making about $1 million in profit a year. That could have afforded me a very good life in 2001. Even so, I didn’t take that money out of the business and start spending it.

I paid myself just enough to live on: $40,000 a year for the fir st 10 years. Everything else went back into the business. I kept reinvesting and reinvesting. We bought more companies and grew the business. And, we became more successful. It can look like luck, magic, or being in the right place at the right time, but when I look back at those early years, it was simply discipline and focus.

When I say “discipline,” I don’t mean a cold, heartless monotony. Rather, I mean building your dream into a fiery passion and allowing that fire to consume you at the expense of all else. Inside, you get a “burning” and nothing else matters except keeping your word for achieving the goal you set for yourself.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, your passion must be great enough to extend your will across great stretches of your life “and to despise and reject everything petty including even the fairest, divinest things in the world.” Are you prepared to live the life a monk, rejecting all earthly and petty pleasures for the sake of keeping your word? Sometimes, that is what it takes. That’s exactly what I learned in prison.

Prison teaches you the power of the ascetic. Everything there requires discipline, and the more discipline you apply, the better the results. Our
commissary purchases were limited to $90 per week. We got two rolls of toilet paper per week. We were issued one towel. This, and many other
examples, did not simply encourage the practice of self-discipline, they required it. Each makes you stronger by forcing an ascetic in virtually
everything you do. Nothing is wasted. Everything has value. I remember when I got my first pen. I remember when I found my first paper c lip.
The ascetic teaches you to value the smallest of forward advances and appreciate with sincere gratitude the smallest of gifts. The best part of
prison is the generosity and support from my fellow man as I see from my fellow prisoners every day.

All discipline comes from a place of emotional fortitude where you don’t break discipline in times of stress, fear, anger, and depression. The more you adhere to your long-term goals with daily discipline, the more effective your leadership will be. The more support from your friends, the more confidence you will have to avoid breaking discipline when things are not going your way.

When you share your stress with your friends, their support can help you overcome the challenge without turning to bad habits, whatever they may be. Knowing this, I have been amazed by, and grateful for, how supportive my inmates are of each other.

Part of the ascetic is being a scavenger. We throw away so much that is valuable. Once, at Montgomery Federal Prison Camp, I found a half-eaten bag of almonds in the trash. I fished them out . We were limited to $90 a week at this commissary, and a bag of almonds was $1.70. When an inmate is sent home, the items he leaves behind are scavenged by fellow inmates in a matter of hours. My tennis shoes must have been worn by three or four other inmates before me. To buy new shoes costs $90 at the commissary, which means I would have no commissary food for a week. So, I wore a worn-out pair of tennis shoes. Everything there is important: plastic bags, tape, paper clips, etc. There is enormous value to “trash” in the right place at the right time.

One of the most important leadership lessons is the art of obeying commands. Obeying and commanding are two sides of the same coin. The best commanders are likewise the best at obeying. We all encounter a higher power. Your ability to obey when you encounter a higher power is a testament to your leadership strength—particularly the humility and self-awareness to recognize when you are not the leader. Failure to obey at the right time is a failure to see reality, and the right leader is always the person closest to reality. So, by failing to obey, you are no longer the leader.

Being locked up in prison presents dozens of opportunities to obey every day. Now several months into my prison sentence, I find these opportunities to obey a tonic to the soul. Knowing I can obey with the same enthusiasm as I can command makes me stronger. Wake up at 5:30 am. Clean toilets. Stand up for count. Wear uniform as prescribed. Keep cell neat and tidy. Address the guards formally. Obeying builds character and character builds leaders.

Your happiness comes from being the best you can be in the plumbing trade, the most creative poet, or the most talented surfer. All of these require goal-setting and an extraordinary dedication to rational and consistent effort. True happiness can only be achieved with such effort . Happiness cannot be achieved by escapism and pure pursuit of pleasure.

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims,” according to Ayn Rand. “Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.”

I grew up in California. My dad was an airline pilot, and he found his happiness to be a “damned good stick.” My mom found her happiness in her six wonderful children.

Despite their modest income, my parents ponied up the cash and sent me to a private high school, Crystal Springs Uplands School. I was really lucky to go. However, it was a school of mostly wealthy parents and their kids. My parents were working class. Everyone would drive up to the school in their Beamers and Porches. My mom dropped me off two blocks away because she was so embarrassed by the 1979 Honda Civic (she called it “Tin Lizzie”) that she drove. I would walk the rest of the way to school. My parents couldn’t afford a nice car because they were putting all their money into tuition. It never occurred to me at the time that my mom was embarrassed about her old Civic. I only knew her as a fearless and dominant woman who could handle anything that came her way.

It was at that point I started dreaming about a nice car. The car I got was a 1969 hand-me-down Chevy Malibu that my sister gave me. It was totaled and then refurbed. California is a car culture. Some people put more into their cars than their houses. All the girls liked nice cars. I wanted to have a nice car.
What did I have to do to get one? Clearly, my parents weren’t going to buy it for me. I had to make some money. That was the first goal I set in life.

The very first thing I did when I started my own business was to lease a new Mercedes 190E. I washed that car three times a week. My rent payment was less than my car payment. It was a labor of love. It was a beautiful, shiny, low-end, entry level Mercedes. My life was very basic. I had that car. I slept in the office. I built my business. And it worked. Within five years, I had a turnover of $1 million and a staff of 12.

In 2002, I bought a business in Naples, Florida. I would fly into Fort Myers and drive to Naples (there weren’t any commercial flights to Naples back then). In Naples, I would stay at the Inn on 5th Avenue—right on the approach path for the private airport. Every five minutes, a private jet flew over my head. I would sit there, working, looking up at these planes flying over. I watched these guys fly right into Naples’s municipal airport on their own jets. I thought that was pretty cool, and I dreamed about having my own plane for many years.

The cost of operating one’s own plane is astronomical. The cheapest private jet is at least $1 million a year. My entire business at the time was making a couple of million a year. I couldn’t afford it. But, I put that dream in my goal book (Napoleon Hill 101: “Set a goal and achieve it.” See it, believe it, and achieve it.). I imagined myself flying on that plane every day. I did the math and realized that the company would need to probably get to $50 million of EBITDA before we could afford a private jet. So, I set the goal to achieve $50 million in EBITDA.

When I started going to Naples, we had a few million dollars of EBITDA. By 2014—when I leased a plane—our EBITDA came in right at $50 million. I worked 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, for 12 years for that dream. I built a business so that I could afford a plane. I loved every minute of the business. It wasn’t as if it was hard labor, but I worked hard to achieve my long-term goal. First is the dream. Second is years of hard work. I leased that plane in 2014. I started the business in 1991. That is a long time.

After you achieve your dream, the most important thing is to immediately set a new goal. Don’t linger on being proud of yourself. Take yourself out to dinner, take your friend out to dinner. Then ask, “What’s next?”

Every chosen field—from auto mechanics to poetry to plumbing—has a need for people who dream big. My grandfather was a plumber. You might think of that profession as somewhat traditional—until your toilet doesn’t work, your water bill is unsustainable or you find out there is lead in your pipes (in fact, some historians say that lead pipes were one of the primary contributors to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, one of the greatest empires in the history of humanity). Don’t underestimate the importance of “workman-like” jobs such as plumbing or auto mechanics. Your entire world is based on them. The people who work in these professions can achieve greatness at the same level as any other.

Regardless of where you choose to make a difference, choose a path that will require you to use all your gifts. As Descartes says, “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”