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Rags to Riches?
02-14-2014, 02:00 AM
I've got a riches to rags story.
My big break came right as I was finishing college. My grades weren't too good, so while my friends were getting internships at Goldman Sachs and Deloitte I had nothing. The only internship I could find was some unpaid piece of shit with some no name company that initially was run out of some guy's living room. These guys were selling real estate seminars. This was around 2004, and I applied because I figured I needed some kind of internship and I'd also benefit from learning the real estate market. The first few months were bullshit, I did shit like fetch batteries from RiteAid and buy food for the seminar speakers and was using my own money. But soon after they started training me to speak at the seminars--had me speaking during the recesses and doing little 5 and 10 minute bits here and there. I still wasn't being paid, but I was being flown to cities like NYC and DC and staying in Hiltons (though I was sleeping on the floor) and at age 21 I thought that was cool as fuck. Within six months of beginning the internship I became a paid seminar speaker. It was especially nice as I wasn't having to pay rent because I was being housed in hotels all the time.
From the outset, my boss (the owner of the company) was hardest on me. Although I was doing well in sales, he kept talking down to me as if I were the weakest link, kept pushing me to improve in areas that didn't even exist. He was pulling statistics out of his ass to indicate how badly I was performing, but I fell for it. He made me believe I sucked at the job, but I was selling enough to think that I was at least decent, and had the potential to do a lot better. But his treatment of me motivated me and really pushed me to get good at sales. I started going to any kind of sales event I could, analyzing everyone from guys like Tony Robbins close half an auditorium, to high profile auctioneers selling houses in Newport Beach. Pretty soon I became the best salesman/closer in the company, and it wasn't even close. That's when shit went downhill.
My first year with the company was fun as hell. I'd be with a group of 20 somethings who had never owned real estate in our lives but we were closers. After our events were over we'd hit the clubs in whatever city we were in and swoop chicks from the clubs. There was camraderie. Once a month I'd check my online banking and there'd be another 10K in there and it would never go down as everything we did was expensed. But as the company expanded and I took a lead role, I started having to roll solo. At first it was cool. I'd be in a new city every weekend, so in a given month I'd be in NYC, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, for example. Staying in the plushest hotels because the seminars would be in the ballroom of those hotels. Eventually I started going international, hitting up Melbourne, Amsterdam, London etc. I'd work 3 days a week and be off 4. Eventually loneliness crept in. At age 23 I didn't know how to enjoy life by myself. So I'd walk down the cobblestone streets of Gammla Stan in Stockholm, and after 20 minutes feel miserable from sheer loneliness. I'd call my bluepill bitchass friends who were getting married to girls who already had wedlock kids and they couldn’t relate to me. The job then started to become less enjoyable. In the beginning if I closed 50K in a room I was stoked, but eventually it just became routine. And since my numbers were the highest in the company, I didn't try to do any better, I had a huge ego and figured I was the best. I'd hit the clubs and pull a girl here and there, but for the most part I was alone and miserable.
Many of the people who buy real estate courses or any "make money" products are broke losers who lack the aptitude to ever become capable in life, but there was a small segment of guys who were ballers who signed up because they made money in other arenas and wanted to diversify. There was one guy I met in Rio, was like 20 or 21, who was making over 100K a month in partypoker commissions (I saw the actual data to confirm). There was another guy, at the time was maybe 30, who had a subprime mortgage company and was pulling in 500K/yr. He offered me to work for him, and he said "with your game you'll clear 300K your first year." I was VERY tempted to work for him but ultimately I felt too much loyalty to my company to quit. There was a guy from Hong Kong who I'm still friends with, who was 31 at the time, who was a publisher making around a million a year. He tried to pull me in and I'll never forget this quote he told me as we were drinking scotch at the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon overlooking the river, "Come to Hong Kong, the US will always be there." I didn't give the slightest thought to working with him but I should have--he's now worth over 100 million and has been written up in Forbes plenty of times. Anyway, the combination of having a lot of money come to me very easily and meeting people who were making even more money easily made me become very disillusioned. I genuinely believed I possessed a talent that was akin to printing money and I needed to capitalize on it more than I had been doing. I felt the 170-200K I was making annually was trivial as I was making nearly a million a year for my company. Even though I had no plan of what I was going to do next, I decided I needed to leave.
But I was too stupid to just quit on good terms. My immaturity made me think that it was somehow a better idea to get fired than to just quit. I envisioned leaving a legacy like Ron Artest—this guy’s a baller but we had to ship him out because of off the court issues. I just wanted to be recognized as the best closer in the business. I prided myself at having a good work ethic and being good at what I did, no matter if I showed up hungover and with a wrinkled shirt--I always closed and that wasn't gonna change. So I purposefully did dumb shit to get myself fired. One night I was in NYC at a club called Butter to celebrate one of my boss' birthday. He must have spent at least 5K on the table that night, and I got roudy drunk and verbally reamed him and spit on him before I got thrown out. I was begging to get fired but it didn't happen. I submitted ridiculous expenses like $500 room service receipts, literally anything I could think of. Then one day, I had a conflict with our office manager, some minimum wage idiot with a carrot up his ass. I never liked him. One day over the phone he starts asking me weird questions, alluding that I was using drugs (I wasn't). I knew those questions were coming from higher up, so I confronted my boss but he denied it and tried to play it off as the office manager just trying to earn his keep. I then demanded that the office manager be fired (he was a little two-faced faggot) and my boss told me to calm down and eased the situation. But I was pissed and decided it was time for me to leave, that I needed to go off on my own and start making real money as opposed to the paltry couple hundred Gs I was making at the time. I emailed one of my bosses and gave him no choice.... I said tomorrow you have me flying from SFO-SYD and this faggot office manager has me way too fuckin stressed to sit 15 hours in cattle class. If I don't get an email confirmation within 3 hours of the flight taking off that I'm gonna be in first class, I'm not going. Before making that demand I’d checked the cost of the flight first class and it was something like 12K so I knew it wasn’t gonna happen. My boss called me ten times over the next 24 hours and the only response my immature and undisciplined mind could come up with was to perpetually yell fuck you into the phone. Needless to say I didn't get on the plane. This happened nearly 7 years ago and it’s the biggest regret of my life.
A couple years later I started a business, truly lived in rags, and learned what it actually meant to WORK for a dollar. It experienced modest success initially but eventually failed. That's a whole other post however.
Lessons learned:
When your big break comes, never take it for granted.
Never lose respect for the dollar. Treat any achievements or financial successes the same way you treat a relationship with a woman—Know it will always end.
And I wish a grownup had instilled in me to never burn bridges. I knew two weeks afterward that I had made a mistake but it was already too late. Had I not intentionally burned that bridge they would’ve welcomed be back, two weeks or even two years later.
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