this in a book.
At six years old I wrote a letter to God asking him to help me never work a regular job. By 17 I'd read Rich Dad Poor Dad four times and made myself a promise. At 18 I turned down a job that paid more than both my parents made combined and left town.
I was chasing a kinesiology degree in Calgary — a city of a million people — when my roommate and I went out on a Thursday night and got a call the next day asking if we could start at a bar on one of the most violent streets in the country. We didn't even remember being asked. The first night on the job, a man was stabbed in the stomach with a broken beer bottle. A year later I was head doorman. A few months after that, I was managing the place.
At 20 I moved to Australia for a year. By 23 I owned two homes. I did shark feeding dives and a shipwreck dive on the Great Barrier Reef, jumped out of planes, rode motorcycles, and learned more about people — and about women specifically — than most men figure out in a lifetime.
Then a car accident broke my back in eight places and tore all four lobes of my brain. Doctors told me I'd need a caretaker for the rest of my life. I walked out of that. The recovery is what led me into fire and EMS school. The next 20 years I stood on the worst day of strangers' lives. I averaged around 10 overdoses per shift at a homeless shelter after that — 18 in a single 12-hour day.
The recovery also cost me 16 years addicted to opioids, and more years to alcohol. I'm eight years clean from one and five from the other. The one constant through every single bit of it was the gym — 32 years. I'm convinced it's the reason I'm not in a wheelchair.
I had over a million dollars by 29. Lost most of it to a wildfire while insurance spent five years not rebuilding, and I kept paying the mortgages. At 27 I took a fire job that paid $200K a year and felt like a complete sell-out the day I signed. That job let me go 12 years later while I was recovering from surgery. Rich Dad Poor Dad was right.
This page is the thing I promised that six-year-old I'd do. Build something of my own. And pull other men up while I do it.
