Do you want to tell us about some of the jobs that you had as a youth and the specific job that kicked off your fanatical obsession with creating wealth.
This gets a little personal and I don't want to do the humble brag thing. There was some thread going around Twitter about like name five jobs, you've held and every rich person on there was trying to Signal how they beheld like normal job. So I don't want to play that game. I've held a bunch of menial jobs. There are people who have had worse than me people who had a better than me. There was one point where I was washing dishes in the school cafeteria, and I said F this I hate this I can't do this anymore. And I sweet talk my way to a computer science profit of helping ta his CSS class in algorithms when I myself was completely unqualified for that. And so it forced me to learn computer science algorithms like a TA the rest of the course, but that desire came out of the suffering of washing dishes in the College cafeteria, which is not to say there's anything wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with anything really, but it was
Not for me. I did not enjoy it. I had a active mind and I wanted to make my money and earn my living through mental activities, not through physical activities. But sometimes it takes the suffering of doing the wrong thing to motivate you enough to do the right thing. I worked at a law firm for a while a big prestigious law firm in New York City. I had a big internship there and I basically got fired for surfing Usenet back in the day. This is before the internet was a big thing using it was the newsgroups and it was the only way for me to stay from being completely bored and I was an overpaid guy wearing a tie and a suit that's a hangout in the conference room where the lawyers need to photocopies that would make photocopies. And the meantime, I would be bored out of my skull. This is pre iPhone. Thank God to Steve Jobs for saving us all from unending boredom. But I used to read The Wall Street Journal or anything that I can get my hands on. I would have read the back of a brochure just to keep from going insane because listening to a bunch of corporate lawyers discuss how to optimize my new details in a big contract is really dull and they got mad at me because they wanted me to sit.
Quietly and not read The Wall Street Journal. They said that's rude. That's misbehavior. So I got called up and reprimand a bunch of times and then I was finally terminated and I was sent home in shame early from my very prestigious internship destroying my chance of going to law school and I was unhappy for all of an hour. But ultimately it's one of the best things that ever happened to me because then I would have ended up as a lawyer not that I have anything against lawyers, but it's not what I was meant to
do. You mentioned the catering job that you had a while back that really kicked off the whole Obsession.
That was an Envy thing when I was in high school. I had to make some money to pay for my first semester at college and I had to get a job. It was the summer of 1990 1991 time frame. So this was the Bush senior recession if anyone who's alive back then remember this was actually really hard to get a job. So I ended up working for an Indian food catering company and I ended up having to serve at a birthday party for a kid who it was actually
My school so I saw my classmates and I was out there serving food and drinks to them and that was incredibly embarrassing. I wanted to hide away and die right there. But you know what? It's all part of the plan. It's all part of the motivation. If I hadn't had that happen there probably wouldn't be as motivated and I wouldn't be a successful so it's all fine. But it was definitely a very strong motivator and that's Envy can be useful and we can also Eat You Alive if you let a follow your entire life, but there are points in your life where it can be a very powerful booster rocket.
