Ferraris Crashing Into Poles and the Importance of Focus in Your Life and Career

I read another article about someone in Los Angeles crashing a Ferrari into a pole today. The car was split in half. The driver of the Ferrari was Charles Lewis, a famous mixed martial arts fighter whose car spun out of control while he was racing a Porsche.  Lewis’ Ferrari was split in two after hitting in a pole.  Tragically, Lewis was killed.

Right in front of my house a couple of years ago there was another famous Ferrari crash. In February of 2006, Stefan Eriksson a Swedish entreprenuer, lost control of his $1,000,000 Ferrari Enzo sports car while driving along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu and crashed into a pole at 199 mph as recorded on a speedometer by a passenger videotaping inside the car.  The impact of the crash was so violent that the car was split in half.  Incredibly, Eriksson survived.  Here’s a picture of the car right in front of my house:

Here’s a picture of another Ferrari that was split in half after hitting a pole in Australia:

The fact that people are crashing Ferraris should not be news to you.  There are tons of Ferrari crashes each year as the uber rich take these cars and make horrible mistakes driving them.  What should interest you, however, is that people are crashing these cars into poles and splitting them in half doing this.  Think about all of the places these cars could crash into when they are barrelling down the road out of control right before the accident.  Why is it that they are always crashing into poles?  If you really think about this particular problem you will realize that crashing into a pole is something that would be pretty difficult to do even if you wanted to when you are jetting along at 150+ mph.  Something is going on that is making all of these people crash into poles.

I know exactly why these people crash into poles because I have almost done something similar myself.

What You Will Learn Focus on where you want to go and what you want to achieve – not on what you fear and want to avoid. What you focus on ultimately decides where you are going to go and what will happen to you. Focus cannot change overnight – You need to take small steps and add on to it. Changing your focus, changes the direction of your life. Focus is what will empower you and give your career strength and direction.

When I was younger, I was very interested in race car driving.  Although I never went to race school, a good friend of mine did.  My friend had always been incredibly interested in racing and his wife had purchased him a couple of days at Skip Barber racing school for his first anniversary.  When I was around 27 years old, I purchased a used Porsche that was very, very fast and had the time of my life in the car. Like these men who had terrible accidents, I remember that I too was guilty of some incredibly reckless driving.

I will never forget the lesson that my friend taught me one day as we were careening around a curve I had taken at around 70 miles per hour.  The back end of the Porsche started to slide and the car started to go out of control.  I braced myself as we were careening right towards a pole.  My friend started screaming:

“Don’t look at the pole!!  Don’t look at the pole!!”  I was headed right at the pole.

He grabbed my head and turned it in another direction.  We kept skidding but he was forcing me to look in a different direction.  As I looked in the other direction, I ended up turning the wheel accordingly.  I do not remember exactly what I was looking at, but it was something else–I think it was a big piece of gravel and dirt to the side of the road.  Sure enough, the car miraculously avoided the pole, and we went screeching in a huge cloud of dust and dirt right where my friend had turned my head.  We stopped just fine.

I was almost one of those guys who crashed into a pole.

I was, of course, very curious about what had happened, and for the next several minutes, I spoke to my friend about it.  He explained to me that the most important thing about racing is understanding how to come out of a skid.  He explained that what he learned at racing school was that what most people do when they are in a skid is they focus on what they do not want to hit.  He said that what ends up happening is the driver who is in a skid looks around them and sees the telephone pole or whatever it is and, despite the fact that it is the last thing in the world they would want to hit, they end up slamming right into it because they (1) pick it out and (2) it is the only thing they are focusing on.  Instead, he said the only way to pull out of a skid is to focus on where you want to go and not what you fear.

He said you need to focus on where you want to go and not what you fear.

How does this relate to your career and life?  It has absolutely everything to do with your career and life.  The best way to get where you want to go in your career and life is to change what you are focusing on.  What you focus on has everything to do with what will end up happening to you and where you will go.

When you focus on the results you want, you are likely to go there.  This is typically how you get where you want to go.  When you are focusing on what you want and what you need to achieve your goals, you are going to be far, far better off than when you are focusing on what you do not want to achieve.

One of the craziest things happened to me several years ago with one of my employees.  It is so crazy that I still cannot believe it happened.  It is something that related to the power of focus and how powerful it, in fact, is.

I had an employee who was really quite lazy compared to other people in the company doing the same thing he was doing.  There were several other people in the company who were much harder workers and did a much better job, and this particular employee seemed to cause one problem after another.  Since this guy was not doing much work, I started thinking that he might be better off working somewhere else.  It was really not in the company’s best interest to keep him around.

One day I was sitting in my office, and he walked in and asked to speak with me. I was hoping that he was going to quit.  Instead, the guy sat down and asked for a raise.  He started telling me what a good job he thought he was doing and how he was entitled to a raise.  I listened to him for awhile and then told him I would think about it.  The guy was clearly delusional, but I was taken back.

The same day he asked for a raise I was actually hoping to fire him; however, he had not been at all afraid of getting fired.  Instead, he focused on what little work he was doing and decided that this made him entitled to a raise.  This helped change my focus as well.  “Was I really seeing things correctly with this guy? ” I wondered.  He had put the focus with him somewhere else.

This particular employee ended up diverting my focus away from his substandard performance for a period of time by getting me to focus on something else.  It actually worked for awhile, and it was a very effective tool because it manipulated me into focusing on something I had not been focusing on before.  Instead of me being focused on what was wrong with him, I started focusing on the little that was right.

You need to understand that your focus can have huge results in either a positive or a negative sense.

• When you focus on getting an offer, instead of not getting an offer, the offer is more likely to come to you.
• When you focus on not getting laid off, as opposed to being laid off, you are more likely to not get laid off.
• When you focused on getting a promotion, as opposed to not getting a promotion, you are more likely to get a promotion.
• When you focus on getting along with people, as opposed to not getting along with people, you are more likely to get along with people.
• When you focus on prosperity instead of the lack of, you are more likely to be wealthy.
• When you focus on being happy as opposed to being sad, you are more likely to be happy.
• When you focus on being talented rather than average, you are more likely to be talented.
• When you focus on being interesting rather than boring, you are more likely to be interesting.
• When you focus on being a hard worker as opposed to being an average worker, you are more likely to be a hard worker.

Whatever your focus on is most often the direction you are going to go in.  This is just how it works and how it has always worked.

If you wanted to feel bad right now how would you do it?

• The first thing you could do is start thinking about all of the funerals you have been to of close people.  Then you could think about all of the bad relationships you have been in.
• Then you could think about all of the bad things people have said about you in the past.
• Then you could think about the biggest failures you have had in your life.
• Then you could think about how you are not that successful if you wanted to, as well.

This would make you feel really lousy, right?  I am sure it would. It would be a real ball of laughs!  What do you think your mental state would be like after an hour or so of this?  Do you think you would be able to accomplish a lot due to these thoughts?  Do you think it would be fun having these thoughts?  Give me a break!  This would be a complete nightmare.

But this is what a lot of people do with their lives.  They focus on the negative, they focus on where they do not want to go and this is exactly where they end up going.  This is so stupid! This is something we all do, however.  You may be among people who concentrate their thoughts on negative stuff like this.  A good part of the world does this all day long and every day. I am sure you know a lot of people yourself who concentrate their thoughts like this.  What a bunch of bologna!

If you wanted to feel good right now, you could do the following:

• You could think about your greatest successes.
• You could think about all of the good things people have said about you in the past.
• You could think about all of the people who love you and you love.
• You could think about what you are grateful for.
• You could think about the future you are dreaming about for yourself.
• You could think about all of the good decisions you have made in your life.

Now that’s what I am talking about!  If you focus on the positive and things that empower you, that is exactly where you are going to go!

I am about to describe two types of people to you. I am sure you too know these two types of people because they are everywhere around us.

First, there are people who tend to look at every situation in a positive way.  They look at people and assume they have a positive intention.  They look at the world and see a happy and exciting place.  They are, in a word, happy people.  When you are around people like this, your experience of the world tends to be pretty good as well.  It is enjoyable being around those who are happy with the world and whose focus is on positive things. When you see the world in this vein, you tend to feel less threatened and overall much better about everything that is going on around you.

Second, there are people who tend to focus on the negative.  They focus on how this or that is impossible or very difficult. They focus on how people are mean and out to get them.  They focus on negative things that people have said.  They look at the world as evil and they are suspicious about the world and what is going on around them.  When you see the world like this, and spend time with these sorts of people, you tend not to feel that great about anything.  Your experience of the world tends to be pretty bleak.

The sort of focus that has gotten you to where you are today is not going to be the same focus that gets you to where you may want to be tomorrow, next week, or next year.  Changing your focus cannot happen overnight and instantly.  It is like anything–you need to take small steps to get more cumulative changes made over time.  However, if you change your focus, you are going to change the direction your life is headed. This is just how it works.  Remember that where you focus is where you are going to go.  Focus is what empowers you and gives you and your career power and not what hurts you.

The Magic Asphalt Sealer Tank

What You Will Learn Have faith in your work and in your own abilities. Invest in what you are good at and take chances. Pick yourself up when bad things happen and fix them. Invest in your gains and keeping going when things get bad. Constantly make the most of the tools you have at your disposal. Continue to improve and move forward and always remember where you came from.

When I was in college my girlfriend had the annoying habit of periodically declaring that the dorms were too noisy for her to sleep in and then would demand I take her to a hotel to spend the weekend watching television and ordering room service.

Her obsession with hotels was so profound that when her mother came to stay in Chicago one year my girlfriend stole her key and used it for years to go hang out in a hotel room for free.  It was for the old Blackstone Hotel and the key was on a giant brass thing that she lugged around in her purse.  She seemed pretty proud that she could go stay in the hotel anytime she wanted to.  I went there with her once but told her that this whole thing was too much for me.

“This is probably a felony,” I related to her as she sat there munching cashews from the mini bar she had no intention of paying for.  When, she said she had no intention of paying for the hotel room either I said, “This is intolerable and I am leaving.”

We had some different values.  Were it up to her we would have moved right into that hotel room.  She really considered me uptight because I did not like staying in hotel rooms for free. I can just imagine what would have happened if someone had tried to check into that hotel room.

When my girlfriend declared the dorms were too loud for her to sleep, what this really meant to me was that she had decided it was time for me to drive her to an industrial part of town so we could spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express, or a similar hotel.  Once we got to the hotel we would watch HBO on television and go out to eat at Denny’s.  Since she never really studied much–or at all, the event would invariably result in an argument of sorts when I would demand she turn down the television in the cramped hotel room while I tried to make sense of some Greek guy pontificating about the meaning of everything.  At some point during the weekend she would generally tell me she also had “writers block” and ask me to write a term paper for her or something while she went shopping for make up at the local mall.

These were not nice hotels.  They were frequently right next to freeways and the rooms were rarely much quieter than the dorms.  There were often semi trucks sitting with their diesels purring in the parking lot all night long.  Nevertheless, this need she had to stay in lousy hotels was something I tolerated and were it not for the industrial areas these hotels were located in I would probably have found myself refusing to go on these short excursions.

The best thing about the areas where we stayed in was not that the hotel rooms were cheap.  It was that they were in areas where contractors all over Chicago kept a lot of their equipment.  There was a little ritual about our frequent trips outside of campus.  We would leave on a Saturday morning and we would invariably stop along side the road and look at dump trucks, generators and other stuff that had for sale signs on it.  Since many of these pieces of equipment were parked in front of homes I would have the privilege of speaking with the owners of the equipment.  My girlfriend would generally be sitting in my truck while I looked at these various pieces of equipment and chatted with their owners.  Once back in the truck, I would explain to her about what various pieces of equipment did and how it was my dream to have my own bulldozer.  She would look very bored by these sorts of conversations and I think she must have wondered to herself what she was doing with me.  Nevertheless, she would tolerate it knowing I was also going along with her interest in staying in bad hotel rooms.

On one of our visits to a working class suburb in Chicago I could not believe my eyes.  Parked in front of a ranch house was a giant red asphalt sealer tank.  It would be one of the most remarkable and transformative relationships I would ever have with a piece of machinery.  The owner of the home had a the same color Chevy Suburban I was driving parked in front of his house and I believe that this was some sort of sign.  I pulled over and sat in my truck for a few minutes telling my girlfriend what a wonderful piece of machinery the tank appeared to be.  Eventually, I decided to go to the door of the home and ask the man if he wanted to sell it.

The man who answered the door was a short European-looking man with dark skin and he was wearing a wife beater tee shirt.  The outside of his entire house was very dirty.  There were a lot of toxic chemicals around this area–open paint cans and so forth.  Inside the house I could see a bunch of little kids running around in white undershirts that appeared to not have been changed in days. The kid’s faces appeared to be partially covered in chocolate and other stuff they had eaten recently.  Inside the family appeared to be speaking another language.

I asked the man, “What language are you speaking?”

“The Cant.” he stated matter of factly.

I had no idea what he was talking about.  I had never heard of this language and only later would I learn after asking him what language he was speaking for the fifth or six time that it was a genuine “Gypsy” or “traveler” language.

I proceeded to ask the man several questions about this asphalt sealer tank.  I was so excited I could not believe it.  Spring was breaking and soon I would be able to resume doing asphalt sealing around Detroit.  I had to make a deal and get this asphalt tank.  The tank looked so run down that I was very confident I might be able to afford it.  Back at my fraternity house I had a 15 year old Audi car that I was looking forward to selling. It had gold rims and was painted with all these strange gold stripes.  It looked like it belonged in a 70’s German hip hop video.  I remember the President of the University of Chicago at the time, Hanna Grey, had walked by me on one occasion while I was parking and appeared to be cracking up.  She looked like Barbara Bush.

“Hello!” I told her happy to be meeting such an important person.

“That’s quite a car!” she said in a patrician tone.

“Thanks!” I replied.

The man could not believe that a kid was directly in front of his house trying to negotiate to purchase an asphalt tank.  I could not really believe it either.  The tank was quite run down.  It looked very cheaply made and even the tires were quite cheap.  It had a very cheap pump attached to it that one could use to spray asphalt sealer on driveways and more.  To me this appeared to be too good to be true.

“Will you take four thousand for this?” I finally asked the man after we had spoken back and forth for at least 30 minutes.

“Of course!” he said.

After I made the offer I got the feeling he would have taken four hundred.  I was incredibly enthusiastic about this tank, however, because I knew what it could accomplish.  With this piece of machinery I figured I was well on my way to making a great living as an asphalt sealer contractor.

A few days later I sold my Audi to a guy who thought he was a rap star from the South Side of Chicago and had the money for the tank.  I called the man and told him he could bring the tank by.  He was at the front door my fraternity house within the next hour.  There were children all over the inside of his Suburban.  There must have been ten kids.  I told him to park the tank directly in front of my fraternity house which was directly in front of the entrance to the quadrangles of the University of Chicago.  There were still a few weeks left of school at this point so I was driving around campus for my remaining weeks of school in a giant suburban with a 15 foot long tank attached to the back of the truck.  It must have been quite a site.

When school ended for the year I packed up all of my belongings and put them in the Suburban and started driving home to Michigan.  I left at around 10:00 pm.  It is about a 5 hour drive to Detroit from Chicago.  It was a very strange trip home.  About two hours outside of Chicago I got a flat tire.  When I pulled over I realized that I still had a gas pump nozzle sticking out of the Suburban’s fuel tank.  Incredibly, I must have brought that with me when I left the last gas station.  A man pulled over to assist me in a giant semi truck.  He was very nice; however, there was also something about him that seemed very dangerous.

“What are you hauling?” I remember asking him.

“Cartilage,” he said.

I have no idea what a guy was doing in a giant semi truck at 12:00 am hauling thousands of pounds of animal cartilage but it frightened me.  I was very fearful that I might be added to his next load of cartilage.  I finally got back on the road and rolled into the City of Detroit around 3:30 am.  What a sorry sight this must have been with me and my tank.  Around that time I had been doing a lot of writing and research at the University of Chicago about the City of Detroit.  I was actually very interested in the sociopolitical aspects of the site, and how African-Americans had been negatively affected by historical discrimination and other factors.  As part of my research, I was planning on spending the summer living in one of the worst areas of Detroit.  It proved to be one of the best summers of my life.

At the time there was a new terror tactic going around the City of Detroit that I had been reading about in the local papers.  Apparently, a group of gangsters would drive around in Chevy Caprice’s with the lights off and when someone would flash their lights at the car the people in the car would all open fire on the car killing the driver and the people in the car.  That night as I drove into Detroit I saw a low riding Chevy Caprice drive right past me with all of its lights off.  I came very close to flashing my lights at it but stopped at the last second when I realized this would be a death sentence.  Detroit is so cool in the middle of the night.

As the summer progressed my red tank and I made a tremendous amount of progress together.  For seven days a week we spread asphalt cheer throughout all of Detroit and worked very hard.  I started employing numerous people throughout the scary neighborhood I had moved into and actually started feeling like I was becoming part of the community.  One thing I can say is that these were some of the nicest people I have ever met.  Drug dealers and others spent their time shooting each other.  However, around all of this insanity there are many people who are very happy and in no danger whatsoever.  If you keep to yourself and do not associate with the wrong people living in a bad neighborhood is generally not really any different from living anywhere else.

That summer I hired Rodger who is one of my favorite people I have ever met.  Rodger was a former crack addict and weighed about 300 pounds.  He had been doing everything he could to stay out of trouble and deep down was a very good person.  He was also very skilled, which came in really handy.  One day I lost the keys to a pick up truck we were using and he hot wired it for me.  He had a huge family and they all lived in a run down house not too far from where I was living.  He also had around 10 kids and was only 30 years old at the time.  One of the most remarkable things about living in this part of Detroit was that the women he had kids with had no intention of marrying him.  One day I was waiting for Rodger in front of his house to start work and a couple of very attractive young girls came up to me.

“I want to have Rodger’s baby!” one told me.

“Are you serious?”  I asked.

Rodger later explained to me that some of the women he had babies with simply declared they were going to have his child and then had proceeded to have his children.  I can imagine that Rodger must have been a very good father but it must have been difficult to have so many mothers to keep track of.

Rodger’s finest moment came one summer day when we were planning on sealing numerous very large driveways and a few parking lots. I had filled the tank up to its absolute maximum of 550 gallons and the weight of this was extreme.  Sparks were flying every time the tank when down a large curb.

We would typically pick up the sealer about an hour outside of Detroit and then drive into the suburbs of Grosse Pointe and other areas to do our work.  On that day as we were on the freeway with our full load, cars kept driving up alongside me and honking and pointing at me and the truck.  The people looked panicked.  Without going into much detail, for various psychological reasons I thought the people were making fun of me and my operation.  In posh suburbs kids used to drive up to me and point and make fun of me, call me white trash and various other sorts of things.  On this particular day the honking and pointing was really too much.  I started flipping all of the people off who were doing this.  It happened several times that day and I remember telling Rodger:

“I am so sick of these people making fun of us and this tar operation.  These motherfuckers need to start working for a living!”

“Yeah, I hear that!” Rodger would say back.

Rodger had won $5000 in the lottery about six months previously and one of the requirements he had of working for me was that I took him to a party store each day to “do the numbers”.  I would advance him the day’s pay and he would proceed to purchase all sorts of lottery tickets based on events that had happened that day.

“Was that exit 241?” he might ask me when we were getting off an exit in some location.

“Yeah,” I would tell him.

Rodger would then proceed to take out a small notebook and write down the exit number with a bunch of other numbers that struck him as significant from that day.

When we got to our first driveway in Grosse Pointe Rodger came up to me.

“You’ve got a bad arc weld on one of the joints on the trailer,” he told me.

“This trailer?  It’s fine! This thing is built like a German brick shit house.”

I was in the middle of operating a flame thrower to burn grass off of the edges of a lawn.  I did not want to hear it.

I think Rodger said something to me at least once more.  For some reason, however, it simply was not registering.  What he was telling me was that a major part of the trailer that was securing it to the Chevy Suburban, a giant piece of steel, was about to break off.  If this happened the results would be disastrous.  What this meant was that the tank would completely detach from the truck and all 500+ gallons of sealant would continue up the road completely on their own.

We stopped at a gas station in downtown Grosse Pointe City around 5:00 pm to get some Gatorade and some gas for our blowers and other equipment.  I never liked stopping in downtown Grosse Pointe because it was quite embarrassing.  There would be people in golf shirts walking around and everyone always seemed very excited about being so middle class.  I would generally see kids I knew as well as their parents who were supporting them over the summer.  They spent their time in country clubs and so forth and drove around in expensive cars.  Seeing girls I knew was generally not a lot of fun either.  It was not considered a cool thing to be doing such blue collar work but I was actually quite proud of myself.

Rodger and I were very tired and still had several more hours of asphalt work before the sun went down.  Generally, what would happen when we pulled out of any gas station is that we would hear a giant “bang” as part of the trailer would bottom out and a bunch of sparks would go flying.  This was a sound I had been accustomed to all summer.  As we exited the gas station I did not hear any bang.  At first I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of a giant bang and then I looked over at Rodger.  Roger was looking out the passenger side window of the Suburban.  Directly to his right was the tank which had broken off to the truck and was now barreling towards and Banana Republic and Ann Taylor store.

“I told you that trailer had a bad arc weld,” Rodger said.

Hundreds of gallons of sealer covered the front of both businesses and a couple of windows shattered. I could not believe my eyes.  The tank weighed thousands of pounds.  It snapped a light pole in half and went charging into the window of a Banana Republic store.  A large blower that was on the trailer went flying through the window of the Ann Taylor store.

There were at least 10 police cars on the scene within a couple of minutes.  At least 50 spectators wearing penny loafers, khaki shorts and polo shirts gathered around.  I was covered in tar from head to toe as was Rodger.  Rodger was very frightened.

“I’m not going back to prison,” he told me.

“Prison?” I asked. I knew nothing about Rodger ever being in prison.

The police asked for my identification and Rodger’s as well.  A few moments later a series of interesting announcements came over a radio loud enough for everyone gathered around in this spectacle to hear.

“Drug possession with intent to distribute … Jackson State Prison 3/14/85-5/5/87.  Arrested for robbing a convenience store with a deadly weapon … Jackson State Prison 7/1/87-9/1/89…”

The best part about these announcements was seeing the faces of the white bread people gathered around enjoying their ice creams.  I loved hearing their hushed whispers.  I never said anything to Rodger about any of this or asked him about the time he had spent in prison.  As a matter of fact, I pretended I did not hear a thing.  What I understood at that point after having spent so much time with Rodger is that you cannot judge people all the time based on their past.  Also, Rodger had experienced a different life than I had, and if I were to have shared his experiences I too might be living a life similar to his.  You can never judge a person until you have been in their shoes.

The tank had lashed out at these stores and did over $30,000 in damage.  Despite an incessant disorganization, I had been organized enough that summer to have insurance and the entire thing was covered. I am very fortunate that no one was injured in this ridiculous incident.

I had been storing the tank at night at a steel processing facility run by a German man.  The tank was currently in a police impound lot.  A couple of days after the tank accident the German man called me wondering where the tank was.  I think he was nervous that I might have run off without paying rent.  He then explained to me that he could fix the tank and trailer because he had skilled welders on his staff.  I had the tank towed there and a couple of days later it was as good as new.

Over the next several years I used this tank every summer and it was something that enabled me to support myself through school.  I loved this tank and it brought me such good luck and fortune it is hard to describe.  Everything I invested in the tank I ended up getting more out of it.

After I graduated from law school I moved my tank up to Bay City, Michigan where I was working for a federal district judge. I was excited about all of the work I could do with my magic tank on the weekends.  The tank had been incredibly good to me for years and years and had brought luck and magic to my life.

I decided that I was going to give the asphalt tank a complete overhaul up in Bay City.  I found a shop that built trailers and I ordered a massive overhaul.  I made numerous changes to improve the quality of the tank. I built special ramps to load my equipment on and more.  I was planning on turning the tank into a profound piece of machinery that could support me for the rest of my life.  I sketched out changes to the tank and spent weeks thinking about how to design the tank of my dreams.

As luck would have it, I ended up quitting my job in Bay City and flew out to California to interview with law firms while my tank was still being worked on.  There were some fishy things going on with the welder before I left.  I stopped by there often and heard them fighting about money issues and other things.  It was a family business.  I knew things were not going well there.  They had also agreed to do the work for a very cheap price which was suspicious.

I was sitting in the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena one evening when the phone rang.  It was the owner of the welding shop.  He told me that there had been a traumatic fire and that his entire building had burned down.  He hinted to me that he had started it for insurance money.  I was 100% confident he did.  He told me that my trailer had been in the garage and had survived the fire but would need a complete rebuild. He told me that the insurance company would be responsible.

To my astonishment, the insurance company took my trailer and did a massive rebuild on it and made it into the most incredible piece of machinery I have ever seen.  Moreover, they made it up to Department of Transportation standards and did all sorts of incredible work to it.  It must have cost them over $20,000.  They also did the work very quickly and gave it back to me within days because they were worried I would file a claim for “lost wages.”  When I got the trailer back I literally could not believe my eyes.  That summer I took the trailer out and it looked so impressive people would pay basically anything I asked for my services. I looked like a hardcore incredible operation.  I was making so much money that I bought a Porsche.  Life was good and it was all because of the magic trailer.

I was planning on moving to Los Angeles to start work in a law firm and was about a week from leaving.  I had no idea what I was going to do with the magic trailer.  One day I was behind the True Value hardware store in downtown Grosse Pointe purchasing some supplies to finish a job.  A man came up to me and said he was at a fair down the street with his family but could not help but notice my beautiful trailer.

He explained that he owned a small nut factory that processed peanuts by adding delicious toppings to them  and was interested in the asphalt sealing business.  He asked me if I would be interested in selling the trailer.  I told him I, of course, was.

A few days later I stopped by his nut factory with the trailer and he gave me a bag filled with $15,000 in hundred dollar bills. I had never seen so much money in my life.  The tank is still giving to this day:

1. When I moved to Los Angeles I purchased a small house for $180,000 and used the $15,000 for a down payment.  A year later I sold the same house for $250,000.
2. I purchased a $350,000 house with the proceeds from that sale.  Two years later I sold that house for $550,000.
3. I purchased a $950,000 house from the proceeds from that sale.  Two years later I sold that house for $2,000,000.
4. I used the proceeds from that sale to purchase a $5,000,000 house.  One year later I sold the house for $5,800,000.

Today the tank is still giving to me and I live on a beach in Malibu, California because of the power of this asphalt tank and what it has given me.  I consider myself blessed by the power of this asphalt sealer tank.

What does this asphalt sealer tank represent and how is it relevant to you?  It is relevant because it represents having faith in your work and your own abilities.  It is about investing in what you are good at and taking chances.  It is about looking for opportunity no matter where you are.  It is about picking yourself up when bad things happen and fixing them.  It is about investing your gains and keeping going when things get bad.  It is about using your skills to provide opportunities for others.  It is about the power of what you are capable of.  Because of that tank I am a different person today.  I get up and look at the waves and walk on the beach when I want to.  The lingering power of the tank allows me to breathe fresh air each day.  The tank is something that changed my life.

The tank may have been magical but it is also a symbol.  You never want to give up.  You want to constantly make the most of the tools you have at your disposal.  You want to continue improving and moving forward and you always, and I mean always, want to remember where you came from.