Hustle & Faith

In which David Goggins and Elder Thaddeus play tennis with my skull

A few years ago I had a boss who told me, “You don’t need to learn anymore. You know what you need. Now you just need to do.”

It was a compelling thought. A hopeful thought. It was also an utterly terrifying thought because I couldn’t have felt farther from knowing anything about anything.

Steve - I’ve mentioned him before - had gone through his own crucible. He’d built up a company with his brother, and because of some disagreement or another, he was ejected from his company and “lost everything,” as he told me. Millions of dollars, allegedly. He had been about the same age that I am now, and he was faced with starting over. He had all the accoutrements of man his age - wife, kids, mortgage, etc. 

He’d gone through his own wanderjahr, starting emergency triage companies only to abandon them. Eventually he landed at a company that he’d helped to found two decades before, and by that point he was ready to rock & roll. And rock & roll he did. He created a position for himself, grabbed the company’s operations by the throat, and increased revenue from $5 million annually to about $30 million in about five years.

Inspiring, to say the least.

So, when this guy, whose advice included such gems as, “I need you to stop being a [pansy],” (he didn’t say “pansy”) and, “You need to learn how to make grown men cry,” took me out to lunch for a pep talk, I was all ears. After all, this was only a couple of months after the company I’d been building for a decade collapsed faster than a Soviet-made nuclear reactor. I needed more than direction - I needed light.