Are You Here To Be An Entrepreneur? 49beautiful home, a thriving business, as much money as I could possibly
need, but does that match up with my vision?
Here’s what people should understand, it’s not a series of events.
It’s really what you start, what you intend your life to be. People intend
their lives to be a certain way when they are young. From the time I was
ten or twelve years old I would tell my mother every single day that I was
going to become a millionaire by the time I was twenty-five. For some
reason that number always stuck in my mind. You can ask my mother
and she will tell you the exact same thing. I said this over and over again
anytime she asked me, “What do you want to do?” I would tell her, “I’m
going to be a millionaire by the time I’m twenty-five.” The funny part is
I did not become a millionaire by the time I was twenty-five, I was actu-
ally twenty-six. Some people might call this a failure, but the fact is that
I earned my first million dollars when I was twenty-six years of age. It
took me ten months to do it.
So what series of events caused this? Some might say it was the
constant reiteration of that goal, even though I didn’t even know what I
was doing at that time. Some people might say I was in the right place at
the right time. But let me tell you this, prior to me starting a business that
made me $1 million, I sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. In selling
vacuum cleaners door-to-door, I certainly learned how to deal with people,
but I didn’t learn anything about how to run a business.
From the time I was very young, I realized that there was a life
that was different from the one I was living. Not that my parents didn’t
provide for us, they did everything they could for me when I was young.
But the fact is, I realized that there was a world out there that I didn’t
know. I saw it on television. I saw it on shows like Miami Vice. I saw the
houses on Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous. The question became how
could I access that world? How do I go from where I am today to that
place? That’s what started me on my quest to find out what that other
world was.
Along my way, I met certain other people, and each one of those
people taught me something. There were probably nine or ten key people
who made a difference in my life.
The first one was a guy named Lenny Epstein. Lenny taught me
how to sell vacuum cleaners. He sold me on the idea of selling vacuum
cleaners, even though I was 19 years old and had no intention of selling
vacuum cleaners. He convinced me to sell vacuum cleaners in about two
minutes. The reason this is important is that he showed me how to be a
great salesperson. He taught me that you don’t push the product on some-