In this personal monologue, the speaker recounts a 14‑year stint as a doorman in Atlanta after earlier work washing cars and janitorial jobs in Miami. He treats the doorman position as his own university, using the time to observe and collect books found in the backseats of parked cars. By noting titles and purchasing the books, he transitions from merely buying them to actively studying them, focusing on works read by successful people. One pivotal book is W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis, whose author he later meets and obtains an autograph from. Inspired by a passage suggesting that speaking can be a profession, he realizes he has been speaking informally his whole life and decides to become a motivational speaker, turning his accumulated knowledge and communication practice into a career.
