A man dropped out of civil engineering to do door-to-door sales in Texas, where he was spit on and chased with bats over six weeks. His late father told him never to quit, his mother sacrificed for his education, and he wanted to prove wrong the people who wrote him off in school yearbooks.
I was dropping out of school, in fact, and flunking out of college, going to school for civil engineering, and I had a plane ticket actually to fly to Morocco, and I was never gonna come back when I got recruited by this kid named Pat Sadoff that pretty much I was so jealous of. And I'll actually wrap back to that point in a minute because that's part of the reason why I was failing for so long. But anyways, needless to say, Pat somehow convinced me to do this freaking job, and I flew out to Texas, canceled my flight to Morocco, and started knocking on doors for 6 weeks and just begging, not really getting into homes, everybody being mean to me. I got spit on, I had people chase me with bats, and I just, I was pretty discouraged. I never really thought of quitting just because, you know, my dad had died not too long before then, but the last thing that he really said to me before he passed was, you know, just don't ever be a quitter. And that's really— it just kind of rings in my head. He just always talked to me about how he quit sports and how his life would have been different and how he really would be alive still today. I thought about that every single day while I was on the doors. And people always ask me, why you didn't quit? And I just thought about it. There's no option. I don't have the— I don't have the luxury of being able to quit. I wish I could have. And life would be a lot easier if I was able to quit in those, those instances. It's not because I'm better than anybody or anything at all. I just was so scared to disappoint my father because I believe that he, he can see what I'm doing. And I thought about it every day. I thought about my mom. I thought about how hard she worked to put me through school by herself and my sister, and I just thought about disappointing her and how much I owe her. For all the work that she put in to take care of me and raise me. And so while I was on the doors, I really, I wanted to succeed so bad, but I really just wanted to prove to all the people that wrote in my high school yearbooks and my middle school yearbooks that I was going to end up in jail, I was going to be a failure, and I just wanted to prove everybody wrong. And I had this chip on my shoulder to just prove them wrong. I had all this pride. I wanted to be better than everybody, and That kept me from quitting, but what it didn't do is it— I didn't have the humility to succeed.
