“Yeah, life throws you all kinds of twists and turns and stuff, but it’s really irrelevant.
Because the truth of the matter is I could have elected to do nothing that would have put me in a position to have twists and turns…
…but instead I elected to be part of society and go out there and participate and to build and grow.”
Trains
Well, my friends, I had a bit of a sad moment this morning. I was sitting in my living room and I was taking apart my train set that I bought for Christmas for myself. And it was really very sad because as I took apart each piece and carefully wrapped each one of the cars in plastic and put it inside the Styrofoam and stuck it back in the box looking at them and feeling them.
Textiles—just the touch, the feel of these beautiful pieces of artwork a past came about me or a remembrance of the past. I remember as a kid wishing that I could afford the train set that I bought myself. Yeah, I had a little small one of those little packaged train sets, but I built this elaborate train set.
And when I was young and I couldn’t afford to have something like this, I would just sit and watch a train go around about a five-foot diameter round circle track for hours at a time just amazed. Loving the control to be able to turn on the power and listen to the train engine rev up and take off slowly and pull these trains.
And now I had a steam engine and I also had a big giant diesel engine, and I have got train tracks and off tracks and changing tracks and I’ve got just thousand and thousand of feet of track. Just unbelievable.
Enjoying Life
I was sitting there reveling in that thinking, “Boy, the world’s really messed up, isn’t it?” What’s really messed up about the world is that when you’re young and full of energy and able to really enjoy things in life, you don’t have them.
I think it’s so sad that people wait until they’re so old that they can’t enjoy life to actually have a life that it’s become a major burden on me. I just can’t even appreciate how it could be done.
Two and a half years after I started investing at 34 years of age I retired. And from that point on I’ve done what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it, with whoever I wanted to do it.
Yeah, life throws you all kinds of twists and turns and stuff, but it’s really irrelevant. Because the truth of the matter is I could have elected to do nothing that would have put me in a position to have twists and turns, but instead I elected to be part of society and go out there and participate and to build and grow.
Business
And then I started thinking about it. Look at this business I have. It’s in five cities. It’s got 8,000 customers that rely on us. It’s been going on for 20 years. Most businesses go out of business — 90 percent within the first five years and then the extra ten percent that are left over 90 percent of them go out of business in the next five years. Here we are 20 years later and thriving.
And it’s like I sat back for a second and I thought of the pride. The pride just as I had built the train system and figured out how to make curves go around different pieces of furniture and around corners in our rooms and out of one room and into the next room, and how I built up all the landscape and purchased the types of train pieces that I wanted to build this realistic looking life.
And I thought to myself when I was a kid I had an erector set. And when I was a kid I had Lincoln log set. And when I was a kid I played Monopoly. And all of my childhood days I was practicing building businesses, building things.
Practicing
I later got involved in every kind of shop class there was. And I took woodworking and built woodworking and cabinetry and furniture. And then I got into metalworking and I built almost an entire gym myself—built all the exercise equipment myself, and started my own gym.
I took auto mechanics and power mechanics and worked on engines and redid my own car when I was a kid, built my own car engine, rebuilt it and took a car apart and rebuilt it.
And all of this was practice for me building businesses. Practice for me building a life. Building a successful profitable business is what has brought me massive amounts of joy. Taking that train set apart today made me think that some day I’m going to have a give all that up.
Growing
I remember reading a book called The Seasons of Life. And in The Seasons of Life it talks about the fact that you’re growing, you’re blooming, you dying. There’s something different that you need to be different in your entire life.
When you’re young you’re full of exuberance and you’re growing and you’re learning and you’re looking for things. In middle life you’ve got the information, now you’re going out there and using it and becoming productive in life.
And then in later life as your energy wanes, your physical structure starts to fall apart, there’s really no way for you to compete and produce against the younger people other than to be so much more intelligent, so much more sophisticated, so much more in control of all of those things that young people don’t have that the mind has given the body a way to survive and compete even after it gets old.
I was thinking of the story—and I don’t know that I should tell this over the radio, but you know what can they do? Fire me? Kill me? Sue me? But I’m reminded of the story I’ve been telling my entire life. The first way I told the story was there were two bulls sitting at the top of the hill—one young bull, one old bull.
And they looked out over a field of heifers. And the young bull goes, “Hey, man, let’s run down and get one of those.” And the old bull looked at him very calmly and said, “No, let’s walk down and get ‘em all.”
Insanity
See, what I’ve found when I was young, I was young and impetuous and I was aggressive and I would attack anything. That was who I was. I remember one time somebody came and insulted my girlfriend, which was the receptionist of a health club. And he came and he pulled his pants down right outside the glass doors.
And when I was saw this, I got mad and I chased after this guy. And I ran him down through a parking lot. And he jumped on top of a car, jumped over the top of a ten-foot fence, and I jumped right after him. And he was running and running and running, and he ran into a condominium—opened the door, ran in the apartment, and I ran in right after him thinking I’m going to kill this guy.
When all of a sudden I looked around and realized I was in this guy’s apartment. There were six other guys in the apartment. If they were to kill me right now, they would have the right to do it because I impetuously ran into their domicile.
At that point I had to immediately think, “Wow, I’ve got to get out of here.” And I left lucky that just my total insanity scared them enough to back them off. And I got out of there before that wore off.
Many times in my life in my youth I have had a thousand things go wrong where I got in trouble with the police or with people or with money or whatever, and every time I came away thinking I’m the luckiest guy in the world ‘cause I got out of this.
