I Waited 18 Years to Bet on Myself. Here’s What Finally Made Me Do It.
The lights went dim and a figure walked onto the stage.
The room fell silent.
I was just out of the Marine Corps and had no idea where my life was headed. Someone had invited me to a one-day seminar. I didn’t know the speakers. I didn’t have anything going on that day so I went.
I was completely out of place. I hadn’t been around people in suits. I didn’t own one. I showed up in a pair of Walmart slacks and a thin button-down with no tie. I looked like a 12-year-old trying to hang out with grown-ups.
Most of the day I don’t even remember. I was that far out of my element.
But as the afternoon wore on, someone I had just met grabbed my arm and told me to stay for the last speaker. Said it was worth it. Something in the way they said it made me stay.
The room filled to standing room only. The lights dimmed. And then the speaker walked out and looked at the crowd and a slow smile started to form and he said one word.
“Hey.”
I had never seen a room explode like that. People on their feet. Cheering. Strangers grabbing strangers. The kind of noise that hits you in the sternum.
He wasn’t a musician. He wasn’t an actor or a comedian. He was a guy on a stage and that room acted like he walked on water.
I didn’t take a single note. I just sat there in my Walmart slacks, completely still, while the room lost its mind around me.
And I thought one thing.
I want to be that guy.
Then I spent the next 18 years not doing it.
Heating and air conditioning. Pharmacy franchise. Bartending. Commercial printing sales. Sales training.
Each one moved me a little closer to people but none of them were it. The sales training was the closest. I was standing in front of thousands of people over seven years. But I was teaching someone else’s material and my heart was never really in it.
That image of that room never left me. It just sat quietly in the back of my head like something I owed myself and kept putting off.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a dream you’ve been carrying for a long time. It doesn’t get quieter. It gets louder. And the longer you wait the heavier it gets.
I knew that. I just didn’t do anything about it.
There’s something else you need to know.
When I was a kid my dad handed me a book. “Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.” I don’t know exactly how old I was. I just remember him putting it in my hands.
He didn’t make a big speech about it. He just gave it to me like he saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself yet.
I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. My dad has always believed something was in me worth betting on. Teachers did too. I didn’t grow up with a lot of people telling me I couldn’t. I grew up with people quietly expecting me to figure it out.
That’s its own kind of pressure. The good kind. The kind that stays with you.
When I finally decided to build the Badass Business Summit I wasn’t doing it to prove the doubters wrong. I didn’t really have many of those. I was doing it to finally prove my dad right. To finally become the thing he saw when he handed me that book.
That matters more to me than I usually say out loud.
I had no idea what I was doing. I did it anyway.
Nobody was putting me on stages. I had no personal brand. I had been trying to get in front of audiences and kept hitting walls because nobody knew who I was. And nobody was going to hand me a platform.
So I decided to stop waiting for one and build my own.
I was going to create a real event. Real speakers. Tradeshow booths. Three full days. Something that put a stake in the ground and said this is who I am and this is what I believe in.
A lot of people thought I was absolutely nuts. The business wasn’t in a great place. I had no experience running something like this. I had no guarantee anyone would show up.
I did it anyway.
Then COVID hit.
The original date was April 2020. The world shut down and I had to postpone. I owed the hotel thousands of dollars. I was sitting with all of it — the risk, the uncertainty, the very real possibility that I had made a massive mistake — and I had no idea how it was going to shake out.
That was the lowest point. Not the fear of failing publicly. The fear of having let down everyone who had believed in me. My dad. Elizabeth. The people who had already bought tickets and trusted that I knew what I was doing.
I didn’t pull the plug. I pushed the date and held on.
September 18, 2020.
75 people walked through the doors.
I stood on that stage and looked out at that room and it didn’t feel real. I could not believe 75 people had actually shown up. And then it hit me all at once — they’re here. They showed up. Now I have to produce.
That feeling of being simultaneously stunned and terrified and grateful all at the same time — I don’t have a better word for it than full. I felt completely full.
I thought about that kid in Dallas in the Walmart slacks who sat in the back of a room and watched a crowd go wild for a guy he’d never heard of. I thought about my dad handing me that book. I thought about eighteen years of wrong turns and detours and almost-theres.
And then I got to work because 75 people were counting on me.
Five years later I’m still fulfilling that dream.
We are on the other side of five Badass Business Summits now. Every year I stand on that stage and I think about the same things. The kid in the slacks. My dad. The hotel bill I almost couldn’t pay. The April date that COVID took from me.
And every year I think about what I would say to that 22-year-old if I could.
Here’s what I’d tell him.
Dude. You don’t see it yet. You have no idea what a wild ride this is going to be. But start now. Don’t spend 20 years figuring it out. Because here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then, you don’t figure it out and then start. You start and then you figure it out. The clarity comes from the commitment, not the other way around.
Start now. Don’t wait.
[Photo 3 goes here — a candid of you with attendees, something real and alive from the floor. Caption: “This is the room. This is why we do it.”]
Here’s what I know about betting on yourself.
Nobody is going to do it for you. Nobody is going to hand you the stage or the moment or the permission. You have to build it or you have to keep waiting.
Most people keep waiting.
I almost did.
The dream doesn’t care about your timing. It doesn’t care about the economy or what the hotel costs or whether a pandemic shows up and blows your April date. It just sits there getting louder until you finally do something about it.
Your dad, your mom, your best friend, your old teacher, somebody in your life has already seen something in you that you haven’t fully owned yet.
It’s time to prove them right.
If this hit you somewhere real, send it to one person who needs to hear it. You probably already know who that is.