“Part of me wishes I had been tested. I often think that in the crucible I may have been forged a different man.” – House of the Dragon
It’s late September, 2016.
I’m standing in the kitchen with a woman who will become the love of my life in less than four hours.
A soft rainfall patterns the roof, as the Maui rainforest sings through our open window.
My business, Elite Guard Training, is on route to another 7-figure year, but instead of feeling proud, I feel guilty.
“I think I skipped a step,” I tell her.
“I didn’t struggle enough. I never experienced being poor. I never went through the business gauntlet. Everything just kind of… worked.”
She laughs:
“Sounds like a nice problem to have.”
We spend the night laying outside under a canopy of palm trees, and by 2 am, we’ve fallen in love.
When I wake up in the morning, she’s still asleep, so I log into my computer and begin my usual routine:
Checking our analytics, responding to emails, logging into our bank account…
I log into our bank account, and my jaw hits the floor.
While I was asleep, a $250,000 business loan had landed in my account.
By the time I woke up, my business partner had spent the entire $250,000:
Back-paying bills to contractors I’d never spoken to for a project I wasn’t overseeing — a project that had generated no revenue, and would turn into the biggest sunk cost of my business life.
I was, for the first time in my life, officially in debt.
A lot of debt.
The type of debt I would need to struggle to get out of; the type of debt that would force me to experience being poor; the type of debt that would test my skills, my will, and my spirit against the gauntlet of hard-knocks business, with real stakes, real consequences, and real danger.
I asked for it, and I got it:
A chance to be forged in the fire.
If only I’d known how hot that fire was about to burn…
(to be continued in Part 2, tomorrow)
– T
