I appreciate it, and you have a great attitude that breeds success. I learned when I was young to seek the company of people who were successful and shut up, listen, and learn. Too much of today 25 and under set wants to showboat, bigtime, and pretend like they know everything or are something special. They tend to surround themselves with people who feed their egos or play party to irresponsible behavior. Big fish in small pond syndrome. Humility is rare to find these days unfortunately. I realized very young that the best thing I could do was just shut up and learn from people who were at a place in life that I wanted to be. I see far too many people try to "compete" with people by trying to prove they are something special or have things that identify them as special, when what they should be doing is not bragging, but listening. The thing you will learn quickly if you open your ears is that truly successful people generally love to mentor and teach their secrets to people who are eager to learn. Assuming you can humble yourself enough to play pupil, you can gain a lifetime's worth of knowledge in a short time from people who have been through it already. I try to take a positive from every successful person I meet. It could be something as simple as presence, how they carry themselves that just says....this guy is a somebody, even before you know WHO he is. It could be how to engage people and make them feel important. I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Jordan a few years back and the thing that struck me about him was how he had this engaging way of making direct eye contact and making you feel as if everything you said was important. You always have his full attention when he is speaking to you or listening to you. You get over being star struck almost instantly and he immediately has your trust. I am also good friends with one of the top executives in his field who runs a multi billion dollar company on a daily basis. The thing I take from him most is he is a leader of men. He will not hesitate to disarm you by joking with you or cracking a sarcastic joke. He treats everyone as if you have been friends for 20 years and makes you instantly comfortable. Combine that with intelligence, tremendous knowledge, and charisma and what you have is someone who can convince you to jump off a cliff for them. I've never seen anyone create such a feeling of bonding in a group so quickly. My point is, you don't have to learn how to directly make money from someone like this. Sometimes learning people skills is just as important to long term success.
The best advice I can give to anyone who wishes to be successful in anything is to surround yourself with people who have achieved, humble yourself enough to shut your mouth, open your ears, and soak up all the information you can.
I love that car, even though it's the most finicky car I own. There's just something about it that makes you feel good driving it.
