Throughout the presentation, we’re going to have that obnoxious noise and the flashing lights and we’re going to have personal growth tips. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about my story and I’m going to intermingle some of these personal growth tips and this is your first one: One idea really can change your life. It might sound a little generic. “Is that really true?” you might think to yourself.
Well, I’m here to tell you, it is and that idea for me while I was here at the university went as follows. I paid for college myself and by the middle of my sophomore year, I was running out of money and thinking, “What the heck am I going to do from here?” I went home around winter break the middle of my sophomore year. I was with some friends. One of them told me about a company he had heard of that was starting student discount cards at different universities. They would go around and they would get merchants to agree to sign up and pay to be on the card and they would offer a free drink with dinner or whatever it was. That was actually a business.
I thought about it and I’m like, “Well, jeez, I could do that.” And, heck, if 2 weeks later I wasn’t in a suit and tie walking around talking to merchants around here in Kingston and Wakefield and here on campus. Within 6 weeks or so, I had produced my own student VIP card. I passed one out to each student. If you lived on campus, you got one in your mailbox and if you lived off campus, I set up a booth at the Union and passed them out as folks walked by.
I did this for the rest of school and it paid for my college education, number one. Number two, probably most importantly, it taught me that, wow, I could actually do something entrepreneurial. It was a pretty simple concept but I could actually do something entrepreneurial, do something a little bit different, and number three, it absolutely got me my first job.
I was an okay student, a decent student, but I wasn’t a great one. There were many better than me but I would walk in the interviews with that goofy card and tell them about this business I had started and, sure enough, it led to some job offers. So one idea really can change your life.
After I left school, I ended up working at a few money center banks, Goldman Sachs and at Citibank, and those jobs – that was about 14 or 15 years. Those jobs really provided the foundation that was necessary for me to pursue the dream I’d always had which was to start my own business. But without the foundation of those jobs, there was no way I would’ve been successful.
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