Now she had told me, and I was sixteen years old and I believed her, that my job could be to make a million dollars—if I wanted to. The amount of the money wasn’t what mattered when Moms said it; the operative part of her message was that if I wanted to do something, whatever it was, I could.
I not only believed her then, at age sixteen, but I continued to believe that statement in all the days that followed, including that fateful day in San Francisco when I got the first inkling of a future in Wall Street, and in those moments pushing up the hills in the downpour
with my son looking up at me from his stroller through rain-splattered dry-cleaning plastic, and in the desolate hours when the only place of refuge was in a BART station bathroom.
It was only later in my adulthood, after those days of wandering in the desert of homelessness, believing in the promised land my mother had told me about and then finding it, and only after generating many millions of dollars, that I understood why these two events were both so essential to my eventual success. The encounter with the driver of the red Ferrari showed me the way to discovering what the arena was in which I could apply myself and also to learning how to do that. But it was my mother’s earlier pronouncement that had planted the belief in me that I could attain whatever goals I set for myself.
Only after looking as deeply as I could into my mother’s life was I able to fully understand why she said those words to me at the time that she did. By recognizing the disappointments that happened in her life before and after I came along, I was able to see that, though too many of her dreams had been crushed, by daring me to dream she was being given another chance.
To fully answer the question of what it was that guided me through and became the secret to the success that followed, I had to go back to my own childhood and take the journey back to where my mother came from—in order to understand at last how that fire to dream got lit in me.
My story is hers.
