Thriving Despite Autism Dyslexia Processing Disorders and Poverty

my mom used to say that my story was the

american story

part steve jobs and part four scump i’ve

been setting challenges for myself since

i was 18 years old

i’ve crocodile wrestled swam with the

great white sharks

and even climbed the face of el capitan

but these things are difficult for me

because

i have heart rate triggered asthma which

is like breathing through a pillow while

running at altitude i also set

professional challenges i’m a serial

entrepreneur forbes book author and

philanthropist

my thoughts have been published in 25

publications including fortune

entrepreneur and the huffington post

i have dyslexia which is like trying to

read while on a roller coaster at an

amusement park ride everything is moving

i have processing disorders which is

like imagine your thoughts stuck in the

spin cycle of washing machine

what’s happening on the inside is a lot

different than what’s going on on the

outside

okay

but i think that struggles are things

that come upon you and challenges are

things that you choose so i choose

to convert my struggles to challenges so

that i can overcome them i had

limitations so college just wasn’t in

the cards for me

i decided that maybe i could become an

entrepreneur i focused on the two things

i needed to know to be an entrepreneur

one was finance and the other was

software in my early 20s i landed a

finance job

i was working multiple jobs at the time

and my boss

had me come in one day

and i was terrified that i was going to

lose my job that i was going to get

fired but he just wanted to take me to

lunch

and on the way we stopped at a ferrari

dealership

and he let me drive the car off the lot

he stopped the dashboard and he looked

at me and it was pretty awesome and i

remember him looking at me

and saying one of these days

you will have one of these

and years later i started my own finance

company a wholesale lender and i did buy

that ferrari but i sold it because i

just

didn’t feel right it just wasn’t me and

i

kind of felt like a jerk the second

thing i needed to learn was software so

i landed a job at a computer learning

school and took all the classes and

learned software it took me 17 years but

the company i created sold as part of an

ebay transaction for

925 million dollars considering that

they thought i was just going to be

digging ditches my whole life worked out

pretty good i wanted to get involved in

politics so i became the chairman for a

congressman and through that i was able

to meet my hero president barack obama

this is me too it’s all here

the story of my life i choose to wear it

i choose to keep it close to me the

tattoos

remind me of the important people and

life events that influenced me

my mother was a nun and my father was a

priest and so they obviously never

planned on being parents

but they left the church

and got married and had my brother and

then adopted my sister from korea and

then they had me

and i was not an easy baby

i had nine blood transfusions and my

heart stopped twice so i was declared

dead twice

my parents got divorced and later on my

mom married the social worker who was

assigned to us in the 80s we lived in

oakland and my mom made a bold move and

bought some land at the base of the

sierra mountains

and we lived in tents

while we built our house and i raised

livestock to make money and feed the

family i remember being hungry and

waiting outside the chicken coop for the

chickens to lay an egg

so i could cook it on the wood stove at

school i would sell rubex cubes for

money and for an extra charge i would

solve the rubik’s cubes i made more

money on solving the puzzle than the

rubex cube

and during christmas i would knock

mistletoe out of the trees and sell it

in front of the grocery store so at

school

i was

paraded with all the other kids like me

to the back of the parking lot where

there was a trailer and everybody knew

the kids that went to the trailer

and so this led to a lot of name calling

they would call me and weakling

among other things

and some of us would wait

and peek out of the window i used to sit

there and wait till all the kids could

leave because then so i wouldn’t get

beat up on in between

these tattoos

remind me of the kindness and courage of

the people that were close to me my

adopted brother rain is here

he committed suicide

and my best friend jay is here who died

of cancer

and this

this is my mother’s boot print

we did the 220 miles and 28 mountains of

the john muir trail before she passed

away of cancer

these marks

inspire me

to always be grateful

every year on my birthday i choose a

challenge and one year i decided i was

going to run a marathon

and so my first day out i ran a mile

and then i collapsed of exhaustion

but

10 months later i ran the marathon now

it took me seven and a half hours and

they were pretty much closed up by the

time i got there

but i did it

another time i decided i was gonna take

the challenge on

to ride a bike from san francisco to l.a

which is 525 miles my first day out i

took my bicycle i made it five miles and

there was a little hill

and i had an asthma attack and ran into

the back of a parked suv in front of a

bunch of people it was horrible

there was all these people and they

stopped and i was just like go away and

they were like are you okay and i was

like just go away you know

it was

pretty embarrassing but i did that too i

made it i did all

525 miles

at one point i started a technology

company on a folding table out of my

bedroom and grew that to over a hundred

people

but then the dot bomb hit i had to lay

off 95 of my people

and move out of our nice office and into

a barn

it was

a barn

and then i had to move my family

out of a comfortable home into a dark

moldy studio apartment with three young

kids

people ask how do i do these things how

do i make these things happen

well when i felt weak like quitting

i focused on five things five principles

one for each finger to help me remember

focus

drive

enthusiasm discipline and optimism just

a handful of things

let’s start with focus

i had no investors and i didn’t come for

money so

i would have to eat breakfast at hotel

buffets

and dinner at bar happy hours but i was

so focused

on getting out of my situation

that

these things were just distractions

now drive is the ability to visualize

where you want to be

as if it’s already there and it’s just

up to you to arrive at the location that

you imagined

it’s like crossing the finish line at a

race

enthusiasm

it’s something that you have to be

excited about the journey

and the destination and all of the

things you’re going to learn along the

way discipline is the most

difficult

discipline is a

[Laughter]

it’s like a muscle it’s not natural it’s

always hard

discipline pushes you when drive fails

and

it forces you to do those things that

you don’t want to do first

instead of last

discipline is the solution for

procrastination

optimism

is the biology of hope it’s the seed of

enthusiasm

optimism paints a picture of your goal

and makes it feel real

so i still struggle

but i thrive

with autism

processing disorders

dyslexia and asthma

growing up

i was a handful

but i guess i converted

those struggles to challenges

to create a full hand

and now

i offer my hand

to you

i i know there are going to be a whole

lot of questions from the audience but i

i queued up a few of my own so i hope

that’s okay

what

is the biggest piece of advice you would

give to people who don’t believe in

themselves

i don’t think i i honestly i don’t think

i still don’t believe that i believe in

myself but i believe in my ability to do

things

so i think believing in yourself is too

holistic and broad i know i can make a

business or or do a marathon or whatever

i know i can achieve those things and

that’s how i believe in myself instead

of like broadly

okay i love the ferrari star story you

know that i do um tell me why you felt

like a jerk i mean it’s a ferrari it

sounds pretty cool to most of us to be

able to have one

so when you’re driving around

you know and you drive by somebody who

is

you know you could tell that they’re

just struggling right they’re just

trying to make it and then they look at

you

how can you feel good about yourself

when there are homeless people on the

street and you’re driving a 250 000 car

and even a thousand dollars of that

could change their lives

so

that’s when i shifted any

sort of

motivation i had from

enhancing myself to enhancing others and

trying to to help in my little tiny way

it doesn’t doesn’t seem very tiny to me

um how do we make sure that there’s a

more level playing field in the business

world for people with particular

disorders

that is hard in fact doing this was like

a big thing for me because i’m worried

about the outcome

about people judging me

but

if you try to

judge anybody based on what they’re not

good at

then you’re gonna get a negative

judgment of that person

and if the things that you can’t see are

the things that they’re good at

then maybe you shouldn’t be judging them

at all

you you’ve set challenges for yourself

your whole life

what’s the next one

i want to swim five miles in the open

ocean that’s one of them

and i want to meet the dalai lama

that’s that’s another one i think it was

easier to meet barack obama than it is

the dalai lama

do you have a game plan for that i bet

these things that you they always take a

long time and you just when i’m running

the marathon as an example and this

reminds me of life when you’re running

i ran so slow you guys don’t even

understand like i mean there were

people passing me i mean it was it was

it was embarrassing to say the least but

when when you’re running

that slow it feels like you’re going

nowhere and you look in front of you and

the distance is just forever

but then

if you look right down in front of you

the road is moving really fast

and that’s sort of like the way i think

about achieving things in life and sort

of my metaphor for life it may seem slow

because we’re all looking straight ahead

of us down this long way that we have to

go but if we look directly down

underneath us the road is moving really

fast

and every grain of sand on that road is

a minute

i think it’s good to keep in perspective

that you

you have more time than you think but

you have less moments than you think

oh i think i think that’s a lovely way

for us to

wrap this up greg

i

so appreciate you being as open as

you’ve been with us

and sharing your journey

i think that people have learned a lot

in just a short piece of time um about

your challenges about your gifts

and i for one look forward to reading

your book so i hope it comes out soon

thank you and i hope this helps all

all the other people that are like me

you can do it you can do things

[Music]

thank you greg so much

you