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