what we have to let go of. If you
are stuck, take a good look at your
past to see what has to be cleared.
Still I was anxious to get going. After dinner and opening our gifts, Lisa and I packed up and readied ourselves to make a quick exit. We said our goodbyes, exchanged a few hugs, and headed out into the night.
“Wait! Josh! Hold up!” called my dad, who was running down the front steps with a box in his hand. “I forgot this! I wanted to give you both something.” He reached us and stretched his arm out to hand me the brown cardboard shipping box. I looked quizzically at my dad, then ripped off the tab to open the box, revealing a purple and gold box entitled You Can Choose to Be Rich. A slick, salesy photo of the author, Robert T. Kiyosaki, smiled at me from the cover of this set of audiobook CDs.
With a half-hearted smile, I said, “Thanks, Dad,” and handed the box to Lisa with a subtle eye roll. My dad had a habit of buying his kids things he’d seen on infomercials – useless and overly complex exercise gear, motivational programs, gadgets that didn’t work. He’d get caught up in the excitement of the ad and want to share it with us, but it always seemed to miss the mark. This gift, I thought, would be no different.
My dad read all that in my expression. As if reading my mind, he said, “This guy is different, Josh. You’ll like him. I promise.” Then, after waiting a beat to see if I would come around, he added, “He’s from Hawaii,” as if that tiny connection would seal my interest.
“Okay, Dad, thanks,” I said.
Then, in his deepest, most authoritative voice – the boss voice – he said, “Son, promise me you’ll listen to these, okay?”
I gave him my word that I would, tossed the CD set into the back seat of the car, and we were on our way.
I initially resented the gift and had no intention of listening to it. I fidgeted in my seat for a few minutes, sighing, until Lisa finally broke the stalemate. “Oh, let’s just listen to them already. I know it’s going to bug you until you do.”
So for the entire drive home to Las Vegas, rather than worrying about what lay ahead for me here after my month of clearing my head and beginning to rebuild our marriage, our heads filled instead with thoughts of hope and inspiration, ideas about having better, more fulfilling, more prosperous lives that were in no way connected to drinking, bars, violence, or nightclubs.
Thus began our journey, literally and figuratively. On the drive back to Las Vegas, as we listened to Robert and Kim Kiyosaki share their philosophies about money, life, and learning, we realized that this program was nothing like we’d expected. We assumed that the CDs were just about how we could get rich by buying something from them, or repeating some mantra garbage we’d heard dozens of times before. But, as we began to understand, the Rich Dad message was completely different. It was a life shift, or, as Robert says, a ”context shift.”
Normally, when we traveled, we listened to audiobooks by people like Steven King and Tom Clancy. It was a great way to keep us entertained and make the time pass quickly. But the idea of learning and improving our lives while traveling had never crossed our minds. Continuing education was, in our minds, a concept reserved for people in school, studying for exams. But here we were, in our car, learning far more than either of us had ever learned in a classroom. Entertaining and distracting our minds was a goal we no longer aspired to – we’d had enough of that.
We pulled into our driveway before the program had finished, but instead of turning it off and getting out of the car, we sat there for nearly 25 minutes in the darkened car until it had finished. And afterward, we remained silent, much like that afternoon in 1999, after seeing The Matrix. After watching the movie on that day two years prior, we had both been thinking the same thing – that our lifestyle was unsustainable and unfulfilling. That much we knew. But we hadn’t had the motivation or understanding to make a change.
SIDEBAR:
Life is a journey of learning;
look at the books, shows
and activities that you do.
Are they supporting you
in continuous growth or
hindering you? Is there
something you can add or
change to your daily routine
to keep learning? All the
successful people I know are
always learning something
new that adds value to their
life and those around them.
Now here we were in late 2001, and once again we were both thinking the same thing. Only this time, instead of the painful realization that we were stuck in a matrix of our own making, our realization was one of hope. We actually did have a choice, one that Robert Kiyosaki had just revealed to us.
Our choice was this: We could keep doing what we’d been doing, or we could take a leap of faith. We could embark on a new path, one of personal development and transformation. We had already begun that path while I was in rehab, and had no interest in going back to where we’d started. Returning to our old lives seemed impossible from this new vantage point.
We were squarely at an intersection of two paths that day, and we chose to be rich, like Robert Kiyosaki, and not just in a way that implied money. We wanted to live rich, thoroughly rich, in health, wealth, and happiness. We wanted to do work that mattered, that filled us with satisfaction and joy, one that would bring us together and enable us to continue learning every single day so that we would always feel like we did at that moment in our driveway.
By the time we stepped into our house that night, I had resolved that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, work in my father’s nightclub business anymore. We would create a new life for ourselves, one that would mean assisting others to get through and overcome the painful experience of addiction.
That was the very beginning of Journey Healing Centers. At that moment, we committed to becoming Social Capitalists.
Chapter Thought
If you were to take a leap of faith, to follow your heart, your passion, and your intuition, what could happen? What would the results of this be five years from now? And if you did nothing, what would those results be in five years?
Understanding Social Capitalism
“Indeed, for anyone who has ever said, ‘This isn’t working’ or ‘We can do better!’—for anyone who gets a kick out of challenging the status quo, shaking up the system, or practicing a little entrepreneurial ‘creative destruction’—these are propitious times.”
—David Bornstein, How to Change the World
Perhaps to best define the concept of Social Capitalism, we should turn to one of its pioneers. J. Gregory Dees, adjunct professor and founding faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, is considered an academic leader in the area of social entrepreneurship. In 2006, at a gathering hosted by New Profit Inc., Dees said that the term “social entrepreneur” conveys “this blending of sectors—a mixture of the social purpose we typically associate with nonprofits and the kind of entrepreneurial