One point that really struck me was the idea to be who you are, and not lie to yourself. Gary said a lot of people don't like his loud, energetic personality. "If I was chilled just a quarter of a percent more, I would be more appealing to people." But that's who he is and he loves being who he is.

I've always been a person who takes strong stances on things, and I'm not afraid to disagree with the masses. I'm not saying I'm always right, I'm often wrong. But I always take pride in making my own decisions and standing by my views. I know I might rub people the wrong way when I do or say certain things, but that's who I am and I won't change for them. But I will listen to them, understand them, and try to win them over.

Gary was a successful businessman even as a kid. He started with lemonade stands, and then moved on to baseball cards and other things. Growing up, I know I was always scheming for ways to make money. Here's one of my earlier memories.

When I was in fifth grade, I started delivering the local newspaper, The Daily Breeze. It was old school paperboy style, on my bike, throwing them as I rode. But I was actually pretty disappointed with how little it paid. The real money was in getting new subscribers. So I would go door to door getting people to sign up.

Turns out I got a pretty hefty chunk of money for each new subscriber I got, so eventually I figured I could give a cut of my bounty to the subscribers to incentivize them to sign up. But eventually I ran out of doors to knock on (I was 10, i couldn't go too far!).

The newspaper increased the bonus for a new subscriber to something like $50 each, and it only cost $5/month to subscribe. So I opened up the white pages, and cold called people, offering free subscriptions for 2 months. There were some embarrassing moments (asked for someone who was deceased), but I learned and got better.

I could close someone in 2 minutes, and I had all their info from the phone book. I paid for 2 months service out of my pocket (didn't even tell the newspaper rep i was doing this), and collected a giant check at the end of each month.

The actual newspaper delivery part of the job sucked, but I had to do to be allowed to sell subscriptions. I made quite a bit of money doing that, probably spent it on a 9600 baud modem and basketball cards :).

My most recent large scale business endeavor was when I found a great deal on Macs and sold them on eBay. I risked over $50k on my credit cards, but ended up making almost $20k in just three weeks. That's a story for another time. :)