1: Dan Martell looked in his rearview mirror and saw two armed police officers running toward his car.
He glanced at the gun in his duffel bag.
“If I just point it at these cops, they’ll end my miserable life for me,” he recalls in his book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire.
Dan rubbed the sweat from his eyes. “I’d just led them on a high-speed chase and crashed into the side of a house,” he writes. “They’d finally caught up and had every reason to fire on sight.”
He remembers thinking it was the end of the line: “Hopelessness flooded me. Memories of a lifetime of troubled antics. Shoplifting in grade school. Stints in group homes in middle school. Getting booted from high school.”
Several weeks earlier, his mother had found drugs, money, and stolen guns in their home. Dan’s mom, too, had hit her limit. She had called the police.
“But my brother Pierre tipped me off,” Dan remembers, “so instead of waiting around to get arrested, I took the $63 he offered and went on the run, hiding in hunting camps and crashing on friends’ couches.”
After several weeks, he left his small Canadian hometown of Moncton, New Brunswick, and drove to Montreal, where his uncle lived.
“I stole a car and left town—but I didn’t get far,” he writes. “I was on the road only a short time when I hit a random roadblock. Feeding the cops a bogus story about forgetting my driver’s license, as soon as they turned their backs to look up my info in their computer, I gunned the engine and sped away.
“The next few minutes were like a car chase out of a movie: slamming the accelerator, pounding the horn, weaving in and out of traffic—before finally crashing into the side of a house.”
Dan reached out his hand to pick up the gun.
“But it got stuck as I tried to remove it—jammed somehow,” Dan writes. “I yanked and yanked, but it wouldn’t budge. Then the cops yanked me into their cruiser.”
2: Dan received a six-month jail sentence.
“I tried to keep to myself and stay out of trouble, but old habits die hard, and eventually I ended up getting into a fight that landed me in solitary confinement,” he recalls. “Finally, after spending almost seventy-two hours alone in my underwear, Brian, a guard, entered my cell.”
“Come on,” he told Dan, leading him into a side room where he locked the door.
“I looked around at the room,” he writes, “realizing that this was one of the few areas without cameras. My heart was in my throat.”
Brian looked at Dan for several moments. He then said, “Dan, why are you here?”
“Well I got in a fight with Kirk at breakfast—” Dan responded.
“No, I mean, why are you in jail?”
“I stole a car. I ran from the cops—”
“No, Dan,” Brian said. “I’ve been here for almost ten years, and I’ve met a lot of kids. A lot. But I see you trying to do your homework and stay out of trouble. You’re different. It doesn’t make sense to me. You don’t belong here.”
Dan paused as “hot tears came pouring down my face.” Brian said he thought “I was meant for something else.”
3: He writes: “Until that day, I’d only ever heard what a troublemaker I was. But somehow Brian saw potential in me. And his words gave me hope for a better life.”
Dan had always been a bright kid. “I had always shown potential,” he reflects. “I was creative, I was willing to take risks, I was good at talking to people, and I could deal with the chaos around me without losing my cool.”
These skills are foundational to becoming an entrepreneur.
“My next stop proved to be pivotal,” he writes. “Not long after my conversation with Brian, I was sent to Portage, a therapeutic facility for teens. There, my transformation continued. I studied and worked hard at the tasks I was given.
“Along the way, I befriended a maintenance guy, Rick, who became like a big brother to me. One day, I was helping Rick clean out one of the abandoned cabins when I found a book on Java programming sitting next to an old computer. I opened it up, and what I saw shocked me. I had always thought computer programming would look like hieroglyphics, incomprehensible lines of complex math equations.
“But this… this read like plain English. And it spoke to me.”
Dan turned on the computer and typed in the commands written in the book’s first chapter.
“Minutes later, the program ran and these words appeared: ‘Hello World!'”
Looking back, he felt something click inside him: “Here was a way to create a set of instructions that allowed me to get the same reliable and predictable results. Every. Single. Time.
“The predictability of software counteracted the unpredictable chaos I had been living with my whole childhood. From that day forward, writing code became my new addiction.”
Dan focused his skills on starting a business. “In fact, my chaotic childhood proved perfect for the world of self-employment—the unknown just didn’t scare me,” Dan writes.
“I opened my first legitimate business, a vacation rental site called MaritimeVacation, in 1998, when I was just eighteen. At twenty-one, I started my second business, NB Host, a hosting company for Web applications.”
But Dan’s education was just beginning.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What potential lies within me that I might not fully see, and how can I use it to create a better future?
Action: Take a moment today to reflect on my unique strengths and consider how I can channel them into meaningful action.
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