I wanted to be a rock star. And I was sure I would make it. I was probably five. The older I got, the more confident I was that I was going to make it.
That’s where it started . . . an unrelenting drive that stayed with me and grew as I grew. I know this lays up the question, “What happened to the rock-star goal?” I’ll get to it. This book isn’t about hitting the bull’s-eye every time. It’s about using every piece of the story to build an extraordinary ride of success, love, risk, and confidence.
At this moment, I’m the CEO of a very hot company that is the first of its kind. We are poised to be the leader of a multibillion-dollar industry simply because I jumped into a pool that wasn’t really on anyone’s radar as a viable business due to the perceived “seasonal” nature of it.
My partners include one of the most influential billionaires in the world, the most powerful entertainment company in the world, a genius hippie who I call the Mayor of Burning Man, a couple of friends who invested in the fetus stages of the concept, and my ex-wife, who I was with for almost ten years. That’s quite a melting pot . . . and the perfect storm.
I’ve experienced great success, great love, great loss, taken enormous risk, rebelled from societal norms, been exiled from family, made a lot of people love me, made a lot of people hate me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The path to get here started the moment I would not entertain any other life course than Rock Star.
The power of choice exhilarated me. I chose not to listen to the rationale of probability being spit at me by my father, teachers, schoolmates, etc. After all, I lived in a small farm town in Connecticut where rock-star level successes weren’t common. And that’s where my divergent path started. I didn’t understand why being “common” was supposed to be the chosen path. After all, we’re talking about choice . . . to do anything in the world. Anything. So, why common?
The concept of making bold choices is what starts extraordinary stories, and it’s the best way to begin your success. Bold choices are scary by their sheer nature, and because of that the majority of the population opts for “common” and thus lives commonly. The smaller percentage of people who choose boldly will either fall harder or soar higher. I will never guarantee you that making bold choices will result in success every time, but I will guarantee you that it’s the only option to living your very best life. And if your choices are rooted in passion, belief, and follow-through, even setbacks or failures will inevitably sling you forward as long as you learn and keep going.
I never said it was easy.
Most people desire financial independence and judge “success” based on that metric. But the harsh truth is that the top 10 percent represents 86 percent of the wealth in America. The top 0.1 percent represents 46 percent of the wealth in America. Whether you think that’s fair or not, that is an extremely small number of people holding the prize. It would be more “common” to be part of the 90 percent or the 99.9 percent not holding the prize. In this instance, it’s easy to see why the societal push to do the “norm” or what’s “common” doesn’t appear attractive. However, I am going to propose that even in the not-so-obvious scenarios, the “choice” should most often (dare I say “always”) be to fall in the 10 or 0.1 percent.
But unless you’re the heir to a fortune, marrying somebody wealthy, or winning the lottery, it isn’t going to be easy. If it were easy, there would be more than this small percentage of the population enjoying this echelon of financial success.
It is not out of your control. You are not a victim of circumstance. You are your choices.
The fear of not making it, not being able to pay bills or afford to send kids to college, even losing social status among peers, keeps us handcuffed to being “common.” But you are not handcuffed. You can jump at any time . . . you can choose to make a bold decision to start an extraordinary path.
I grew up on a farm in a very small town. But before that, my mom and I were on our own after she left my father when I was four. She had nothing, not a roof over our heads, no heat in our car . . . no money. She did have a job.
We moved around weekly to different family members’ houses while she picked up tutoring jobs. She spoke fluent French and figured out how to make extra money using that skill. She could have easily stayed with my father to avoid the financial hardship that leaving caused, but she made the harder choice to leave and choose freedom. Not financial freedom in this case, but another kind of freedom. I watched her struggle and make the harder choices because her quality of life was her priority. Eventually, she fell in love again, and we all moved to a small run-down farm that my mom and soon-to-be stepfather purchased against the advice of everyone around them. Not one person supported their purchase of this farm. It was swampy, haunted; it smelled terrible . . . everything that makes you choose to walk away.
They saw something much different, and even though this property was more than they could afford, they jumped. They spent the next five years working nights and weekends cleaning up the property by hand. As it started looking better and better, those who had warned against the purchase of the farm began to slowly eat their words.
It became the most magical place on earth.
To this day, it’s a sanctuary to people and animals from all over the country and the most beautiful space you could ever imagine. My mother and stepfather have homed senior cows, horses, goats, donkeys, geese, ducks, dogs, feral cats, rabbits, and more for thirty years. The local community visits on “open house” days to interact with the animals and have the visceral experience of farm life. The local high school and college even support internship programs for students who volunteer to work on the farm with the animals. My mom and stepfather have saved the lives of thousands of beings and instilled a program that teaches compassion to the community. My mother has literally become a hometown hero.
Her choices impacted me enormously.
She chose to leave my father when I was only four. She chose to struggle. She chose to work every moment she was awake. She chose more struggle and more work so she could own a run-down property that her family was telling her was a ludicrous move.
She was the definition of “making bold decisions.” And she created the life of her dreams.
So what happened to my dreams of being a rock star?
The answer is probably going to really surprise you.
I went after it, hard. And I started young. My mother got me a guitar when she saw it wasn’t just a phase. I quickly started taking guitar lessons, and off I went with my instrument, making friends with other kids who were also interested in music. By the time I was fifteen, I started my first band called “MuSKAteer” during the time ska bands like No Doubt and Sublime were becoming popular. It was difficult to find players, but I did it and, within two months, I had written an entire set’s worth of songs and booked our first show in Willimantic, Connecticut.
The crowd seemed to like us. But as with many bands, we had personality conflicts and quickly broke up.
My favorite band in the local music scene was a naked punk band called “Sorry Excuse.” And yes, I do mean “naked.” It was a band of three men ages eighteen through twenty-two, and, lucky me, they were auditioning for a lead guitarist. I was a giant fan and incredibly nervous to audition because the thought of being a member of one of my favorite bands sent me over the moon.
Even at this young age, I went after it with everything I had. All the odds were against me as a sixteen-year-old girl who could barely play lead guitar. I learned every song on their albums, forward and backward, and wrote a lead guitar part to all of them before my audition. On a super-cold winter day in Connecticut, I went to my audition in a barn with no heat, freezing hands, and played my ass off.
I got the part. I was now part of the naked punk band, Sorry Excuse.
I went on to play my first show with the band at Barrington College in Vermont. The very last song of the night, called “Touch Butts,” was our cue to show the audience what punk rock was all about, the moment the packed crowd had been waiting for all night . . . the moment we were to get naked.
And we did.
Although, being a sixteen-year-old girl, I got less naked than the boys. Still, while my mother knew I was in the band, she had no idea nudity was involved. After the show, photos started circulating, my mother caught a glimpse of them, and that ended my naked punk-band days. After all, I was still living under her roof. Though I did try to be punk rock, and tell her where she could go with “her roof,” it didn’t really go my way.
I now had two bands under my belt and felt really confident that the third one would be the charm. I was seventeen and had just started dating a girl. My mom was thrilled, as she didn’t have to worry about the things that come along with daughters dating boys. And the girl I was dating happened to be a virtuoso drummer from Berklee College of Music with a virtuoso brother who played the saxophone. This was the start of what became known as “Rudie Brass,” an incredible ska band that grew very popular on the East Coast and began playing shows opening for bands including Creed, Blink 182, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Goldfinger. I was the manager, guitarist, and vocalist of the band, and I managed this group like a business, booking shows almost every weekend, meeting with record labels, and doing anything it took to move us forward.
We stayed together for four years and did really well, but I was nearing the end of my college career and thinking about what was next for me. I had started to become disenchanted with playing music for a living. The members of Rudie Brass also started fighting, and personalities and a divergence of our ultimate goals began to interfere with us going any further. I’ve always said that passion is paramount in any success story, and my passion for this band started to wane, and with that, so did everyone else’s.
My relationship with my girlfriend became rocky and we fell out of love and broke up. It was my first heartbreak and damn did it hurt.
So, I was going to jump.
I had never left the East Coast and insatiably wanted to experience big business and be close to the action of iconic success stories. I was hypnotized by tales of moguls like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, and icons like Clive Davis, Walt Disney, and so many others. People building empires were now the most interesting people on earth to me.
I rejected the internship program of my university because I didn’t see anything that looked exciting to me. Even then, I needed passion in my life. I was able to get my university to accept a new program that I was going to create. I was going to find an internship that exhilarated me and put me exactly where I wanted to be . . . in big business with icons.
I worked for months trying to get in touch with everyone on the list above, and others too. I didn’t care where or how long it took me, I was going to get my dream internship. This was my opportunity to get my foot in the door. And why would I want my foot in the door anywhere that didn’t lead me to my dreams?
And I did it. I got an internship at Arista Records in Beverly Hills, California, working as a junior publicist. I was going to be working for Clive Davis. It felt like the greatest day of my life.
It wasn’t a paid internship either but I didn’t care. I would have paid them for the opportunity, if I’d had the money. I don’t even think paid internships existed back then.
Once I finally regained consciousness and got off the floor, I remembered I had never even left the East Coast. I didn’t know a single person in Los Angeles. Where was I going to live? How would I pay rent? Where would I earn money to eat and pay for life? All these thoughts lasted for thirty seconds, then I thought: Who cares? I’m going into the great unknown and I’m going to be a huge success.
The first day I ever set foot in California was the day I moved there. And because of that, I was very unfamiliar with the area and neighborhoods, and ended up living in an unsafe, high-crime part of town that was known for its gang activity and police corruption. I didn’t have a car so I used public transportation exclusively. I had no money—I needed to work as much as possible when I wasn’t at Arista Records so I put in applications at over sixty businesses. It felt like it was taking too long for any of them to turn into interviews, and I started really getting scared. I’d call home crying because I wasn’t eating. My mom would put whatever she could afford into my bank account, but she couldn’t keep doing that. I’d make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and buy twelve-packs of Coca-Cola, and that’s how I survived. Did I mention I was terrified? My supervisor at Arista could see that I wasn’t eating very often and, on internship days, she would buy me lunch, which was like hitting the lottery for me. Finally, after a ton of follow-up calls, all those applications started hitting at the same time, and I didn’t want to decline any job opportunities to make real money, so I took three jobs in addition to working at Arista.
I’d work at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Larchmont starting at 5:30 am until 2 pm. I’d then grab a bus and go all the way across town to get to my 4 pm shift at Virgin Megastore, which used to be on Sunset Blvd. I’d work there until midnight, at which point I’d walk six blocks down the road and pick up shifts as a cocktail waitress at The Body Shop, a local strip club. The Body Shop paid the best so I wasn’t giving that up. I’d leave by 3 am, get home and sleep for about forty-five minutes, and get back up and do it all over again. This lasted about three months until I landed in the hospital with exhaustion.
I made the choice to jump into an incredibly intimidating world that I had never seen because I believed this was the road to my bold goal. I thought so far outside of the “common” space that my college didn’t even have a protocol for what I wanted to do. So I created it myself.
This decision took me off the Rock Star path and put me on the Building an Empire path. I was twenty years old.
And today as I sit here writing and reflecting on all of it . . .
I have an empire.
Coming off my internship in Los Angeles, I had managed to overcome my previous intimidation about working in large corporate environments with incredibly smart and influential people. The internship also gave me a pretty relentless work ethic and the ability to approach almost anyone, which pushed me to get back to Connecticut, graduate from college, and hit the ground running to start my career. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I was ready. I loved the thrill of achieving and was so inspired by the possibilities. I picked out what I thought was the coolest job in Connecticut, which wasn’t really a hub for the entertainment industry. I found Clear Channel Entertainment and that’s where I wanted it to begin. It wasn’t easy to land that job, but after three months of interviewing and taking assessments and keeping myself at the forefront of their minds by calling and sending notes very regularly, I kind of gave them no choice but to offer me the job. It was the beginning of my born-and-bred corporate American career that would be so influential in teaching me the skill set that I needed a decade later to start Ten Thirty One Productions and live a life of personal freedom and happiness.
The ability to be bold and live extraordinarily started the second you began to make choices for yourself. Have your choices put you on the path to your best life? If your answer is “yes,” congratulations. You are part of the 10 percent. If your answer is “no,” I have really good news for you . . .
Your choices start now.