The first time I went through college, I thought I'd done pretty well with girls: I wasn't the best-looking guy on the small private campus but I was nothing you'd be embarrassed to have on your arm or explain to your girlfriends. I was smart - had a full-ride engineering scholarship to prove it - liked talking to and, more important, listening to women, and I was funny enough to keep them laughing. At 6'2", I was the "right height" according to most of the girls I talked into my bed, and I learned that shorter, smaller girls - under 5'4" - found my height a real attraction, as did really tall girls, who liked the novelty of kissing up instead of down. In retrospect, I don't think I had more than a handful of girls between 5'6" and 5'10" in four years. Swapping my glasses for contact lenses and taking some much-needed advice on dressing from a stylish female friend didn't hurt either.
I started off like every other freshman: chasing anything with a pussy and a pulse. I thought that my inability to hold my drink would be a huge disadvantage (I've known I was a lightweight when it came to alcohol since I was 14) but the opposite proved to be true. I cut back my intake to levels I could manage and soon found that the most sober man in the room at midnight is the one most likely to wake up with company. Freshman year taught me two things: I preferred girls who were a little bit slutty - maybe only slutty for the night because they were drunk or coked up - and I definitely liked making girls perform for me. There's something compelling about the excited look in a girl's eye when she accepts a dare or a challenge - especially when the dare turned her on. It's as though she's revealing some inner side of her character, some flash of a hidden personality when her desire to prove herself trumps her better judgement. I got lapdances, I had girls call their fathers for a catch-up while I fingered them, I made them play with themselves in my car while driving them to movies or dinner.
By my senior year, I considered myself a sexual veteran who could talk almost any girl into almost anything. I couldn't count the number of times a blushing girl, thinking back over what I'd persuaded her to do for me, had said: "James, you are just plain dangerous." I had no idea that I was only taking the first steps in what I was to become.
I was lucky enough to get a summer job at a local steel company. Although the scholarship kept me well from September to May, I wasn't from a rich family and earning summer money was an absolute requirement. The company was run by a man in his late fifties - Jack - who knew all too well that cheap labour from Asia and South America was going to make life impossible for companies that couldn't find and defend a niche. His firm made small volumes of specialty steels - many of them for start-up companies spun out of local universities - and he hired me to be a dogsbody in the company's skunkworks. We used a motley collection of reconditioned kilns and lab equipment to produce metals by the ounce that the company's experienced steelworkers would then figure out how to make by the ton. I took to it like a duck to water: by the end of that first summer, I was signed up for every course on metallurgy my college would teach me (and had persuaded the head of the materials science department to let me take extension courses at a big public university an hour down the highway.)
In the summer of my junior year, I stumbled into my first big piece of luck. Jack was now letting me try some experiments of my own in the lab, trying to come up with something new and different we might be able to offer customers. With a lot of patient help from the company's roughhouse crew of steelworkers, I fluked a discovery that turned out to be very profitable: a cheaper recipe for the steel in pressurised cans. Trust me when I tell you the details will put you to sleep. Trust me again when I tell you that if you can shave a tenth of a cent off the price of every can in the world, you're going to make a lot of money.
Jack's lawyers drove the patent through at light speed, buyers were forming a queue at the door, my name was (very generously) listed as co-inventor, and the cut Jack gave me of the upfront licensing payments meant that, on the day I graduated, I was able to write the college a cheque for the four years' worth of scholarships they'd given me. Plus a little extra for a pool table in the engineering lounge.
There might have been a few broken currencies in the world in which I was a millionaire - certainly not even close in dollars - but I had more money in my bank account than I'd ever known and felt like I'd won the lottery. That was the day Jack decided to retire. He called me into his office the day after my last exam and made me a proposition that changed my life.
"You're a good kid, James. You're responsible, you work hard, you've made the most of your talent and I'm glad you're going to see some reward for it."
"Thanks, Jack" I replied. "I can't tell you how grateful I am for the opportunities you've given me here. And for making a company that's such a great place to work."
He smiled and said: "It is a great place and you've added to that. Everybody likes you, from the secretaries to the shopfloor guys, and you get a lot of respect for your knowledge, even at your age. It's that, and the fact that I think you can continue the good work, that I want to talk to you about."
Then he dropped the bombshell: "I turn 60 next month and I want to retire. I don't have a child of my own to take over for me and I want to see the world and have some fun while I'm still young enough to get the most out of it. I want to know if you'd be interested in buying me out and running the company."
I couldn't answer. I was stunned and sat in front of him with the same expression I might have used if he'd asked me to marry him.
He laughed: "Ok, so it's not an idea that already occurred to you."
He laid out the details of his plan to me. I'd take on the role of general manager, while he remained as chairman of the company, I'd forego my royalties from the can steel and use that and any excess profits I generated to buy out his equity, he'd mentor me as I learned how to be a manager, and he'd introduce me to the innumerable industry contacts he'd made over 35 years in the business.
I must have still looked stunned because he smiled at me and said: "I was 24 when I started this company and I probably knew less about steel than you do now. You'll be what, 22 next month? You're young, but I think you can do this and, if it works out well, it might be the smartest thing either of us have ever done."
My brain was overloaded trying to process the opportunity, so I know it was my gut that answered him: "I'd love to. Absolutely. Let's do it."
When I was six years old, at a classmate's birthday party, an older kid, maybe ten or so, pushed me into the deep end of the pool. I had begun learning how to swim but I wasn't at all confident about deep water yet and I panicked. I went under, breathed water, thrashed my way to the bottom and was fished out by one of the adults. I sat by the edge of the pool, sobbing, choking, humiliated, snot and pool water dripping out of my nose, while another parent brought the kid who'd pushed me around to apologise. I could see in his eye that he'd been given one hell of a lecture and was thoroughly cowed by the parents glaring at him. I also knew he was a bully and a prick and would soon be laughing at me with his friends. He apologised, I stood up and broke his nose (and one of my fingers) with one punch. That anecdote very accurately summarises the mood of my first month as general manager.
Every relationship I had in the company changed for the worse, and I was too young and inexperienced to see it coming. Everyone wanted to find the limits of my authority, challenging every decision I made, running to Jack behind my back, even talking me down to some of our customers and suppliers. Jack did his best for me, using his moral authority and long relationships to calm tempers and smooth a path for me, but it was a brutal introduction to life as a manager. Every conversation seemed to end with shouts - some of the worst ones with insults - and every decision I made became the start of another debate. I don't think I slept more than four hours a night. I left work every day upset, hoarse from arguing and half-hoping Jack would call me in to say it wasn't working out and he'd let me out of our deal.
The turning point, for me at least, came in the aftermath of a screaming match with a group of shopfloor steelmen. Crowded into a tiny conference room, we were bellowing at each other over a stupid, avoidable communications error that had completely screwed up an important order for a valued client. As the temperature in the room rose and we glared at each other over crossed arms and pointing fingers, I realised I was afraid. Afraid I couldn't do the job, afraid these men would lose all respect for me, afraid I would let both Jack and myself down, and, surprisingly, I felt physically intimidated. Steelmen, from their twenties to their sixties, are built for strength, not speed. Each of the men in that room looked as though he could juggle beer kegs, and they all had barrel chests, massive thighs and forearms the size of hams. They made me feel weak, not only physically but, given the number of problems I was having at work, in just about every other way as well. For some reason, the instinct to fight - the one that had broken that ten year old's nose so many years ago - disappeared with the realisation that fighting wasn't going to work. I swallowed hard, told them I could see their point, and said we'd solve the problem in the morning.
It was barely four in the afternoon and I walked straight from that meeting room to my car - probably the first time I'd left before 10:30 since Jack named me as his heir. I drove straight to my old college gym, flashed an expired ID at the attendant, changed into some old basketball kit I had lying in my car, and went to work. Other than the odd morning run to prove I wasn't a total slob, I hadn't done any exercise more serious than the odd pick-up hoops game or drunken softball outing since leaving high school. But I stayed there for 90 minutes, misusing equipment I'd never seen before, struggling with weights I could barely lift, pulling muscles and sweating like I was about to die.
After a long shower with nothing more on my mind that how much I hurt, I could barely walk to my car. But I felt virtuous and somehow relieved, so I bought a huge salad and some smoked fish for dinner on the way home instead of the usual hamburger or pizza. For the first time in weeks, I slept like a log. Ten hours later, I woke up refreshed and, despite some excruciatingly stiff muscles, relaxed.
I went to work, called in the same six steelmen to the same conference room I'd been screaming in the day before and said: "I'm sorry. I fucked up once when I let the order details get screwed up and I fucked up worse when I started yelling at the only guys likely to be able to think of a way out of the problem. Can you guys get us out of this hole, because I don't know how?"
Hesitantly, and making sure I could see they still nursed a grudge, they offered some ideas. I genuinely had no clue what to do so I asked them which option they thought was most likely to work. Within ten minutes, they had a solid plan to fix the order. They even had ideas about how to recycle the half-ton of scrap we'd accidentally produced and one had volunteered to go out with the salesman whose order we'd screwed up and find some things we could do for the client to help oil the waters. I told them to go for it and they filed out, happier, but I knew I was still on the shit list.
