When somebody close to you dies, you're always devastated. But it's different when you know you could've spent more time talking with them. Getting closer to them.

My friend died two weeks before my birthday this year. He was one of my closest childhood friends. We grew up together for 15 years. We worked together, played sports together, ate meals together.

Yet the last time we spoke was because he accidentally called me. I feel guilty that I didn't talk with him more in recent times.

I wasn't thinking about someone who was constantly caring for me, even when I didn't see it.

I've loved animals for as long as I can remember. Dogs especially.

I've had them throughout my life, and anyone who has ever truly loved a dog knows they're never just a pet. They become part of your routine, your family, your memories. They know when you're happy. They know when something is wrong. They wait for you to come home like you've been gone for a year when you've only been out for twenty minutes.

For years, I kept telling myself I wanted to do more for animals. I didn't know exactly what that meant. I wasn't starting a rescue. I couldn't adopt every dog that needed a home. But I figured I could at least help somehow.

One day in San Diego, I decided I was going to do something simple.

I went to Walmart and started filling my cart.

Dog food. Treats. Blankets. Little dog clothes. Anything I saw that I thought a shelter might be able to use.

Then I filled another cart.

I wasn't thinking about anything profound while I was shopping. I was actually excited. I remember looking at everything packed into my car afterward and feeling good about myself. Not in an arrogant way. I was just happy that instead of saying, One day I should help, I was finally doing something.

I drove to the shelter feeling great.

That feeling lasted until I walked through the door.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw.

There were dogs behind kennel doors everywhere I looked. Big ones. Little ones. Young ones. Old ones.

Some were barking and jumping when people walked past. Others just sat there quietly.

And then there were the ones that simply stared at you.

That's what got me.

I would walk past a kennel and this dog would stand up and come toward the door. For a few seconds, I couldn't stop myself from imagining what was going through its head.

"Is this person here for me?"

Then I'd keep walking.

And the dog would watch me leave.

I made it through a few rows before I couldn't handle it anymore.

I just stood there and started crying.

Not a couple of tears that you quickly wipe away so nobody notices. I mean really crying.

An older woman who worked there saw me and came over. She tried to comfort me and thanked me for bringing all the supplies.

She told me how much donations helped them because shelters depended on people contributing food and other things they constantly needed.

I wanted to answer her normally.

I couldn't.

I went back outside to start unloading my car, still crying.

I put bags of food onto the cart. Crying.

Blankets. Crying.

Treats. Crying.

I pushed the cart back inside. Still crying.

At some point I probably looked ridiculous, but I didn't care.

What had started as one of the happiest things I'd done in a while had become one of the heaviest experiences of my life.

I kept looking at those dogs and wondering how some of them had ended up there.

Maybe someone's circumstances genuinely became impossible. I understand that life can go terribly wrong, and I know not every animal in a shelter got there because someone simply stopped caring.

But I also knew that some of them had.

Somebody once picked that dog.

Maybe they brought it home as a puppy. Took pictures with it. Bought it toys. Gave it a name. Let it sleep beside them. That dog learned the sound of their car pulling into the driveway. It learned their footsteps. It trusted them.

And then one day that person left it somewhere and didn't come back.

The dog doesn't understand mortgages, relationships, moving, inconvenience or whatever explanation a human being has.

It just knows that the person it loved disappeared.

That thought destroyed me.

I remember looking at one dog in particular. I don't even remember what breed he was anymore. I just remember his eyes.

He wasn't barking.

He was sitting toward the front of his kennel looking through the door at me.

I wanted to open every cage.

I wanted to somehow tell all of them, You didn't do anything wrong.

But obviously I couldn't.

I eventually finished unloading everything. The woman thanked me again, and I told her I wished I could do more.

She said something very simple. She told me that what I'd brought "was" doing something. The food would be eaten. The blankets would be used. The treats would make some of their days a little better.

That helped.

But when I got back into my car, I didn't start it immediately.

I sat there for a while.

The car was empty now. A few hours earlier, I'd looked at the back filled with bags and blankets and felt proud and excited.

Now I just felt helpless.

I realized something that day that I've never forgotten.

Helping animals isn't only about being the person who adopts twenty dogs or donates thousands of dollars. Most of us can't do that.

Sometimes it's one bag of food.

One blanket.

A few hours volunteering.

Sharing a shelter dog's picture.

Paying an adoption fee for somebody else.

Fostering one animal until a permanent home can be found.

Or simply choosing to adopt instead of overlooking the animals already waiting for someone.

But there's something else I wish people would understand before they ever bring an animal home.

"Please understand what you're promising."

A dog isn't a Christmas present that becomes inconvenient in March. It isn't something you keep while it's small and cute and surrender when it gets older, sick, expensive or difficult.

You're becoming that animal's world.

You have friends, work, restaurants, vacations, phones and a thousand other things competing for your attention.

Your dog has you.

They know your smell. They recognize your voice. They know when you're supposed to come home. They remember where you sit. They wait at doors for you.

And they don't understand why one day you might decide they're no longer convenient.

If circumstances truly make keeping an animal impossible, do everything you can to find that animal a safe, loving home. Ask family. Ask friends. Contact reputable rescues. Fight for them the way they would fight to stay beside you.

And if you're thinking about getting a pet, ask yourself one question first:

"Am I willing to still love this animal when loving it becomes difficult?"

When it's old.

When the veterinarian bills come.

When you move.

When it ruins something.

When life changes.

Because that's when the promise actually matters.

I went to that shelter in San Diego thinking I was bringing dog food and blankets.

I left realizing that what those animals needed more than anything wasn't sitting in the back of my car.

They needed people who wouldn't leave.

So if you're reading this, please do something for them when you can. Donate. Volunteer. Foster. Adopt. Tell someone else to do the same.

But most importantly, if an animal already trusts you enough to call your home its home, remember what that means.

"You may have many chapters in your life."

To them, you are the whole story...................

When I was ten years old, I heard a Ricky Martin song that made me obsessed with a place I had never seen.

I was one of those kids who felt music physically. A song could change the temperature of a room for me. It could make an ordinary afternoon feel like something was about to happen.

Then I heard "Livin’ la Vida Loca."

There was a part about Rio de Janeiro, dancing in the rain, and I became completely fixated on it.

I ran to my mom and asked her where Rio was.

She found it on a map and showed me. I remember putting my finger on that tiny spot in Brazil and staring at it.

One day, I thought, "I’m going to dance at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro."

Then I went back to being ten.

I forgot about it.

Thirteen years later, I was 23. I had just finished school and gotten my esthetician license. I was bartending while figuring out my next move. My plan was Los Angeles. I wanted to become a special effects makeup artist and work in Hollywood.

LA was supposed to be the beginning of my real life.

Then one night at the bar, a man asked me out.

He was Brazilian.

From Rio de Janeiro.

The childhood memory didn't come rushing back. There was no sign from the universe, no dramatic moment where I connected the dots.

I didn't even think about the song.

We dated for a few months. And somehow, within six months of meeting him, I was emptying my apartment.

I left half my belongings beside the dumpster.

I left my job. My friends. My family. My plans for Los Angeles. Everything I had spent years believing I was supposed to do.

I got on a plane to Brazil.

Even now, I have trouble explaining why.

It wasn't entirely love. There was something else pulling me there. Something almost irrational. My body seemed to make the decision before my brain had time to argue with it.

I landed in São Paulo, and we drove seven hours to Rio.

I had never really traveled before. Now I had moved to another country.

And strangely, I wasn't terrified.

I felt like a little girl.

Everything was unfamiliar—the language, the streets, the food, the people—but instead of making me feel small, it made the world feel enormous.

For the first time in a long time, I was proud of myself.

Then February came.

Carnival.

The city changed.

Music seemed to come from everywhere. Streets closed. People poured outside. There were parties on the beaches and dancing in places that normally belonged to traffic. Rio felt like it had decided sleep was unnecessary.

One day, we were out near the beach with everyone else.

At some point, I wandered away from the group.

I don't remember why.

I just remember suddenly being alone in the middle of thousands of people.

Then it started raining.

Not cold rain. Warm summer rain.

I stopped on the boulevard and looked up.

My hair was soaked. My clothes stuck to me. Music was playing somewhere nearby, and people around me kept dancing as though the rain were part of the celebration.

So I started dancing too.

And that's when I remembered.

The map.

My mother's hand showing me Brazil.

My ten-year-old finger pressed against Rio de Janeiro.

The song.

That little girl making a promise to herself that she had absolutely no idea how to keep.

I was standing inside it.

Thirteen years later, on a boulevard in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, I was dancing in the rain.

I started crying.

Nobody noticed because the rain hid it.

For a few seconds, I felt something I have never been able to properly explain. It wasn't about the man I had followed there. It wasn't about Brazil. It wasn't even really about the song.

It was about me.

Somewhere along the way, without planning it, I had walked directly into a childhood dream.

And instead of making me feel lucky, it made me feel powerful.

Like maybe there were things inside us that knew where we were going long before we did.

The part that hurts is what happened afterward.

I didn't stay inside that feeling.

Slowly, I became afraid.

While I was living in Brazil, I kept thinking about the life I wasn't living in America.

What was happening without me?

Was I falling behind?

Had I ruined my career?

Should I have gone to Los Angeles?

Was everyone else moving forward while I was standing still?

I became so obsessed with the future I thought I was losing that I stopped seeing the life directly in front of me.

I was even offered an opportunity to audition for a modeling contract in Brazil.

I didn't go.

I convinced myself it wouldn't help me back in America.

That decision still bothers me.

Not because I think I would have become some famous model. Maybe nothing would have happened.

I regret it because "I didn't even let life answer the question."

I answered it for myself with fear.

Looking back, I wish I had given Brazil one full year.

One year without worrying about Los Angeles.

One year learning Portuguese properly. Making friends. Understanding the culture. Taking ridiculous opportunities simply because they appeared. Seeing where that strange childhood promise might lead if I stopped trying to control the ending.

I spent so much time worrying that my life was happening somewhere else.

I didn't understand that my life was already happening.

I was standing in it.

Barefoot in the warm rain.

Dancing on a boulevard in Rio de Janeiro.

Exactly where the little girl with her finger on the map said she would be.

I have to say, there isn’t much in life that I regret, but this one hit me hard later in life. It was an act of selfishness that felt like it led to this woman’s demise. Maybe it didn’t, but in my heart, it felt true. It felt like my actions that day could have prevented what I later saw when I randomly crossed paths with her. Seeing her that way felt like a knife through my gut.

It was about five years ago. I used to stop at this bar regularly after work on my commute home from San Diego to Orange County. It was the kind of place where all the local golfers, football fans, and men in town came to drink—or mostly to gawk at the beautiful bartenders. They were all gorgeous, but one in particular had caught my eye. I won’t deny that she was the reason I would stop.

She only worked Thursdays, and that was the only evening she was there. One Thursday, I was sitting at the bar sipping on my Miller Lite when I finally worked up the courage to talk to her. Mostly because I was so shy that I couldn’t say much. We talked briefly, but I had a wife and two kids at home, and I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. I knew I would never be with her, but I wanted her to want me anyway.

That evening, there was a gentleman sitting next to me. I could tell he and her were connecting. He had definitely been there before, and as they started talking, he confessed that he wanted to take her out on a date but was nervous. He was an Air Force captain and very good-looking.

I immediately became jealous and angry as I took another swig of my beer. I wanted to punch him every time she glanced his way. She was sweet, kind, and beautiful, and he seemed attractive and put together. Through the grapevine of customers, I learned that she was single for the first time in a while after a broken relationship had left her scarred. But somehow, she had found interest in this man sitting next to me.

That only made me more jealous.

He told me he was deploying the next day for a month. As we continued talking, she kept glancing over at us, and her eyes kept holding his. I was fuming inside.

Then she walked away for a minute. Another girl stepped in behind the bar and told us that Paige had gone on break.

Paige… what a fantasy.

The man got up, saying he needed to leave. Before he walked out, he took a note from his pocket and handed it to me. He asked if I could please give it to her because she would know who he was. Then he left.

I held the note in my hand, thinking, Fuck that.

When Paige came back from the kitchen, I could see her eyes scanning the room. Then she saw the empty seat where Jack had been sitting next to me and continued working.

I looked down at the paper, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash.

The following week, I came back and learned, to my disappointment, that she had quit. I had no idea where she went or how to find her. She was gone, and so were my frequent Thursday stops after work.

Five years passed.

One day, I was walking out of a grocery store in a town in Orange County when I saw a woman outside. “She looked like she was struggling with drugs.” She must have weighed 80 pounds. I looked at her and realized it was her.

Paige.

She was broken, homeless, and completely messed up. I froze. I could barely breathe. She didn’t even recognize me or glance my way, but I knew it was her. I could still see the small tattoo of a rose on her shoulder.

My heart sank.

Suddenly, my memory took me back to the last time I saw her at that bar. I remembered Jack. The note. The number.

And I remembered that I threw it away.

Maybe if I had given her that note that day, she could have had a chance with that wonderful man. Maybe she would have had a beautiful life—a family, a home, and a different future.

Instead, I threw it in the trash because of my own selfishness.

I felt like I was meant to see her that day—to remember my selfish act and wonder if it had somehow changed the course of her life. I will never forgive myself for what I did that day.

The following day, I went back to see if she was still there because I wanted to help her.

She was gone.

Just like the note I threw in the trash.

The Fastest Back Injury in Medical History

There was this woman at my gym who was unbelievably attractive.

And I don't mean just attractive. I mean the kind of woman who somehow caused every guy in the gym to suddenly need the machine closest to wherever she was working out.

Everybody noticed her.

Nobody talked to her.

Including me.

For weeks, I would see her and think about going over, and then immediately convince myself not to. Finally, one day I thought, What the hell am I scared of? Worst-case scenario, she says no and I spend the next six months avoiding eye contact.

So I walked over.

I don't remember exactly what I said. I'm sure it wasn't nearly as smooth as I imagined it was, but somehow it worked.

And to my surprise, she was incredibly nice.

We talked for a few minutes. I complimented her. She laughed. The conversation actually flowed. Eventually, I asked for her number.

She gave it to me.

I walked away trying to act completely normal while internally I was celebrating like I'd just won a championship.

And I swear I could feel every guy in the gym watching me.

Nobody said anything, but their faces said enough.

"This motherfucker actually did it."

I went home and deliberately waited a couple of hours before texting her because apparently I needed to create the illusion that I hadn't been thinking about her the entire drive home.

She told me she was about to take her puppy for a walk.

I said I'd love to join her.

Now, normally that sounds like a guy using a dog to get closer to a beautiful woman, but I genuinely love dogs. We met up, and within five minutes I was on the ground playing with this puppy like I'd known him my whole life.

She was watching us and smiling.

And I remember thinking:

Oh, the dog loves me.

She loves that the dog loves me.

"Gentlemen, we are making tremendous progress."

But I didn't want to rush things, so I asked her on a proper date.

We went out the next night.

Dinner was great. Conversation was great. Chemistry was great.

Eventually, we ended up back at my apartment.

At this point, I couldn't believe how perfectly everything had gone.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I was just some guy at the gym trying to find the courage to say hello.

Now we were making out in my bedroom.

Things started getting heated.

We moved onto the bed.

Her shirt came off.

Then her bra.

Then her jeans.

And somewhere in the middle of all this...

I smelled something.

I stopped for maybe half a second.

"Sniff."

What the hell is that?

It wasn't overwhelming yet. Just enough for my brain to register that something smelled strangely fishy.

For some reason, my first thought was my neighbor.

"Tuna."

The guy must be making tuna.

Perfectly reasonable explanation.

I told myself to focus.

This was not the time to investigate my neighbor's dinner.

So I continued.

Then her underwear came off.

And suddenly...

BOOM.

Mystery solved.

It wasn't the neighbor.

It wasn't tuna.

The smell was coming directly from "her vagina".

My brain completely stopped working.

I actually froze.

There are moments in life when your entire nervous system makes a decision before your conscious mind has caught up.

This was one of those moments.

My body immediately shut the operation down.

Completely.

I had spent the previous twenty-four hours trying to get to this exact moment, and now every cell in my body was screaming:

ABORT MISSION.

The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to get out of this without humiliating her.

I couldn't exactly sit up and say, "I've conducted an investigation and unfortunately the tuna has been located."

So my brain had maybe three seconds to invent an emergency.

And apparently the best it could come up with was...

My back.

I suddenly threw myself backward onto the mattress.

"AHHHHH!"

She jumped.

"What happened?!"

"My back!"

"What?!"

"My back! Oh my God."

I grabbed my lower back and started rolling slightly from side to side.

This woman went from expecting a romantic evening to apparently witnessing a serious orthopedic emergency in about four seconds.

"Oh my God, are you okay?"

"I don't know. I think I pulled something."

"How?!"

Excellent question.

Apparently taking someone's jeans off had ruptured three discs in my spine.

"I don't know. I moved wrong."

She immediately became concerned.

"Do you need ice?"

"No."

"Do you want me to massage it?"

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

"No, no, don't touch it."

"Should I call someone?"

"No."

"Do you want me to stay?"

And that's when the situation somehow became even worse.

She climbed back onto the bed and said, "It's okay. I'll stay here with you tonight."

My internal voice went into full emergency mode.

TUNA.

TUNA IS STAYING OVER.

I tried to sound like a man bravely suffering through a medical crisis.

"No, honestly. I think I need to be alone."

She looked confused.

"I don't mind staying."

"No, really."

"I can just sleep next to you."

"No."

That one came out a little too quickly.

She stared at me.

I softened it.

"I mean... thank you. That's really sweet. But when my back gets like this, I just need to lie completely still and be alone."

When my back gets like this?

Apparently I now had a history of recurring spinal problems.

She started getting dressed.

I could tell she was embarrassed, confused, and increasingly annoyed.

And honestly, I felt terrible.

But there was no turning back now.

I had committed to the injury.

She finished getting dressed and stood by the door.

"I'll text you tomorrow."

"Absolutely."

She left.

The door closed.

I remained lying perfectly still for about ten seconds in case she'd forgotten something and came back.

Then I sat straight up.

Miraculous recovery.

I started laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

Twenty minutes earlier, I had been congratulating myself on executing the greatest romantic performance of my life.

I approached the girl everybody was afraid to approach.

Got her number.

Won over the puppy.

Got the date.

Got her back to my apartment.

And then, at the finish line, my downstairs neighbor was falsely accused of cooking tuna and I suffered an imaginary spinal injury.

She texted me the next day asking how my back was.

I told her it was still really bad.

At this point, the lie had developed continuity.

She checked on me again a couple of days later.

Still injured.

Then she asked when I was coming back to the gym.

That created another problem.

Because I couldn't exactly tell this woman I'd nearly required an ambulance on Thursday and then have her see me doing deadlifts on Saturday.

So I did the only reasonable thing.

I changed gyms.

For almost a month.

I drove farther away to work out because I had to protect the integrity of a back injury that never happened.

Eventually, the messages stopped.

I still wonder what she thought.

Maybe she genuinely believed I hurt myself.

Maybe she knew exactly what happened.

Maybe she went home and told her friends about the strange guy from the gym whose spine mysteriously collapsed the second her underwear came off.

I'll probably never know.

But I do know one thing.

For several weeks afterward, every time I smelled tuna...

my lower back started hurting.

I spent most of my working life in sales.

And I hated it.

The strange part was that I was good at it. Really good at it.

I knew how to talk to people, build relationships, handle objections and close deals. There were months when I was the top salesperson in the company. My name would be at the top of the board, I'd get congratulated, maybe get an email recognizing me, and for about five minutes I'd feel proud.

Then Monday would come.

Another sales meeting. Another conference call. Another manager asking what I sold yesterday, what I had in the pipeline, what I planned on closing this week and why something hadn't closed already.

I fucking hated those calls.

I'd sit there smiling and giving all the right answers.

"Absolutely."

"I'm on it."

"Should close this week."

"Yes, I'll follow up."

Meanwhile, deep inside, I wanted to push everyone off a ten-story building.

Not literally, obviously.

But anyone who has spent enough years sitting through sales meetings probably understands the feeling.

The managers weren't necessarily bad people. Most of them were just doing their jobs. The problem was that I had never been built for that kind of life.

I've always been someone who wants to do things his own way. I don't like answering to people. I don't like somebody asking me what I did today or telling me what number I need to hit tomorrow.

Yet somehow I had built an entire career around doing exactly that.

Why?

Because the paycheck kept showing up.

That paycheck was dangerous.

It didn't make me happy. It made me comfortable enough to tolerate being unhappy.

And comfort can be a strange prison because the door isn't locked. You're just scared of what might happen if you walk through it.

For years, I'd think about starting something of my own. I'd get excited about an idea, imagine what it would feel like to build something for myself, and then almost immediately start talking myself out of it.

What if it doesn't work?

What if I don't make enough money?

What if I leave my job and regret it?

What if I lose everything?

So I'd convince myself that staying was the responsible thing to do.

Then I'd wake up, put on the same fake smile, join another sales call and repeat the whole thing.

Eventually, I met the person who changed that.

He was an immigrant from Iran with a heavy Persian accent and an attitude toward problems that was almost completely opposite to mine.

His story wasn't some overnight-success bullshit.

He had started his business when he was around twenty years old.

And nothing about his beginning was glamorous.

At one point he was so broke that he lived out of his car for about a month.

When he told me that, I remember thinking about what I would've done in his position.

I probably would have panicked.

He didn't.

He just kept going.

That was the thing about him. The guy was fucking unstoppable.

A problem could happen that would have me thinking about the seventeen different ways everything could go wrong, and he'd barely react.

He had one answer for almost everything.

With that heavy Persian accent, he'd look at me and say:

"WE WILL FIGURE IT OUT."

That was it.

Not a thirty-minute motivational speech.

Not a business seminar.

Not some quote he had read online.

"We will figure it out."

And somehow, he always seemed to.

A year after sleeping in his car, his life looked completely different. He had his own house. Cars. Watches. His business was doing well.

But what impressed me more than the things he owned was the way he moved through life.

He wasn't fearless.

I eventually understood that.

He simply didn't require an answer before taking the first step.

That was completely foreign to me.

I wanted guarantees.

He wanted movement.

We became good friends, and eventually I asked him what exactly he did for work.

He explained his business to me and then casually said something that would end up changing my life.

"I can teach you."

You'd think I jumped at the opportunity.

Of course I didn't.

I immediately became the same scared version of myself I'd been for years.

"I don't know, man. I have a job. I need to make sure I'm making money."

He looked at me like he'd heard this excuse a thousand times.

"Don't worry. Go for it."

Then came the words I would hear from him over and over again.

"We will figure it out."

Eventually, I believed him enough to try.

He gave me his business blueprint.

And I mean that literally. He showed me what he did. He explained what worked, what didn't, how he found business, how things operated, where mistakes were usually made.

There was no jealousy. No hiding information because he was afraid I might become competition.

He opened the book and handed it to me.

I took what he taught me and applied it directly to my own business.

And something happened that I had spent years being too afraid to seriously imagine.

It worked.

Not perfectly.

There were problems.

There were days when something went wrong and I'd call him already halfway into panic mode.

"This happened."

"We will figure it out."

"What if this client doesn't pay?"

"We will figure it out."

"What if I made the wrong decision?"

"We will figure it out."

"What if—"

"We will figure it out."

Sometimes it used to piss me off.

I'd be looking for a detailed answer and this guy would give me the same five words.

But then we'd figure it out.

Every fucking time.

Maybe not the way we'd originally planned. Sometimes the solution cost money. Sometimes it required working harder. Sometimes we had to change direction completely.

But there was always another move.

That's what he was really teaching me.

Problems weren't the end of the road.

They were just the next thing that needed to be handled.

My business kept growing.

Eventually, I started doing better than the guy who had taught me how to do it.

Think about that.

For years, I was afraid I couldn't survive without a paycheck.

Then someone gave me a chance to bet on myself, and I discovered I had been underestimating myself the entire time.

But apparently I still hadn't completely learned the lesson.

Even after the business started doing really well, I was living in the same apartment.

My rent was around $3,200.

One day my friend came over and basically told me I'd outgrown it.

"You need a bigger place."

Immediately, my old brain returned.

"I don't know, man. My rent is pretty low here."

He looked around the apartment.

"Bro. Please. Let's go find you a house."

I started thinking about the money.

Of course I did.

What if business slows down?

What if something happens?

What if I take on too much?

He already knew where my brain was going.

"We will figure it out."

About a month later, I was living in a bigger, better house in a nicer part of Orange County.

My rent went from roughly $3,200 to $6,500.

I remember looking at that number and thinking:

What the fuck did I just do?

Then something interesting happened.

I worked harder.

I started thinking bigger.

The responsibility that I had been afraid would crush me actually pushed me.

I saw what I was capable of doing, and once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

And guess what?

We figured it out.

Again.

I never went back.

Looking back, I realize my friend gave me something far more valuable than a business blueprint.

He changed my relationship with fear.

Before meeting him, I believed successful people somehow knew everything was going to work before they took a chance.

They don't.

Nobody knows.

That's the secret.

You take the step without knowing exactly where your foot is going to land.

Then you deal with what happens next.

And then the next thing.

And the next.

Eventually you look behind you and realize you've traveled farther than the person who stood still waiting for certainty.

I will always be grateful to that crazy Persian immigrant with the heavy accent who refused to let problems impress him.

He taught me business.

He taught me to take chances.

He taught me to believe in myself.

But the lesson that stayed with me most was five words.

"WE WILL FIGURE IT OUT."

I've carried those words with me ever since.

And the older I get, the more I believe them.

I've had things happen since then that scared the hell out of me. I've lost things. I've made mistakes. I've had plans completely fall apart. I've had moments when I genuinely didn't know what I was going to do next.

And somehow, eventually, I figured something out.

Maybe it wasn't the answer I wanted.

Maybe life didn't return what I lost.

Maybe the next chapter looked completely different from the one I had planned.

But there was a next chapter.

That's what I want someone reading this to understand.

I'm not telling you to quit your job tomorrow. I'm not telling you to double your rent because some guy on the internet did it. Taking chances doesn't mean being reckless. People have children, mortgages, medical bills and responsibilities. There are times when being cautious is exactly the right decision.

But don't let fear disguise itself as logic for the rest of your life.

Don't spend ten years saying, "Maybe next year."

Don't automatically assume you're incapable of something simply because you've never done it before.

Don't wait for the moment when you're no longer scared.

That moment might never come.

Sometimes you have to be scared and move anyway.

You might fail.

You might lose money.

You might make a terrible decision.

You might have to start over.

And sometimes life will hit you with something you couldn't possibly have planned for.

When it does, remember something a Persian immigrant who once slept in his car taught me:

You don't need to have every answer today.

You just need enough courage to deal with today.

Tomorrow?

We'll figure that out tomorrow.

I spent years choosing security because I was terrified of saying, "Oh well, I tried and it didn't work."

Now I understand there was another sentence that should have scared me much more:

"What if I had tried?"

So take the chance when the chance makes sense. Believe in yourself enough to find out what you're capable of. Work your ass off. Get knocked down. Adjust. Learn. Try again.

Choose "OH WELL" over "WHAT IF."

Because life is going to go wrong sometimes no matter how carefully you plan it.

And when it does?

I can still hear my friend saying it in that heavy Persian accent like the answer was the most obvious thing in the world:

"WE WILL FIGURE IT OUT."

And somehow...

we always do.

I was flying from Los Angeles to Dubai with my brother on Emirates, and before I continue, I need you to understand the version of me who boarded that airplane. I was confident. Not normal confident either. I mean the kind of confidence where you walk onto a fourteen-hour flight, see what looked like a storm of beautiful flight attendants, and instead of wondering what they're serving for dinner, you think, "This could be the greatest flight of my life."

My brother was apparently traveling to Dubai.

I was apparently entering the Olympics.

Back then I had this theory that economy was where Emirates hid all the younger, newer flight attendants, while business and first had the more senior crews. I have absolutely no idea whether this theory had any basis in reality, but at the time I believed it like I'd personally studied Emirates HR records. Either way, I was in economy, I liked what I saw, and before we'd even taken off I had gone into hunting mode.

The first flight attendant who caught my attention was from the UK. Beautiful, funny, friendly. Naturally, I started ordering things I didn't need just so she'd keep coming back. Water. Coffee. Another water. Something else. At some point I was probably one request away from asking whether Emirates had a screwdriver and a medium-sized houseplant.

Eventually she figured out exactly what I was doing. She'd come over smiling with that look that said, "What does this idiot want now?" We kept talking, I kept flirting, she kept entertaining it, and eventually I asked for her number. A little while later she brought me a cup of coffee with her number written on it.

Gentlemen, at that moment you couldn't tell me shit.

I wasn't sitting in economy anymore. I was sitting on the throne of the British Empire.

What made it worse was that I had already watched other guys try flirting with some of the same flight attendants. I saw the smiles, the little jokes, the attempts to keep conversations going. Nothing. These women were professionals. They had probably heard every line imaginable from Los Angeles to Dubai and back. Some of these poor guys were getting shut down so efficiently they barely realized the conversation was over.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting there drinking coffee with a phone number on it.

This was terrible for my ego.

A normal man would have accepted the victory and gone to sleep. Unfortunately, I have never been accused of knowing when to leave well enough alone.

After midnight, dinner was finished, the cabin was dark and most people were sleeping. That's when my brain produced what I considered at the time to be a brilliant idea: the bathroom. Apparently getting her number somewhere over the Atlantic wasn't enough. I now wanted membership in the Mile High Club.

I went to the bathroom, came back out, found her and told her something was wrong inside. She asked what was wrong. I told her, "I can't explain it. You have to see it."

This should have been the moment Emirates opened an emergency exit and threw me into the ocean.

Instead, she followed me.

She stopped at the bathroom door and asked again what was wrong. I told her to come inside. At this point she obviously knew there was absolutely nothing wrong with that bathroom. She looked left, looked right, saw nobody around and stepped inside.

Then she told me, "I can't be in here for more than thirty seconds."

Thirty seconds?

Lady, you have severely overestimated me.

We started kissing. Things escalated quickly. Then I encountered an obstacle nobody had mentioned in the Mile High Club brochure: her uniform.

Skirt. Stockings. Underwear. Layers upon layers of aviation-grade security.

I'm trying to figure out the logistics while the clock is ticking, and suddenly it becomes obvious that successfully completing this operation would require tools, planning permission and possibly a small construction crew.

She started laughing and told me, "This isn't happening."

I looked at her outfit. She looked at me. I looked back at the outfit.

She was right.

I'd need a chainsaw.

She fixed herself, laughed again and walked out, leaving me standing in an Emirates bathroom like a man whose Mile High Club application had just been denied because he failed to bring the required documentation.

I returned to my seat. My brother looked at me. I said nothing.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn't.

Because on a flight that long, crews rotate. A few hours later, another crew appeared, and somewhere inside my deeply malfunctioning brain a voice whispered, "New game."

Another beautiful flight attendant. Another conversation. More flirting. Eventually, another number.

This time I had learned one important lesson: stay away from the bathroom.

Later I caught her during a quiet moment near the curtained galley area. We started kissing and went at it for maybe twenty seconds before she pushed me away, smiling, and told me to go back to my seat.

I walked back like I'd just successfully negotiated an international peace treaty.

My brother had finally had enough.

"What the FUCK is wrong with you?"

I started laughing.

"Relax, bro."

"RELAX? YOU ARE WILD."

By the time we landed in Dubai, I had somehow collected five flight attendants' numbers.

And one passenger's.

Six numbers. One flight. Economy.

And remember, I'd watched other men trying their luck during that same flight. They were throwing out lines, making conversation, trying to get that extra smile. Nothing. Some couldn't get thirty seconds of attention from women I'd been talking to throughout the flight. Every time another guy struck out, my already dangerously inflated ego gained another ten PSI.

By the time the wheels touched down in Dubai, my ego needed its own passport.

I stepped off that aircraft feeling like I'd personally conquered a small country. My brother stepped off looking like he'd spent fourteen hours supervising a dangerous zoo animal.

And the funniest part was what happened inside my head afterward. Instead of thinking, "That was ridiculous. Maybe I should calm down," I thought:

"If I can do this in economy... imagine what I can do in business class."

That thought should have been medically evaluated.

Eventually, I did fly business class.

I'm going to leave what happened on that flight for another story because, frankly, some things are better left anonymous. Let's just say my theory was thoroughly tested.

For years I genuinely believed that first Emirates flight proved I possessed some extraordinary international level of game unavailable to ordinary men. Five flight attendants. One passenger. Los Angeles to Dubai. I was basically the Muhammad Ali of unnecessary flirting.

Looking back now, I'm slightly less convinced.

Maybe I had game. Maybe they thought I was funny. Maybe fourteen hours trapped inside an aluminum tube simply lowered everybody's standards.

I don't know.

What I do know is that while hundreds of perfectly normal passengers were peacefully sleeping underneath their little Emirates blankets, my brother was sitting beside a grown man who had somehow convinced himself that an economy ticket was an all-inclusive singles resort.

And honestly, the real hero of this story was him.

Because he had fourteen hours to smother me with one of those tiny airplane pillows.

And somehow, he showed restraint.

Growing up in India, my brother and I had a system.

Whenever our parents went out of town, there were certain things we knew we could get away with.

Stay up late. Eat whatever we wanted. Have friends over.

And occasionally, when we could get our hands on one, watch an adult movie we absolutely were not supposed to be watching.

My brother was much more committed to this activity than I was.

I'll leave it at that.

We were young, just getting to the age where girls had suddenly become interesting and none of us really knew anything about anything. Watching an adult movie felt like we were doing something incredibly dangerous.

There was no internet in our house. No smartphones. No private screens.

There was one television in the family room and a VCR.

So this required planning.

You needed the tape.

You needed the house empty.

You needed enough time.

And most importantly, when you were finished, you needed to remove the evidence.

That last part turned out to be important.

One time, our parents went out of town for two days. At some point while they were gone, my brother watched one of those adult movies. Then he forgot about it.

The tape stayed inside the VCR.

Our parents came home two days later, and somehow neither of us remembered it was still there.

My dad came home, took a shower, ate, and eventually settled into his normal routine.

He wanted to watch the news. My brother and I were somewhere nearby, completely relaxed. As far as we were concerned, we had gotten away with everything.

My dad picked up the remote.

Our VCR had this feature where if you pressed a certain button, it would switch over and automatically start playing whatever tape was inside.

I don't remember which button my father pressed.

I just remember the television changing.

And suddenly, the adult movie my brother had been watching two days earlier was playing right there on the family television.

Nobody moved.

My dad stared at the TV.

I looked at my brother.

My brother looked at me.

I don't think either of us had ever turned that pale before.

My father switched it off immediately.

Silence.

There are moments in childhood when nobody needs to explain what's about to happen. This was one of them.

My mother understood the situation almost immediately.

She looked at my father. She looked at us.

And then, very wisely, she got up and walked out of the room.

To this day, I respect that decision.

My father turned toward us. There was no point lying.

No investigation was necessary.

No blaming our friends.

No pretending we didn't know how the tape got there.

We knew.

He knew.

And he knew that we knew.

My brother and I received what I can comfortably describe as one of the greatest ass-whoopings of our childhood.

My father loved us more than he loved himself, but when it came time to reprimand us, he didn't hold back.

That evening, however, it wasn't funny.

The embarrassment was almost worse than the punishment.

I couldn't look at my father. I couldn't look at my brother. I definitely couldn't look at the television.

A few days later, we made the mistake of telling our friends what had happened.

For days, we laughed until our stomachs hurt.

Someone would pretend to pick up a remote and we'd lose it.

Someone would ask, "Did your dad get to watch the news?"

That was enough to start everyone laughing again.

And naturally, my brother tried to defend himself.

"It could've happened to anybody."

No. It couldn't. You had one job.

Take the tape out of the VCR.

I'm 45 now, and somehow that stupid little moment is still perfectly clear in my head.

My brother's face.

My mother's perfectly timed exit.

My father standing there with the remote.

And the instant realization that our lives were about to become very unpleasant.

As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate my father in ways I couldn't when I was a kid. He loved us fiercely, but he also believed it was his responsibility to correct us when we crossed a line.

I didn't always appreciate that then. I do now.

Some childhood memories are important because they teach you something.

Some are important because they remind you how much your parents loved you.

And some survive for decades simply because they're too damn funny to forget.

Dad, I love you. Thank you for being the father you were to us.

And after all these years, I have only one thing left to say in my defense:

"It was my brother's tape."

The last conversation I ever had with my father ended with me hanging up on him.

I've replayed that moment in my head thousands of times over the last fourteen years, searching for a version where I handled it differently. There isn't one. Reality is stubborn like that.

At the time, I was thirty-two years old and convinced the world revolved around my career. I had just been promoted to regional sales manager, worked twelve-hour days, answered emails during dinner, and believed every missed call was an interruption instead of an opportunity to connect with the people who loved me.

My father never understood any of it. He grew up believing work ended when you walked through your front door. Family came first. Phones stayed in your pocket at the dinner table. Sundays were sacred.

We argued about it constantly. Every time he called during work, I'd answer with the same frustrated tone.

"Dad, I'm busy." He'd always laugh. "I know you're busy. I just wanted to hear your voice."

Back then, I thought he was being needy. Today, I'd give anything to hear his.

One Thursday afternoon, my phone rang while I was sitting in the middle of a meeting with a client I'd spent months trying to land.

Dad.

I declined the call. A minute later he called again. I declined it again. Then he called a third time.

Embarrassed and irritated, I excused myself from the meeting and answered.

"What is so important that you have to call three times?" There was a long silence. "I just wanted to tell you something." I sighed loudly. "Dad, can this wait? I'm working." Another pause. "I suppose it can." "I'll call you tonight." "Okay, son." Before he hung up, he quietly said something I barely noticed. "I love you." Without thinking, I replied, "Yeah... love you too."

Then I ended the call before he could say anything else. I never called him that night. Work ran late. Then I met a colleague for dinner. By the time I got home, it was almost midnight. I figured I'd call him tomorrow. Tomorrow never came.

At 5:17 the next morning, my sister called. Dad had suffered a massive heart attack while watering the plants in his backyard. He was gone before the ambulance arrived. For weeks after the funeral, I couldn't stop wondering what he had wanted to tell me.

Maybe it was something important. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe he just wanted to hear my voice one more time. I'll never know.

About six months later, my mother handed me an envelope she'd found in his desk. Inside was a birthday card.

My birthday wasn't for another three weeks. He had already bought it. Already written it. Already signed it.

The message inside was only one sentence. "No matter how old you get, hearing your voice is still my favorite part of the day."

I broke down in my mother's kitchen. Not because he was gone. But because I finally understood why he kept calling.

He wasn't lonely. He wasn't bored. He simply loved his son. And his son was always too busy.

These days, when my phone rings and I see my mother's name, I answer every single time. If my wife calls, I answer. If my brother calls, I answer.

Meetings can wait. Emails can wait. Almost everything can wait. People can't.

If you're reading this and someone you love has called you today, call them back. Not tomorrow. Not after dinner. Not when work slows down. Right now.

Because the greatest regret of my life isn't that I missed one phone call. It's that I spent years believing I'd always have another chance.