RUSH: We’ll go to Katy, Texas. Justin, great to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: And also thank you for the recent support to us Texans. We desperately need it sometimes.
RUSH: Works both ways, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: I wanted to do a quick 180 and ask you a personal question, if that’s okay.
RUSH: Sure. Have at it.
CALLER: I asked Snerdley, and he loved it. His words, not mine, of course. I was wanting to know how did it feel like and how old were you when you made your first million, when you saw those seven figures looking right back at you?
RUSH: Well, it didn’t happen that way, but I’ll try to answer it. Now, here’s my problem with this. My parents told me to never talk about money. Now, I know in this day and age everybody does. Everybody mentions it, either exaggerates, brags, or whatever. I was told not to talk about it, that it’s not very classy to talk about your own financial circumstances.
The way this program started and the way it was financially structured, I was a profit participant, but not an owner. I didn’t have much leverage when we began, and so I’ll just say I got 30% of whatever the net was. But I wasn’t in charge of the net, versus a guarantee of a paltry, compared to what I should have been getting, sum. But it was what I had to do to get started. And for four years the entity didn’t really make enough money for there to be a significant net, for there to be any percentage of.
It wasn’t until the original syndication partner decided to sell his percentage that the leverage I had came into play. So my first million was not a check for a million dollars. It was not a commission. It was an accumulation of years. So there was never one entry into the checkbook, one million, wow, look! It wasn’t that way.
It was hard work. It was a struggle. And now, see, I’m out of time here, and this is a really — there are a bunch of life lessons in this answer, but I’m out of time to give them. I’ll try to remember to go into this next Monday. Because here’s the short answer: Success is nothing like I thought it would be.