RUSH: Here’s Tom in Newport, Vermont. Great to have you on the program today, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’ve been trying for a long time to get through, and I’m glad that I did. It’s an honor to speak to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I told the call screener in 1993 I was running a small business of my own, my life savings went into it, and due to a series of circumstances, I was failing. But I was listening to you on the radio at the time, and I heard you tell your life story about failing a few times and being fired, and yet you went on to great success. And, frankly, that inspired me to pick myself up and dust myself off and go on. So I’ve been wanting for all these years to thank you for really essentially saving my life.
RUSH: Wow. Well, I appreciate that. I remember 1993 there was something that — I think it was 1993. USA Today ran a series of stories on white-collar people losing their jobs and how that was justified because it was always blue-collar people being laid off, but the phenomenon happened, there were white collar people — executives in other words — who were being laid off or fired and in their forties and fifties when it was gonna be impossible for them to go out and find jobs that paid what they were earning at the time. And so I did a series of shows that week asking some of these people what they were gonna do, and what they had done.
And they said, much like you, that in the end it was a blessing, that it had forced them, they had to, they got laid off, they didn’t have any money coming in. They had to go replace their salaries. They chose to do what they had always wanted to do with their lives but never did because they had to have a job. So they turned their hobby, they turned their real passion for whatever it was into a money-making enterprise. That’s how they reacted to being laid off.
And I remember those shows — there were, I think, three of them that week — received all kinds of accolades because they were inspiring and they were motivating, and they were actual people who had had everything stripped away from them. They had no choice but to go out and become self-starters. And they told their stories and described how they did it, much like you did just here. And I’m happy to be associated with that. I really am. But you did the work. You’re the one that recognized what you had to do, and you did it. So don’t leave yourself out of the equation. I’m happy to have played a role in it, more than you know. But you did the work. So don’t ever leave yourself out.