Jason Zook
You know that idea you had? The one that seemed like it could really make a difference in your life. Then, over a period of time, you convince yourself that it will never work. Why do we do this? Well, one day Jason Zook decided to be a force of nature. He took one of his crazy ideas and decided to launch a company where he was paid to wear t-shirts. And it worked…eventually. Because he did the work. He contacted everyone he knew. And hustled. And after months of not quitting, he got traction. Eventually IWearYourShirt made over a million dollars in revenue. Then he shut it down and forced another crazy idea to work. So why aren't you doing your idea again?
Announcer:
Welcome to The Bureau Briefing, a podcast by the Bureau of Digital, an organization devoted to giving digital professionals the support system they never had. Each episode we're going to talk to a member of our community doing awesome, inspiring things. Now for your host, Carl Smith.
Carl Smith:
Hey everybody and welcome back to The Bureau Briefing. With us today, we have a serial entrepreneur. This guy succeeds where other people say, "That shit ain't going to work." It's a good friend of mine who I haven't seen in years, Mr. Jason Zook. How's it going Jason?
Jason Zook:
Hey Carl. Thanks for having me. By the way, I was just thinking, we've known each other for quite a while.
Carl Smith:
We have, yeah.
Jason Zook:
Like, I think even back to like 2006, like before, like right when my entrepreneurial journey started, before all the weird stuff. That was just I co-owned a design firm with Dennis Eusebio and we met you through nGen Works being so crazy awesome and we were like, "Oh, you guys are amazing." You had little meetups that you guys did, and I remember that, as we started talking, like that's a long time ago on the internet.
Carl Smith:
It was a long time ago. You know, the reasons those meetups were so popular, we learned it from Bugs Bunny, right? It's free beer. If you put a sign up that says, "Free beer," suddenly you're really popular.
Jason Zook:
Everyone shows up and they're like, "What's going on? This has got to be cool." Now everyone does their free beer thing, though.
Carl Smith:
Yeah, you know. Free beer in the office and Foosball. That's why we shut down. Free beer competition.
Jason Zook:
Yeah, yeah. That's what you had to do.
Carl Smith:
It was too much. Now, for those that don't know, and we don't have to get into the whole story because there's like 1000 people who've interviewed you about this, but you decided one day that you were going to wear t-shirts of brands and get them to pay you for it. I mean, this is just one of those things. For me, it's like one in a long line of ideas that you had where I'd be like, "Dude, get a job."
Jason Zook:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Carl Smith:
But then it worked. Talk about that just a little bit.
Jason Zook:
Yeah. That design company that I had was going swimmingly well. I mean, we were getting to our I think it was our second year quarter of a million dollars in revenue, which was fantastic. We were three people.
Carl Smith:
That's amazing.
Jason Zook:
Yeah, it was great. We started from literally nothing. Everything was going fine. Like, I shouldn't have changed my course but I just, this entrepreneurial itch was nagging at me to do my own thing. Thought & Theory wasn't my own thing. I was a part of someone else's, and a lot of our clients had been asking us about social media so this is 2007. Like, we're going back in the time machine here, so Twitter wasn't very big at all. Like, you were just, it was you and Jack Dorsey. That was it. You, me, and Jack Dorsey were the only people talking about the [inaudible 00:02:20] we were making.
Facebook was closed, so you had to have a college address to even use it. I didn't even have an account. I just saw all these things and our clients were asking me about them and I was like, "Oh, this is interesting. I wonder if someone could be the voice of these companies on social media, interacting with these few people that are here." I mean, there were a lot of people but at the time, not a lot. One day I woke up and I was standing in my closet and I was looking at all these shirts that had all these other company's logos on them, that I felt like an idiot at that moment going, "Why am I wearing this company's logo every day and I paid them? This is ridiculous. This could be the avenue."
So yeah, I mean, I had a web design company behind me that could easily churn out an awesome website, build out this calendar which is how I sold the first year, and came up with this unique pricing structure of a dollar on the first day, $2 on the second day, $3 on the third day, which I now just coined, called Bumpsale, and yeah, I mean, it took off. No one bought on the first day, 12 people showed up on the website. My hopes and dreams were completely crushed in the first 24 hours, and I was an overnight success.
I was set from there, Carl. Robin Leach was calling, and just all the interviews of all the top [crosstalk 00:03:31].
Carl Smith:
Oh, wow. You are showing your age, sir.
Jason Zook:
That's true, yeah. I don't know. You get it, so that's all I care about.
Carl Smith:
That's all that matters.
Jason Zook:
Yeah, so really then this has been the repetitive path now with all of my crazy ideas since then, is then I just hunkered down and did the work. And the work is the unsexy stuff that people glaze over when you start talking about it, but it's emailing all my friends and family, and not pitching them to buy but just saying, "Hey Carl, do you know anybody that would maybe care about this crazy idea?" A lot of people don't write back, they don't care, they don't know anybody, but a few people started to recommend some people. A few people started to say, "Yeah, this is kind of neat." A few people started to buy, and low and behold, a couple months into that idea launching, I had sold six months of that first year of I Wear Your Shirt, and now I had this thing ahead of me that I didn't even know what it would be, and I had to wear all these shirts every day.
The idea is I would promote a company, make a YouTube video, host a live video show, talk to people on social media and just talk about my weird life, and I thought maybe people would watch. Went from 12 people not that first day, which by the way, was like Dennis, my co-founder of the design company, our developer Jeff, my mom, my grandmother, my girlfriend at the time, me on like four different browsers.
Carl Smith:
I'm not even going to claim to have swung by.
Jason Zook:
No. You weren't there. You weren't there on day one. No one was. My grandmother was. But yeah, so it was 12 people on that first day and then halfway through the first year in 2009 when this started, 10,000 people were showing up every day-
Carl Smith:
Wow.
Jason Zook:
... for some reason, to look at what shirt I was wearing, and that was kind of the moment I knew like, "Wow, I actually did one of those ideas when people go, 'I wish I'd thought of that' or like, 'Oh, why didn't I think of that?'" I had one of those on my hand, kind of like Million Dollar Homepage or any of these other things. Yeah, it was a really crazy experience. The long and short of it is that it did over a million dollars in revenue. I scaled the company up to eight people by the third year. I worked with a bunch of Fortune 20 brands, not even Fortune 100, and just worked with so many awesome people and just told so many cool stories every day.
But I really ran myself ragged by doing this. I got myself into debt because I had no clue how to run a business. I didn't even understand payroll and things. The calendar pricing was great, but imagine the first couple months of the year. It's pretty lean on income. What wasn't lean was the salaries that I was paying people to also wear shirts for me and run this business. Yeah, I got into some debt and after five years, I actually shut it down when it was still making money, but I just realized it wasn't sustainable. It grabbed its moment in time, it was time for me to just do something else and not just be a one trick pony and then go get a job in marketing for some other company, to really see like you said, to open this could I be a serial entrepreneur and come up with other ideas and do other things?
Carl Smith:
And I think that's, the key is knowing when to shift, right?
Jason Zook:
Yeah.
Carl Smith:
When to let the great idea that you had die. Or, you know, put it gently to rest. It doesn't have to be a cruel, cruel death, but I always thought the calendar was the great idea. It's like, the shirt was the execution.
Jason Zook:
For sure.
Carl Smith:
The other thing is, and the way you described it, and I think this is true of all of your endeavors, the real product is not even you. It's you as a force of nature. Like, refusing to let that idea not work. That was the thing that always impressed me. I never told you because I didn't want you to get like a big head and all that crap, but no, and so I remember having a conversation with Ze Frank, this would have been two or three years into when he was doing his show. He just said, "You know what? I hate that show."
Jason Zook:
Yep, yep, yep.
Carl Smith:
I was like, "What?" He was like, "It's three minutes every day. It doesn't matter if I'm hungover or I'm sick, or I'm just in a bad mood. It's like I have to do that and if I don't do it, it's not" ... Then later he realized it wasn't the show. It was him. You had the same thing. Now, the book, right? You decide after shutting down I Wear Your Shirt that you're going to write a book and you're going to have an ad on every page, and you did it. I mean, we were sitting at the biscuit place here in town, right?
Jason Zook:
Yep. Maple Street.
Carl Smith:
There you go, yep. I live here and you're in San Diego now and I still don't know the name of the damn place. We sat there and you were telling me and I was like, "Well, it goes against all of my instincts, so congratulations, you've got another hit on your hands."
Jason Zook:
You mentioned, I mean a great phrase, which is a force of nature, right? Like, I made those sponsorships happen by sending almost 3000 emails. Literally I counted. I kept track because I wanted to know. I didn't keep track during I Wear Your Shirt, and I wish I had because I'm sure I Wear Your Shirt I sent 20,000 emails, no joke. That was me pitching companies whether I'd worked with them or not, or people emailing me because they heard about this crazy idea of getting a book sponsored and every page having a little blurb on the bottom.
I had to do the work. Like, I had to show up. It wasn't just create this beautiful website which the website was great, and have this cool idea where you could sponsor pages in a book and get your message in there. All of that stuff is good, but if you're not promoting it, if you're not putting it in front of people, people aren't just going to throw money at you because you have a good idea. Like, that doesn't actually happen and if it does, it's an extremely rare care when someone who has a track record where people are then willing to continue to support them, which I kind of have earned a little bit, but even still, it still takes a lot of work to do that.
Yeah, pulling that book off was a sheer force of nature. It took five months to land all 204 of those sponsors. I earned every bit of the $75,000 that I made before ever writing a single word for that book because-
Carl Smith:
That's the thing, man. You didn't have a book.
Jason Zook:
I didn't have anything.
Carl Smith:
"Pay me while I'm writing the book if you don't mind." Because I've got friends ... Okay, I know some people, they're not necessarily friends, but they've got books. They don't make money off the book. They get invited to speak because of the book or they might get a higher hourly rate or whatever because of the book, but you got paid before you wrote the book.
Jason Zook:
Yeah. Well, [crosstalk 00:09:47].
Carl Smith:
[crosstalk 00:09:48] like you. I think I like you, but I'm not sure.
Jason Zook:
I'll make you even more angry. This past year, so I'm working on my second book. It's actually pretty much completely written. I would say it is completely written but no book is ever really finished until it's published. I came up with this idea that I wanted to write the book publicly. I wanted to do what no author wants to do which is just share my shitty first draft and just write, but I didn't want to just do it in a Google doc. I didn't want to do it on Medium because I'd done a journal thing like that before, so I had a developer whip up this basically live editor where you could watch me write.
Carl Smith:
Oh, [00:10:23].
Jason Zook:
That was the site. It was WatchMeWrite.co. There was a little chat on the right that I couldn't see while I was writing. That was very intentional.
Carl Smith:
Oh, man.
Jason Zook:
For two weeks, because that's how long it took me to write my first draft of the first book, I just showed up and I wrote every day for hours, and then I would check in on the chat and thousands of people watched. I had a bunch of donations-
Carl Smith:
[crosstalk 00:10:42].
Jason Zook:
... and I made $20,000 with sponsorships for people just watching me write the first draft of the book. Now, not a lot of people have the balls to do that. A lot of people are afraid to show their ugly duckling version of the thing they're working on, but we all have that. That gives a lot of people this whole new trust factor that they can't get when you just show them the finished, shiny product. Here's the thing. Let's keep going on this crazy book. The book is going to be titled, "Do It Differently."
It's the second chapter of my life as an entrepreneur, with all the things I've learned, all the lessons, all the stories, and what I want to do now, so later this year, this is the first place I've actually talked about this, is I want to create the site that's like a call out to book publishers saying, "Here is my book, here is what the book is about. It's completely finished. You can't touch it, you can't change it, but you can give me a check to own a part of it and then you can have it under your publishing house." While that sounds like just a douche move, it just sounds like, "Why would anybody do that?" It's a great story for that publisher because that publisher now gets the notoriety of like, "Why would you do this?"
But you're getting someone who has an established track record of making these things happen and work, and I know this book is going to do decently because my first book sold somewhere around 20,000 total copies so far and that was just like it just did. Now I actually know what I'm doing, I'm a better writer, I have a lot more stories, I have a lot more things, I have a bigger audience. I know it's going to do as well or better, and so it's kind of like a built in win for this company.
I like to have fun with this stuff, and I like to get paid before things actually happen because I think that's just a really unique thing that so many people are afraid to do and I really challenge myself with that stuff.
Carl Smith:
Okay, so force of nature, once you have the idea, you just have to power through and then get paid before you start.
Jason Zook:
And I think that everyone can do that. Like, I really do. I believe that everyone should test the assumption of like, "Oh, no one's going to pay for this." Who is telling you that? Even if it's someone who has done something similar, it doesn't matter. You have your own unique circumstances, situations, stories, experiences. I firmly believe in that, so sorry to cut you off, but I wanted to just-
Carl Smith:
No, no. It's okay. I'm getting used to it, but to that point in the early days of the web, or actually the mid to early days, everybody was doing 50/50, right? 50% upfront and 50% at the end, or some people were doing thirds. Electric Pulp in South Dakota, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they did 90/10.
Jason Zook:
Nice. I love that.
Carl Smith:
It was amazing.
Jason Zook:
And why not, right? Like, you don't get what you don't ask for. That's been a motto for me for years now, but if you don't ask for it, you're not going to get it, so at least try.
Carl Smith:
Exactly. You just try, and that was the thing. I remember I was talking with Aaron Mentele who is one of the founders there, and they had Guy Kawasaki, they were doing work with them, and Guy was promoting them all over the place and they got really popular, and anybody that showed up that they weren't really sure about, or if they were really busy and they were just going to iterate on their process and iterate on their invoicing and everything, they just one day, they tried 90/10 and that shit worked.
Jason Zook:
Yeah, and then from there on it was like, "Oh, they're the agency you've got to pay almost all up front. Okay, well, we know that. We just expect that."
Carl Smith:
Exactly. But that totally worked for them, right?
Jason Zook:
Yep.
Carl Smith:
Okay. I know there's a real story behind selling your last name, because I always knew you as Jason Sadler. And then you were Jason, was it Headsets.com?
Jason Zook:
Yep. Good memory.
Carl Smith:
How do I remember? Trust me, I did not prepare. "Everybody knows, Carl."
Jason Zook:
It was worth it. It was worth the spend for them if you can remember it. Like, that in itself proves it.
Carl Smith:
I've totally, probably went to the website just to see who was willing to give you money for it. Talk about that. That happened before the book, right? Before the first book.
Jason Zook:
Yes. So, that happened in the last year of I Wear Your Shirt, as I was shuttering things down. I was just looking for some way to really honestly get cash, because cash flow was running super low. I was accruing more debt for the business and I was just like, "I have to do something" and maybe one last ditch effort to try and get attention for I Wear Your Shirt. I thought maybe the notoriety of that would help that business.
Yeah, so I have had three last names prior to Headsets.com. I had Sadler, I had two other last names before that, so I unfortunately didn't have one name to rule them all my entire life, so for me, my last name meant nothing. For a lot of people, it's hard for them to understand that because they've had the same last name.
Carl Smith:
Smith.
Jason Zook:
Yeah. It's easy, right? Like, you're comfortable with it, you've had it forever. When this idea came to me and actually was sparked by my mom going through a divorce, and I wasn't attached to that name Sadler at all, and the divorce wasn't a great situation. I just offhandedly made a joke to her like, "Well, I'm going to divorce this guy, too. I don't want his last name." But then what do you do? Like really, what do you do to pick a last name? If you don't have another one as a grown male and even as a grown female, where do you pick one?
I looked at my grandparents last name and I was like, "Ah, it's okay. I love them, but it's not really very exciting to me" and it just hit me, "This could be fun." This could be the next iteration of all the sponsored things I had done up to that point, because there had been a bunch of other ones through I Wear Your Shirt, so I was like, "Why not sell my last name?" The domain BuyMyLastName.com was available. That's always a good sign. Maybe not a good sign, I don't know. I'm very literal with my domain names. I Wear Your Shirt, Buy My Last Name, Sponsor My Book. There's a thread here.
Yeah, so I just had this website built. I wanted to do it like an eBay style auction where it started at $0, it went for 30 days, and then wherever it ended, it ended. I had some terms in there like no porn company was going to buy my own name. I had last right of refusal, so I launched it and my goal in my mind was like, "If I get $10,000 for this, it will be crazy." Like, that's insane.
Carl Smith:
I mean, it sounds insane.
Jason Zook:
First 24 hours, the bidding ends at $33,000 at the end of the first day. 33,000. I remember staring at my screen just being like, "I don't even understand this." You think everyone else is going, "What is going on?"
Carl Smith:
I totally had it wrong. I thought for some reason you ended up getting something like 20 or 25,000, but in the first day it was over 30?
Jason Zook:
Yep. It ended at 45.5 at the end of it to Headsets.com, and funny enough, they called me because my phone number, every time you bid you would get my phone number in case you questions or whatever, and they called me like five minutes before the auction ended. It was the Chief Marketing Officer, and he was like, "Hey." Literally I picked up the phone, because I just assumed it was someone related to it, and I pick up the phone I'm like, "Hello." He's like, "Jason, my name's Matt, Headsets.com. I'm the Marketing Officer. I'm $5000 over my budget that I was allowed to spend for this. Please tell me you're not going to screw us over."
I was like, "I'm a real person, I'm not going to screw you over." He's like, "All right, bye. I've got to go bid again." He hangs up, he's the final bidder, and so you mentioned you went to the website or you checked it out, or you even remebered it.
Carl Smith:
Oh yeah. I was blown away.
Jason Zook:
The first quarter after my last name had sold, and so I went on, I mean all the news outlets. CNN, Fox and Friends, Good Morning America, blah, blah, blah. They saw an increase in sales of a quarter of a million dollars from all the press.
Carl Smith:
Whoa.
Jason Zook:
And earned media of like six million dollars in earned media. They understand all that stuff, so they were like, "Okay, we just spend 45.5 to get six million in earned media, and an increase in sales of $250,000" which you can't 100% attribute just to me, but there's a really good correlation in timing there. They were really happy. It was a super unique experience to live as Jason Headsets.com for one year. Checking into hotels was the worst, because they'd be like, "What's the reservation under?" I go, "Headsets.com."
They go, "No, not your business name." I'm like, "No, no, that's my last name." They're like, "Wait, what?" It was just like 10 minutes to check in and I was always apologizing to people behind me and having to show my ID. Yeah, it was a little bit of a mess.
Carl Smith:
Well you got your license changed. That was when it blew my mind, when you got your drivers license changed.
Jason Zook:
I go all the way. Listen, force of nature, right? I don't have half-ass these things. I'm going all the way with all this stuff. The only thing I didn't do was my passport because I was like, "I don't want to mess with this when I'm traveling. Many last names on the record could be weird" so I skipped any international travel for two years and then changed it to now my final last name which was Zook.
Carl Smith:
Where did that name come from?
Jason Zook:
That name actually came from my great grandfather who funny enough, was an entrepreneur. Had his own power company back in the '50s, '60s, '70s, won the Nikola Tesla award for his work in the power industry in the '70s.
Carl Smith:
Whoa.
Jason Zook:
And I did not know this until my grandmother sat me down after I sold my first name the first time. Maybe as a lecture, maybe just to share, like that we had similar kind of tendencies and ideas and thoughts, and challenging convention. That really made me excited, because his last name passed with him. It didn't get carried on and so I said, "This is the name I want to carry forward," so just a really cool way to pay homage to my great grandfather, and to carry that lineage forward where it stopped.
Carl Smith:
That's amazing. Congratulations. I thought you were going to say, "Ah, I like the sound of it."
Jason Zook:
Yeah, no. It's a great story. I love that part of it, too, and I also feel like so many of these things happen because of other things lining up, right? Like, I wouldn't have sold my last name had I not done I Wear Your Shirt. I wouldn't have written my book had I not done I Wear Your Shirt, and so I'm really grateful for all of these things happening, even if they were negative experiences, because whether they're negative or positive, they still lead you forward in some direction that you can learn from or move on from. That's just something you learn with age and wisdom as I'm sure you know extremely well.
All those experiences, I'm just so zen about it all these days. Just anything that goes wrong I'm like, "Whatever, I'm going to learn something from this. It's not going to matter." It's funny-
Carl Smith:
It's so true. [crosstalk 00:20:34].
Jason Zook:
We could probably spend an entire episode talking about the one million shirts thing that we did kind of together, which had a whole nasty fallout, but what's interesting, in that moment of that thing and we can save everybody the long story of it, but it was a non-profit that just got smashed, but in that whole situation, I just learned so many life lessons that I still carry forward with me. It's unfortunate when you're in the moment, but it's so nice looking back to have that perspective to go, "Well, now I've learned all this stuff. I'm a better person, I'm a better business owner, I'm a better probably advocate for different type of non-profits," now that I know all the things that I do know. When people come to me I'm like, "Hey, no you should read this" or, "You check this out." I have some knowledge that I never would have had before, experience I never would have had.
Carl Smith:
It's so true and that experience actually became relevant again for me last week.
Jason Zook:
Whoa. That's fun.
Carl Smith:
Well, we're working on a diversity scholarship for Bureau events, right?
Jason Zook:
Cool.
Carl Smith:
We get everything written up, we've got our first sponsor who doesn't want to be mentioned, and they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart, and I send everything to the lawyer and he goes, "Well, we do have one problem." I'm like, "What?" He goes, "This violates almost every discrimination law on the books."
Jason Zook:
Oh, no good.
Carl Smith:
If you're trying to target marginalized or underrepresented people, you are by definition, discriminating-
Jason Zook:
Marginalizing, yeah.
Carl Smith:
... against everybody else. So, I was like, "Okay, well" ... He's an amazing lawyer and a good friend, and he's like, "I'll get you to yes. Just give me a couple of weeks."
Jason Zook:
Wow.
Carl Smith:
I'm like, "All right, thanks."
Jason Zook:
That's crazy. Yeah it's, again, those things just happen and you can be super upset about them or whatever, but you're not in control so what does it matter? I don't know. That's been a big thing for me that I've learned over the years that I'm very grateful to have had those experiences. As much as they sucked, they feel really good these days to just have that knowledge.
Carl Smith:
You've built on again and again that initial wave of success with I Wear Your Shirt, where you ended up on CNN and Fox and all these outlets. You always came back and gave them another story. You always gave them something else, so what are you working on now?
Jason Zook:
Yeah, so funny enough, I have ... I wouldn't say given up on press, but I just don't care anymore, because I've done it all. It's kind of like if you're a designer and you've designed a certain way forever, maybe you did all the flat designs or all the gradient designs, you're like, "I don't want to do that anymore. It doesn't serve me," as much as it gets you accolades or clients. For me, that's the press thing. I just don't care anymore. I don't want to talk to anymore pundits or people who sit behind green screens all day and just yell.
But I do have this crazy cool idea that's called Buy Our Future where my wife and I have teamed up. We've now made a ton of different things from online courses to books to I have a couple of pieces of software, and pretty much everything helps people do something better that they're already doing, whether it's with building an online business or teaching some skill that they have, or just organizing their business better as online business owners.
Buy Our Future is this really unique packaging of everything we've both made in one thing, and if people buy it, they get access to this really cool community of almost 400 people and anything we make in the future at no extra charge. It's like my one time lifetime access purchase, and I just love it, because it takes all the worry and headache for me out of promoting anything I create that's new. Instead of just saying, "Here's a value add to Buy Our Future, so if you want to buy it, this is the way to get all of the things," and it's incredibly affordable for what you get.
We love it, we're starting to come up with a system for selling it ongoing. It's been a yearly or annual, whichever you want to say, opening for it. Now we're doing it a little bit more ongoing that we have a good system in place for it. We just love it and the community is absolutely fantastic. We last asked for testimonials before the last launch and 84 people wrote thorough testimonials. I was like, "Oh, I think we have something on our hands here" because that never happens.
Carl Smith:
No, that's amazing. So Jason-
Jason Zook:
Yeah. So it's just really cool, it's fun.
Carl Smith:
I'm so glad you were able to join us today, and I've got to tell you, I needed this conversation. I've been having a really good week but a really busy week, and you just made me feel so good. Just hearing your stories and knowing that if I try hard enough, any idea can be successful.
Jason Zook:
And any idea is better than the ideas I have. You can be a force of nature with any of your own, and yes, I'm also glad that we got to rekindle our Maple Street biscuit memories. That was fun as well.
Carl Smith:
TacoLu misses you.
Jason Zook:
Oh, man. I miss that place so much. You have to go say hi to Don [crosstalk 00:25:03].
Carl Smith:
I know San Diego has no tacos. I know.
Jason Zook:
No TacoLu, though. Good tacos, but no TacoLu.
Carl Smith:
Well, do you have any parting words of wisdom for all the digital professionals out there listening?
Jason Zook:
No. I think if anything, it's just like be willing to ask. You don't get what you don't ask for, be willing to just put stuff out into the world. The more things you create, the more opportunities come your way, and just don't take no for an answer. If you really want to do something, if you really want to chase down some idea or dream, be the force of nature to make it happen and it will happen one way or another.
Carl Smith:
And you're living proof of that, so everybody listening, do as the man says, and we'll talk to you later.