This book made me $13 million.
Not Think and Grow Rich.
Not The 4-Hour Workweek.
Definitely not The Secret.
Microsoft Access For Dummies.
Because I was dumb enough to try something crazy.
I’m not a tech guy. I was a political science major who got Ds in my mandatory engineering classes. I had never written a line of code in my life. I had never even downloaded Access.
I started my company with my best friend in May of 2013. By Thanksgiving, I was down to my last $2000. Not even enough to cover rent.
Our business sent letters to property owners that said, “Call us for your personalized offer.” The problem was that everyone else was doing the same thing. Our letters were getting lost in a sea of competitors.
We survived those scrappy years, but we were still fighting tooth and nail for every deal.
Then, in 2016, I had an idea to stand out.
What if our letters contained real offers?
Not lowballs or estimates. Verified, actual numbers.
The challenge was scale. We had hundreds of thousands of property owners in our database. Some owned one property, but others might own more than a hundred. Each property had different acreage, ownership percentage, and values per acre. We had to account for millions of variables.
Doing it by hand would be impossible.
I started researching and learned that Microsoft Access could theoretically handle the logic. So I hired an Access programmer, then another. Both failed. They were trying to build enterprise-grade solutions. They didn’t have the industry-specific expertise to understand the real-world use case I was solving for.
So I decided to build it myself.
I bought the book and started on page one. I literally had to learn what a table was. Then I learned about queries, how relationships work, and eventually, nested queries and if-then logic.
I spent an entire year teaching myself from the ground up.
I didn’t know if it would work. I didn’t know if I was wasting my time. I just knew I had nothing to lose.
I was not obsessed with work. I was obsessed with the problem.
Eventually, I built a system that could generate real offers at scale.
The first time we mailed them, our phones started ringing nonstop. Within the next ten months, we went from low seven figures to multi-eight figures in transactions.
The trajectory of my life was forever changed by our “overnight success.”
Here’s the thing:
- I had no prior skill
- Zero qualifications
- No idea what I was doing
I literally bought a book called For Dummies because that is exactly what I was when it came to SQL.
The key was having a beginner’s mind. Because I actually was one, my ego never got the chance to take over and complicate things. I had zero self-judgment because I was supposed to be bad. And I committed to working on the problem until I had solved it.
Tomorrow is January 1st.
You are one year of unhinged commitment away from changing the trajectory of your life.
All it takes is the willingness to keep showing up and to stay with something long enough for it to compound.
To your best year yet,
Mb
