Not a Failure...

A story about obsession.

Early 1980s…

When I was a little kid I used to watch cartoons on Saturday morning. Man, it was like a ritual for me. I was obsessed. If Saturday morning rolled around and I wasn’t spending my morning, on the floor in front of that television or curled up on the couch healthy, sick, tired, or wired…

…I was really disappointed. Bad mood disappointed. Ruined my day disappointed. Might sound silly but that’s where I was when I was 5 or 6 years old. This was the early 1980’s.

Mid-80s…

Flash forward a few years and it’s the mid to late 80’s. My dad had gotten me into little league baseball, and I had discovered baseball cards. I’ll never forget the first year and style of baseball card I started collecting either. It was the 1985 Fleer set.

They had the Grey border and the team logo in the upper left hand corner. That’s how I learned all the Major League baseball team names. From that set there. But boy, I’ll tell you something…

…I really got into baseball cards for a few years there. I was completely obsessed. I collected the Beckett Baseball Card Monthly, and traded with my friends at school. I would spend my birthday card money on baseball cards, pester my dad into taking me to the card shops.

I probably drove my parents nuts…but that’s just how it was. I was really into them. Laser focused on this one thing. Regardless of how it might have affected anyone around me.

1992…

A few more years go by and now we are in 1992…

I’m a Sophomore in high school and I’ve shifted my focus from baseball cards to comic books.

All I care about is buying number one issues of comic books, in hopes that they would blow up in a month or two and I could sell them back to the comic book store for store credit, and invest…

…in even more number one issues. Sometimes taking some money for myself. I remember the comics that got me into comic books too.

It was X-O Manowar number 1 from Valiant Comics. That and Harbinger number one from Valiant as well. Both books I collected as a kid and paid for my habit with my little “buy and sell the number ones scheme.”

I’d collect the Wizard price guide and use it to prospect my potential number ones.

And every week I’d jump on my bike and ride it down to the local comic book shop. And let me tell you something…

…I was like the mailman with my trips to the comic book shop. Rain or shine, sleet or snow…I would go.

Just stubborn. And this was the 90’s too. My parents didn’t watch me like a lot of parents watch their kids today. Times were different then. I was born in 76. I was a child of the 80s and a teen of the 90s.

We practically watched ourselves.

But anyways, I was obsessed with these Valiant comics and my damn number one issue comics business for a few years.

And then I graduated high school in 1994 and something changed.

I had to figure out what “YEAR 13” looked like. And for the first time in my life, nobody was telling me what to do. I wasn’t a kid anymore, at least not in the technical sense of the word.

My little obsessions took a backseat to figuring out how to be in the “real world.”

My mom and dad had just one rule. I had to do something. Either go to school or get a job, I just had to keep my life moving forward.

They never forced me to pay rent or buy groceries. Just that one rule.

Year 13…and Beyond…

Keep your life moving forward. Do something.

And as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life and what I was going to be…

…I worked a series of beginner level jobs. A pizza place, a call center for family portrait selling, an office supply store, a video game store…

…and then in the summer of 1995, I joined the Navy for 5 years.

While in the Navy and on after the Navy I became obsessed with music and learned to play guitar and sing. I joined several rock bands and recorded in studios and wrote records…

…and for pretty much all of my 20’s and half of my 30’s I was obsessed with music. It’s like that’s all I cared about.

I remember I got married, my last year in the Navy.

Mid 2000…

And once during that marriage I had band practice on my wedding anniversary. Probably not the best choice for a married man who wants to stay married, but that’s the way it was back then…

…nothing mattered more to me than music. Anyone who wanted to share my life with me had to deal with that. Probably not the nicest thing to deal with, but again…that’s who I was. I was obsessed.

2006, my marriage ends in a fiery divorce.

2006…

It saddened me greatly and I felt like I wasted 7 years of my life on that marriage. The better part of my 20’s.

But the day my wife moved out(with another man I might add, she was no angel,) I was playing a show with my band that night at McGuffy’s House of Rock in Dayton Ohio.

It was our first show as a band, so even though I was sad, I was focused. The band and the music still took center stage.

2008…

Flash forward again to 2008. One marriage had ended in a fiery divorce and my new girlfriend, she came into the relationship with a daughter so it’s like I went from being a single rock and roll guy to “Insta-family.”

And on top of that…

She was pregnant. My son was born in October of 2008 and when he was…

…I immediately understood that things were changing for me. It wasn’t just me anymore.

This music dream? It wasn’t going to work. I wanted to be there for my son, my step-daughter and the girl who would be my future wife. And for the first time in a long time…

…something was more important to me than music.

Being there for my family.

2008-2009…

And for a time I focused on working. Making money to support my family, and just living the family man life.

And that “obsession” thing I had. The thing where I focus really intently on just one thing, and ignore all the other stuff?

I let that go for a while.

But then in the summer of 2010 I was fired from my job. I worked at a hospital. See, I had been a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy which is kind of like a medic, so I had a lot of healthcare background at this time in my life.

Summer of 2010…

How did I get fired?

My gallbladder had gone bad but I didn’t know it. I thought I had food poisoning one time, maybe caught a stomach bug another time, but all these bouts of nausea and sickness…

…ended with me calling in sick a lot that year. And even though I had a lot of sick time built up (I’m talking months of sick time) after working at the hospital for like 7 or 8 years and hardly ever calling in sick…

…it didn’t matter. They fired me. They needed someone who was going to be there.

Finally, after I was fired, the doctors actually figured out what my problem was. Bad gallbladder. Great.

But it was the day that I got fired that matters to this story.

I remember walking home from the hospital I worked at (I lived close.) Sitting down at the kitchen table and telling my wife I was fired. I was the breadwinner of the family.

A 3 year old son and a 5 year old step-daughter and a new wife to think about.

Fired. Great. Now what?

Summer 2010 (part 2)

I was sitting there trying to figure out what I was going to do now. I remember being very concerned because I had these other people depending on me.

And slowly I started to remember obsession. Like an old friend.

I had two choices. Find another job like the one I just got fired from or…

…go back to college. I had some 401k built up from my job and we had some savings. I could afford to go to college for a little while. Maybe a year.

So that was what I had. I couldn’t go for a degree. We didn’t have enough money for all that.

But I could go for a year and learn something to try and better myself. I had a year, not to focus on degrees, but on higher learning.

But going to college meant eating away all our savings.

It meant taking time for ME selfishly. Yeah, I was doing it for my family, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It felt like I was focusing on myself a whole lot on something that was TAKING money not MAKING money.

It was a very hard decision, but I went back to school. Community college. It was October of 2010.

October 2010…

And I was obsessed with doing well at that school.

I remembered my time as a child, and as a young man obsessed with those various things. The cartoons, the baseball cards, the comics, the music…

…and I thought, “This obsession is my super power. A gift and a curse. I put it away for far too long.”

I decided I would rekindle that obsession I had for music and transfer it to an obsession for learning something new.

2011…

Straight A’s and B’s the whole time I was in college. I made the Dean’s list every quarter. A stark contrast from my time in high school, I’ll tell you that, with my high school transcript sporting a whopping 1.5 GPA.

And what was my focus in college?

Business. I figured that maybe I could learn business and turn my love for music into actual money.

Anyways…

While in college I learned about buying my college books on Amazon. That turned into buying AND selling my college books on Amazon, when I was done with them, every quarter.

Mid 2011…

That turned into my buying books at Library sales, estate sales, and garage sales and selling THEM on Amazon.

And that turned into my buying very large quantities of used books, combing craigslist for bulk book purchases…

…heck, I once bought an entire church library. Thousands of books.

Leaning into my obsession, by the time my year of college was up I was already making a full time income on Amazon buying and selling used books.

I had leveraged those skills and started my first membership club too. It was called Adventuresontheriver(dot)com and it was all about how to make money on Amazon.

2015…

And the story goes on, and on and on…

…until we come to today, where I am sitting here writing this to you.

But what is my point?

The point?

Well, my point is simple.

Obsession has been painted in our society as a bad word. Living an unbalanced life is frowned upon and not seen as a good thing. And you know what?

I get that. It sounds right to me too.

But I also know the path I’ve taken to get where I am today. Self-made. No boss to answer too. Getting a raise is as simple as launching a new product.

And I know that path leads right through obsession, again and again.

God gave me the ability to tune a bunch of stuff out and focus intently on just the one thing.

The ability to keep the main thing…the main thing. Whatever that “main thing” might be for you.

So as a withering 2024 is heading like a steaming runaway train at breakneck speed towards the broken bridge over the valley that is 2025…

I Implore You…

I implore you to take a second look at this thing we call “obsession.”

Heck, it might just be something you can leverage to achieve your goals. I know it worked for me, many times throughout my life…

…and those parts of my life where I put it down?

They weren’t bad. But they were status quo. Those years were about just getting by with what I had. They weren’t about achieving some higher level.

Nothing wrong with that.

But if you ARE trying to achieve a higher level. If you are NOT happy with your station in life and you maybe even find it downright unacceptable…

…then I would say, take another look at obsession.

That’s all I got. Good luck in all your ventures!

Kam

P.S. I have this little side goal to teach myself how to draw comic strips in 2025. That’s why you are seeing these extremely bad stickman sketches accompanying this story. As you can see, I have a lot of work ahead of me on this one. Feel free to shame my abilities. Lol. I’m just getting started.