Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff Read online

  I poured my entire life into that game. Baseball was the center of my universe, this one singular activity around which everything else orbited: school, family, friends, church, weekends, and any amount of free time that I had. Baseball somehow managed to take precedence, and everything else fell in line after it. The only reason I even tried in school was so that I could make the grades to play baseball. Education was simply a means to an end.

  When baseball was going well, my life was going well. But as soon as one thing went wrong, it seemed as though other areas of my life started to fall apart at the seams. It was a snowball effect, a chain reaction. So I pushed hard to make sure that every aspect of the game was perfect. There was literally no room for error.

  My dad and my coach, faithful to the team, as always.

  My dad—a consistent, persistent, and faithful coach—was right there with me every step of the way. He taught me that if I would do the hard work and never quit, I would be successful. Dad had played college football, and he was as passionate about his sport as I was about mine. He would have loved for me to be more excited about football, but baseball was my thing. I chose it, and Dad got on board with me 100 percent. I can’t tell you how much I respect him for setting aside his own wishes for mine. His support drove me to work even harder. He encouraged me to hit farther, run faster, and throw harder.

  In light of my dad’s high expectations, I pushed myself more and more. I woke up earlier and stayed up later. I was dedicated to my dream of playing baseball, and he was my biggest cheerleader. Nothing compared to the satisfaction of making my dad proud. And now, being on the other side of things, I get it. Nothing beats getting to see the smile on any of my kids’ faces when one of them gets a hit or steals second.

  Baseball was this incredible opportunity, a conduit really, for Dad and me to develop a deep relationship with each other. We spent hours together every single day. The only problem was that we artificially attached ourselves and our relationship to this sport, this one activity. The bond between us was completely built on baseball. It was our cornerstone, the factor on which everything else was based. Love and pride and encouragement were all contingent on how well I played every single game. Literally game by game.

  If I was firing on all cylinders, Dad couldn’t have been prouder. We’d high-five and recount every play for hours, reminiscing, on cloud nine. But if things didn’t go so well, the subsequent hours would look a little different. We’d drive home from the ball field in complete silence. Dad would sometimes storm into the house, slamming the door behind him. And I clearly remember thinking, My dad doesn’t love me because of the way I just played. I wasn’t able to separate my performance from Dad’s feelings toward me. Back then, our relationship just hadn’t developed beyond the expectation of a perfect performance in the game.

  Looking back now, I realize these two things:

  1.My dad wanted to be with me. We both loved sports. So if there was a sport to play, he was right there by my side, playing it with me or, at the very least, cheering me on.

  2.My father wanted me to be the very best. The very, very best. And I love him for that. My dad didn’t really have a dad. He was very young when his father chose to leave the family. So every idea my dad had about how to be a father came either from a book or from some other man he looked up to. Without having a direct example of his own, he just expected of me what he assumed other dads expected from their sons. Or maybe, in his heart, he was just paying me the attention he wished his old man would have paid him, had he chosen to stick around.

  I know without a doubt that my dad loved me and was proud of me and did his very best to be a good father. So I’m not complaining. But Dad and I both had a little growing to do, because a relationship centered around just one thing will have drawbacks.

  Especially when that one thing goes away.

  I’ve heard that about 6 percent of high school baseball players actually play college ball. And then, of those lucky few, only 8 percent get drafted into the major leagues. I’m no mathematician, but that had to make my chances of playing professional baseball less than half of a percent. But I didn’t care. I still lived and breathed that game. To me there was no scenario in which I didn’t end up playing college ball and then going pro, no matter what the odds were.

  Toward the end of high school, everyone I knew was working hard to build a hefty college application portfolio. They were taking internships, joining academic clubs and debate teams, running for class treasurer (the more easily achieved class officer position), and, on top of all that, going on numerous obligatory college visits.

  But not me. I was doing one thing and one thing only: playing baseball. Baseball was my trajectory. It was my plan A, and there was no plan B.

  As it turned out, all those hours and days and years I practiced paid off. I actually beat the odds and made it onto a college team. Playing baseball in college was a dream, an absolute dream! But let’s not celebrate too soon, because in my sophomore year I was cut, just like that, with no warning whatsoever.

  The news hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. And in the following months, I fell into something I can only describe as a deep depression. The only dream I’d ever had was crushed. The weight of that held me down for the better part of a year.

  There are lots of people who don’t dream big enough dreams. That has never been my problem. My problem was that my dream was actually too big for me. And when that dream was lost, I was lost too. Dozens of well-meaning friends and family members suggested possible alternatives to help move me beyond my funk. Every single recommendation—all of them—fell flat. I wasn’t having any of it.

  But hiding away in my dorm room, fooling myself into believing I wasn’t made to do anything other than play a game, wasn’t going to work forever. Apparently there’s a cap to the amount of self-pity time a person gets, because one morning I woke up and realized it was time to snap out of it. The time had come for me to get on with my life.

  It wasn’t long after that that I remember sitting in a business class and looking out the window at a man riding on a lawn mower. I was mesmerized as I watched the blades of freshly cut grass billow up into the air. Then I thought, That guy has it all figured out. Why am I sitting in here learning concepts and hypothetical business principles while he is out there grabbing the bull by the horns and actually making it happen?

  It’s those seemingly small, fortifying moments in our lives that often end up being the instrumental ones. So as the second hand hit the twelve and signaled the end of class, I closed my spiral notebook, zipped up my backpack, turned my hat around backward, and walked out the door.

  I marched right toward that landscaper, confident that he alone held the answers that would save me from my agony and floundering. While I was questioning him a little about his job, I noticed he seemed a bit caught off guard by my interest in his work. I imagined that what he felt in that moment was similar to the way I’d felt in the classroom so many times before. I related to feeling completely unprepared to handle questions fired off by probing professors. After beating around the bush for too long and asking him stupid questions about mowing grass, I was finally able to pry out of him how I’d go about getting a job from the company he worked for.

  It wasn’t as easy as one might think to get hired by a landscaping company, but I eventually sealed the deal. But let’s fast-forward past me mowing a bunch of lawns to the good part.

  It was early August when the owner of the landscaping company I’d been working for took me aside to talk. He told me that he thought it would be smart for me to start my own landscaping business. Without even meaning to, he drew the same type of confidence out of me that I’d felt when a coach or my dad would call me out and give me advice or encouragement.

  That was the very moment when I finally knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life, what I felt truly passionate about—not necessarily lawn care, but dreaming up and starting businesses.

  It was the da
y I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur.

  When an uncovered passion sits dormant inside you and then someone calls it out, all of a sudden that’s all you can think about. It’s like a wildfire being lit by a spark, and the aftermath is all-consuming. I ended up finding a new purpose, a new passion, a new “baseball.” Seeing that man ride past my classroom window began my journey toward starting my very first business, the first in a long stream of entrepreneurial ventures.

  Getting cut from baseball was something I never saw coming. And looking back, I can see that it could’ve played out one of several ways.

  First possibility: I could have dropped out of college and spent my days lying around the house with my five lazy roommates, eating a sick amount of pizza and getting really good at the video game RBI Baseball. My backup plan of moving back in with my parents and having my mom wash my tighty-whities didn’t sound so bad either. The passion had been knocked out of me, and there was seemingly nothing good that could fill its place.

  Another possibility would’ve been to suck it up and get a part-time job to occupy my time—just a random job that I didn’t care too much about but that paid the bills. Sure, it would have meant giving up on my dreams, but at this point I would’ve resigned myself to barely getting by. This option involved zero risk, and there’s something really appealing about not rising again after being hurt so profoundly. And although it didn’t sound as good as playing Nintendo all day, at least it would get me out of the house.

  Another possibility would’ve been to use every instinct and skill I’d developed over the years, find a new passion, and then go for it. I’d get off of the couch and be okay with hanging up my cleats so that I could pursue something different. And even if this new direction was different from what I’d always dreamed about, I would refuse to quit. Sure, it took me a few months to get my head on straight, but I was resolved to figure this all out. I’m smart enough to know that when you put in the effort and find a new passion and get back on track, good things are bound to happen.

  This last scenario is just about the way it turned out. I may have dipped my toes in options one and two, but option three was what all of those years prior had equipped me for. So instead of becoming chronically despondent or detached, I chose a different approach. It took everything inside of me to step up to the plate again, but I did it.

  And then I gave it all I had.

  Each and every year, as the smell of fresh-cut grass heralds the approach of springtime, baseball season commences, and all is right with the world. The very elements of the game, well known as America’s favorite pastime, bring me a certain nostalgia. I am an old soul, and the old-school romanticism of the sport gets me every time. Now, any time I’m in the stands and tear open a bag of sunflower seeds, I can’t help but fall in love with the game all over again. But no matter how much I may love the game and the season, I’m always aware that they all must come to an end. In what feels like just a moment, the boys of summer go from being the big men on campus to passing the torch to the boys of fall—and just like that, it’s football season.

  I have loved baseball as much as anyone, and the lessons it taught me have proved invaluable. But now, in the end, I know it is just a game.

  I never, ever thought I would say this, but it’s the truth: if I could go back in time and have my life work out differently—not getting cut from the team, actually making it in baseball—I wouldn’t do it. I might still fantasize about what that life could have been like, but ultimately I know that God’s plan B has been infinitely greater than my plan A ever could have been.

  And by the way, my dad was right—every moment of practice was worth it. None of the passion I invested in baseball turned out to be wasted. Moving on to plan B was hard work, to be sure. And I had to relearn what it meant to never quit. But the twenty-one years of my life that I spent pursuing baseball taught me the very things I draw upon in my work today. The discipline I learned on the field helped give me the drive to do whatever it takes to keep building.

  Before anything worthwhile can be built, it needs a strong foundation. I believe each life lesson and every opportunity is a building block on which future experiences are built. And that’s definitely true of my life in baseball. I’m confident that I wouldn’t have been a successful entrepreneur if it weren’t for the things I learned in baseball. It was under those bright lights that grit and scrappy became part of my nature, and fortitude became part of the fiber of my being.

  I believed the baseball field was the perfect place to train me as a baseball player, but it turned out to be the perfect training ground for life as an entrepreneur.

  That can be true for you too, no matter what your passion is. Every ounce of energy you invest in pursuing your goals will help you grow toward God’s plan for you . . . even if you end up somewhere you hadn’t counted on.

  I can’t promise you there won’t be any curveballs in your life. But I’m positive that if you do the hard work and never quit—and pick yourself up when things go sideways—good things will be waiting on the other side.

  CHAPTER 3

  LOST IN TRANSLATION

  By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was knee-deep in three different businesses, and I’d been working with the same group of Mexican guys on all of them. We were a close-knit crew. These were my boys, and something about their culture and work ethic really resonated with me.

  It’s interesting how when you roll up your sleeves and labor side by side with someone, your stereotypes and assumptions fall away. I found myself preferring to spend time with these guys over my college buddies, and at first, that struck me as strange. Eventually I just owned the fact that the guys I worked with every day were some of my favorite people. Despite their obvious differences, they somehow reminded me of my granddad, J. B.

  Granddad lived in a different era, a time when people valued honest hard work. And spending days with these guys was somehow like going back in time and getting to spend even just one more hour with J. B. I had never met a person other than him who could work all day in the blazing hot sun, quite literally from sunup to sundown, and never once complain. But these guys did. And because of that weird connection, I almost grew addicted to spending time with my work buddies.

  By “spending time,” of course, I mean working. So that’s what I did in my twenties. I worked. All the time. With this great crew of Mexican guys I respected deeply.

  What did continue to trip me up, though, was how inadequate I was at speaking their language. When we were on job sites together, they did a pretty good job of getting their points across to me. But I was pretty useless at meeting them halfway. I would actually merge English with Spanish and come up with my own unique language—which seemed to confuse everyone even more. Or I would use my hands and face to try to explain to these guys what needed to get done. It was like watching a bad game of charades. Beyond a few basic Spanish terms and a handful of cuss words, I didn’t know squat. And for some reason, that really got to me. It seemed that the highest level of respect I could show these men was to learn Spanish so that I could really relate to them and also help them better relate to me.

  This lingering desire to learn the language and submerge myself in their culture had long been in the back of my mind. So when I heard about a Spanish immersion program on the coast of Mexico, I was definitely interested. As I looked into the three-month-long program and learned more about it, I felt internally resolved to go for it.

  When I shared the idea with my then-girlfriend, Joanna, whom I’d been dating for about six months, I was pleasantly surprised at how positive she was. I actually couldn’t believe it. This girl who had played it safe all her life was really supportive of me going to live in a country where I couldn’t even ask where my school was. (Looking back, maybe she needed a break or was trying to get rid of me or something.) Her support gave me the nudge I needed to quickly get things in order so I could take off for the summer.

  The only problem with getting
things in order was that summers were a very important and somewhat complicated season for at least two out of my three businesses.

  For instance, in my house-rental business, most of the college kids I rented to went home for summer break, even though they had signed twelve-month leases. This meant that maintenance and day-to-day obligations became a bit simpler in the summer months, but I also had to chase down rent checks more aggressively than I did during the school year when the kids were at least in town.

  On top of that, my landscaping business was highly dependent on summer revenue, so there were a lot more moving parts during that time. Any of you who own seasonal businesses can probably relate. We made 65 to 70 percent of our annual revenue during the spring and summer months, and that money was key to our survival in fall and winter.

  I decided the only way I could go to Mexico for three months was to leave Jo in charge of my businesses. But that was a lot of pressure. If she screwed up in any way at all, chances were my landscaping business wouldn’t make it by the time the third and fourth quarter of the year rolled around. The one relief was that with so many college kids gone, at least my wash-and-fold laundry business would be slow during the summer, so that wouldn’t add a lot to Jo’s already-full plate.