Car Jacking After Midnight:

Risk, Bravery, and Life

A coward judges all he sees by what he is. ― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

Beginning in the late 90’s I ran a website design and web hosting company before getting into the commercial real estate private equity business. One night, well after midnight and among the whiff of human fecal matter in the curb, I jumped into my green land rover discovery - a lemon of a vehicle not worth the capitalization - after I finished another successful launch of a website for a mega church.

By this time, it was 2000 and I had several companies, and the church client was putting up all-black billboards across Oklahoma with just the website address in big white letters the next morning. Thirty of them. So, wanting to get the DNS and the hard drives swapped over - running RAID for redundancy - I decided to do it in person in our downtown leased data center.

If you want something done right…

And crossing the bridge over I-37 in downtown Corpus Christi - not the best place to be - a group of thugs blocked the one-way bridge. The haze from the port a block over struck against the yellowed lamp on the opposite corner. About a dozen figures, plus the outline of two cars angled behind. The site launched at midnight, so it may have been closer to two by then.

A weak man is a dangerous man. I was a little afraid, but I will blame that on my sleep deprivation. And being outnumbered.

And seeing a group of potentially armed men blocking the road, you too would only have three options if you are unarmed like I was:

Stop and encounter them outnumbered and unarmed,
Reverse and hope they don’t follow you or worse, have someone else to box you in, or
Play chicken and risk killing them. And going to jail, hospital - or both.

These options also tell us a little about business and life.....

finish reading this essay online to find out if I died!

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Sentenced for Stealing.

The best sentences I could find for you to steal (but, please credit).

“When we make a decision to prove we’re right rather than get the best outcome possible, we only end up with a mess to clean up later.”

Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking

"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“And is your current fortune dear to you, though she cannot be trusted to stay but brings misery when she leaves? And since she cannot be controlled by human will, but leaves men in ruin when she flees, is she anything but a sign of some impending disaster?”

Boethius on Life

“On the part of the Soul it is, when evil triumphs in it, so that it becomes the follower of vicious pleasures, through which it is so much deceived, that on account of them it holds everything in contempt.”

Dante Alighieri, The Banquet

"To become wise, your knowledge must take the courageous leap into the darkness of the divine transformation through the heroic hallway of insight."

@rickwalkertx