Let’s see …

My first ‘job’ was controlling how much ore was being loaded into the railroad cars at the loading dock of my father’s iron ore mine.  I was 13.

So, no, mine wasn’t a typical upbringing.

I was born in the U.S., but raised in Brazil and learned to speak English and Portuguese at the same time.  According to family myth, our ancestors moved down there from New York after the U.S. Civil War, around 1865. If true, that would make me 5th generation O’Day in Brazil … and fully bicultural.

I learned the American work ethic … and the Brazilian sense of living for today.

Dad was the consummate entrepreneur and we all discussed his latest business venture at the dinner table.  Some years we were rich, some years we were broke.  But we were never bored.

And we kids were … by necessity … survivors.

I spent my early years at the American School in Rio de Janeiro.  My twenties: launching businesses, doing aerial photography in the Amazon, backpacking across Peru, living in a thatched-roof hut on Isla Mujeres while Cancun was being built in the 1970s.  At 30 I got an MBA from the Wharton School.  My thirties: shaking up Godiva Chocolatier in Brussels, marketing a Cognac from France, living in Paris, starting my own international consulting business.

My forties: I discovered ‘the American Dream’.  Suddenly I needed a big house, big car, big garden, big mortgage, taxes, insurances, the whole megillah.  Oh yeah … and credit cards.

I consulted to foreign governments, took products into distant markets, built up my business with more and more debt.  And then 9/11 hit.  Clients went bankrupt, accounts dried up and I hit the wall.  I was 53.

What I learned from that ‘fall from grace’ was more profound than everything else I had learned up until then.  Close friends watched me grapple with values, truth, perception, reality, fantasy, justice, belief, rights, universal law.

I learned that when I had nothing, I was actually richer.

And from there, everything has blossomed.

Life is (very) good.