Josh continued to enjoy the world of mega structures which hosted dozens of realities and fakes. Things appeared fine and for a time he operated on a running gear on an autobahn. But when he joined a team to negotiate what he thought would be his big bang his eyes opened to the possibilities and improbabilities in the sector. To his chagrin he came face to face with dealers who turned dirty, sold one property to more than one buyer, and used threats along with gangsters to keep the losers quiet. These went on the opposite lane to his dreams but as an unrepentant optimist he believed he would do a clean job and get to the top.
The young dealer literally bumped into a mega deal via an innocent act of purchase of drinks for people he met at a tavern on his birthday.
One of them turned out to be a self-effacing billionaire with the name Baron Metrope. The man enquired of Josh’s engagement as the emergency party progressed. Josh told the Baron he conducted business as a real estate broker. The billionaire gave him a call card and directed him to one of his managers.
The following day Josh met the Manager who handed him a folder with an eye-popping proposal. Josh found himself at the center of a multi-million dollar deal with little or no effort! He saw in it Lady Luck out of nowhere and a story book drama in real life and real time. A friend told him to try it out because some billionaires have the quirk of building up nobodies to somebodies as a way of giving back to society or for those who stood on the heads of others to reach the top, to create a new billionaire to ease their tortured consciences.
Josh went into the business the way he did in all cases and engaged everything in his treasury – money, emotions, physique, time, and much more. He reached out to all contacts with the capacity to assist him to close the deal. The engagement became an idée fixe to the point he weighed in five points below previous level while his packaged cell volume, PCV for short, went a notch below the level acceptable for women.
At commencement of the transaction nature appeared to be in harmony with him because sleep invaded his system less and less although to his peril. On some days he worked on the project for the better part of twenty hours and ignored other projects. He saw it as a make or break deal with no middle ground.
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But in several cases one tiny uncovered hole may prove fatal. Josh discounted the possible impact of competition which he later found out entered the scene through the Manager who handed the folder to him as directed by Baron Metrope. Josh ignored the man because he felt the boss would have the final say which meant he ignored a truism – an insider involvement must be regarded as fatal for an outsider in any business transaction.
When Josh sat and faced a major competitor with Josh’s bank statement in his breast pocket, some lurid photographs which his befuddled mind failed to place and some forged letters from the Internal Revenue Service, he realized he had at last stepped into a rarefied world.
The world before the deal boasted of dreams as tall as the Empire State Building on date of completion. But the dreamer-owner sat at the foot of the structure with nothing beyond framed pictures of the building for him to sell to be able to buy bread and soda to stay alive. Dreams sometimes turn out to be kites flown by children which rise fast and high but with the possibility of instant crash courtesy of a strong gust of wind.
He recalled the day he watched Ted Turner in a discussion with Christiane Amanpuor in a CNN interview. Mr. Turner operates in the billionaire club but the famed Captain Planet wished the communications giant called Cable News Network continued to be his personal property. Few pioneers who lost ownership of the businesses they built to greatness get back into the mainstream of the particular business while fewer regain full control and return to Chief Executive position the way Steve Jobs did.
Josh accepted no basis existed for him to put himself in the Steve Job’s club because the first major deal which would have put him in the big league dangled like an unreachable apple above his head with the possibility of the deal being a sword of Damocles. At the end he decided to see the deal as his baptism of fire.
Some days after a strong competitor knocked him off balance he received full brief of a revised plan which turned out to be a pot pouri of offerings. They were flowery at first glance but deceptive and fraudulent on close examination. The Chief Executive Officer of the major competitor arranged a meeting with him and showed ‘ki’dness’ by way of an offer of a share in the expected mind-blowing profit as well as partnership in future deals. But Josh’s religious upbringing disallowed him from consideration of what he saw as messed pottage.
A further complication arose from the status of the prospective buyer as one of his clients in another deal. The man, Mr. Goody enjoyed a reputation for straight forwardness and often demonstrated irritation for back hand deals.
Given the odious mix before him Josh pulled out of the deal and left town without as much as putting a call to the parties he negotiated with. The terms of the unwritten agreement with the ultimate winner of the contract contained provision for the loser to join a shadowy group or withdraw and shut up. The other unwritten understanding meant withdrawal left his life in the dangerous palms of the winner. He took a third option – to get out of the United States at least for a time and apply glue on his cracked lips.
One should wonder what Baron Metrope did to save Josh from the trauma he faced. Because the Baron allowed himself to be accessed by the Manager alone, Josh made no effort. But a friend told the embattled young man the kind mogul expected him to handle the situation if he wanted to join the big league. If he failed, as he did, it meant Josh needed to rewire his operational model or stay out of the slippery lane which leads to big time.
Before he left town he considered it wise to hand over whatever he accumulated in his business to some big players in the capital market. He approached Mr. Bartman his former high school teacher who left teaching for the dizzy world of Wall Street because as he put it, teaching has little capacity to pump the blood in a restless body. Teaching below university suffused itself with relaxed, stereotyped, and predictable characteristics bad enough for someone in the genus described as hyperactive with overdrive as the icing. He handed ninety percent of his savings to Mr. Bartman just before a major shift in United States policy on Chinese goods.
Following the announcement of a new China policy stock prices engaged in a dance after a spell of stability and predictability. The Dow on an upward trajectory before the announcement began to behave like a wasp as it flew up and down with the two extremes sometimes within forty-eight hours. In the entire 228 years since the Bretton Wood Agreement led to the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange and by extension the formalization of Wall Street, stocks witnessed no such ballet which made many skyscrapers in the mind turn to castles in the air.
Unlike the 1929 Stock Market crash which saw Yale economist Irving Fisher become an emergency villain (he assured investors in the Stock Market their monies were save but stock values cascaded few days later) the 2020 case appeared to be a contrived game which saw Wall Street dance upwards one day along with high employment numbers and nosedive the next day with apologists of the administration desperate to explain away the unexplainable. Josh, like several other new investors watched as dreams went up in smoke.
If the wasp-like choreography were all, Mr. Bartman would have employed all his expertise and experience to salvage something for his former student. He managed to assure a worst case scenario of restoration of his protégée to status quo ante without pork.
But whether by accident or by design China played a new card and whatever Wall Street left for anxious new investors such as Josh danced out of the electronic boards as days went by. The new Chinese card came with the composite name of COVID-19, a variant of Coronavirus with reinforced virulence. Before someone sneezed thrice and drove away people close by, the stock certificates in Josh’s office safe were worth no more than the pieces of paper used to print them. The young dreamer decided to blank out when the French phrase force majeure made a stealthy waltz into his consciousness.
While he waited to see whether Mr. Bartman would save him things appeared to retrogress from bad to worse on a slippery slope lane. Josh packed his bag and headed to an enchanting community in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil to nurse his wounds and re-strategise.
When he moved into a cottage in the Amazon he involved himself in soul-searching and in particular asked himself questions with respect to his capacity which he defined to include his mental state, physical state, intellect, and wisdom. A desperate question such as the possibility of being jinxed or subject to super normal forces tormented him despite his inclination for objectivity and the twin sister empiricism.
Concepts such as critical success factors, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) along with other tools in the world of management ran riot in his mind. None of them gave him satisfactory explanation for the frequent business failures which dogged his life.
His long discourse with self over several days narrowed his search to two non-scientific issues which he felt may have impacted his operations. These were readiness to sustain effort in a niche for prolonged period, and the size of his dreams. He accepted without question his inability to stay for long periods in one activity brand. This he passed the buck to his restlessness implanted in his DNA.
On the second issue he rejected blame because at the early stages he set up shop in a garage the way Walt and Roy Disney, Tony Magilica, Will Hewlett and Dave Packard, William Harley and Arthur Davidson among others did. Harold Matson, Elliot Handler, and Ruth Handler of Barbie doll, Michael Dale, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin all engaged gear and rode to stardom from garages. Why should his case turn up with a different flavor despite commencement from the same humble beginning?
He decided to think deep rather than nurse doubts when the world around him boasted of limitless possibilities. He beamed mental searchlight on the technology sub sector given its perverse hold on much of business and life. He thought of a product or service with the capacity to revolutionize everything and by extension the way people live and work.
The natural and serene environment in the backwoods of the Amazon allowed him to think of a world dominated by vocal currents in which touch replaced speech. Such would be a prelude to elimination of human labor and assembly line.
He did worry about such possibility on the society, about unemployment, about sedentary situations on human health, about a whole lot. He worried about the possibilities of devious human beings who may attempt to exterminate their kind over long distances as his plan would eliminate the need to strangle or shoot people.
But he believed such possibilities should be left for the next stage in which unintended consequences are handled as corollary mind activity in a multiplier framework. Human beings developed bullet-proof vests because bullets entered the scene. Israel has developed the iron dome because someone developed flying canons with powers to kill, maim, and destroy property. Antidotes have been made to counteract the power of poisons and bunkers are bomb shields. Where the will to destroy exists the way to protect and prevent will be found.
When he questioned his mental state he waved it away for those who create the unimaginable have questionable but normal mental states. Hackers for instance have a twist towards genius without which their ability to create – negative in the point of view of society – would be impossible. No normal person does things of epic proportions, for instance in the world of classical music the masters were abnormal and must have had the rare capacity to pick vibrations from the cosmos. An Eifel Tower continued to astound him whenever it crossed his mind’s eyes.
His long deliberation with self led to full conviction as to the possibilities and rightness of his plan. The fact of good company in the cast of unusual actors in the world who push the world beyond known limits complemented the first line of thought. He turned his thoughts to how to raise big money for his gargantuan project for he knew big money begets big money and big money functions as a sine qua non in the drive to bring to fruition any big idea no matter how weird it looks at commencement.
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