Goal #1
A&F Underwear Model
When I was 16, I picked up a Calvin Klein underwear box at my friends house, and said with, “Do you have any idea how many girls this guy gets?” The Before picture shown here was just a year before that. Many years of cookie dough ice cream and a slow metabolism made me “skinny fat,” despite being very active. I was easily in the worst shape of my friends, and consciously tried to avoid shirtless situations.
Three years later, I went to Ford modeling agency. The guy said, “You’d have to lose weight, but even if you did that, you’d look weird… Bye.” Immediately after Ford, I went to Elite Modeling Agency, and the head male agent, David Love, was excited to meet me, said he represented the “Abercrombie Twins,” and told me to lose 10 lbs, then send him some pics. A couple weeks later, I sent him pics, and a letter saying, “You told me to lose 10 lbs, so I lost 15.”
Four months later, Abercrombie was flying me out to Savannah, Georgia, and paying me to wear a lot less than what I was embarrassed to wear just three years earlier.
Goal #2
Rain Man
Goal: To get a perfect 4.0 GPA while completing more than two and a half times the “full time” student course load, teaching myself two subjects, and skipping a couple years of math (completing 31 credits in total, while 12 was considered “full time,” requiring special permission from the registrar at 20), all of which were high-level Major requirements.
Circumstances: I had been diagnosed several times by several different doctors with “disabilities” including “Severe” ADHD, a processing problem, and dyslexia; I graduated 695th out of 724 students in my high school graduation class (bottom 4%).
Eleven of the 31 credits I completed during the semester were by way of teaching myself the material, and passing competency tests that were primarily used for transfer students who had already taken the courses (I just read each textbook twice). But four of these credits were for Calculus, which I was three prerequisite courses away from even being allowed to take (had I gone the normal route, I would have had to take college Geometry, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calculus just to TAKE Calculus). In other words, I’d have to pass four courses—two years of math—in one semester, with one test.
This required a little more than reading the Calculus textbook, which seemed like a foreign language at first. So I asked Matt Bernander, a teaching assistant, to tutor me.
Twelve tutoring sessions later, I took the test.
On the way to take the test, I will never forget the thought that entered my mind. I can even remember the intersection I was at. “Eric—695th out of 724 students, bottom 4%, expellee, two-time suspendee, 'learning disabled,' socially inept outcast—you’re not supposed to do this.”
Not only did I pass the test, but I scored so high that, had I taken that same test at nearby Michigan State University, I would have also qualified for competency in Calculus II (five math courses—two and a half years of math—in two and a half months, while taking 27 other credits, after just 12 tutoring sessions.
And I got the 4.0 GPA that semester as well.
Goal #3
24 yr-old Commercial Real Estate Developer
In 2005, I bought a forclosed apartment building on a retail corner for $250,000, using my life-savings of $20,000 as the down payment. Four and a half years later, I sold a 6,000 sf shopping center for $1.25MM.
There were no co-signers. I had to go to eight banks just to finance the land, and get two leases (Dunkin Donuts and Sprint) to finance the construction.
With my mom, dad, grandmother, Dunkin Donuts owner, and Mayor at the building's Ribbon Cutting ceremony.