The words of Stevie Stone's Relentless stick in my head like they're tattooed on the back of my eyelids. To me, they are a reminder of the days when I was doing whatever I could to make my business - a college bookstore - a success. Long days on the road, traveling, buying, selling, making deals - the definition of grindin'.
To be relentless, is to be adamant, unyielding, determined
Only real ones 'round here, welcome to my hood
If you ain't grind don't come 'round here we hustle in my hood
Don't matter whatcha grind, just git it git it, grind, and git it git it
Grind, relentless, stay on top of ya business
I still tell the story of the day I quit Red Bull cold turkey. We had just opened a bookstore in Jamestown, NC and I was Assistant Manager. We were in a tiny - you can't even call it a strip mall - it was just 4 empty shells with promises of future business. And Sheetz was in the same parking lot. 100 yards and I could get a 4-pack of Red Bull for $8.
It's busy season for college bookstores. August or December/January. We arrive at 6am to check online orders. We have to get as many packed and shipped as we can before customers arrive so we pop the first can open to get our "wiiings". By 10am foot traffic is increasing and the crash is beginning, so here comes can #2!
The adrenaline rush of customers keeps us going til 5-ish, when crash #2 comes along and the second round of online shipments needs to go out - yep, time for the third Red Bull! At this point I'm tired of the taste so I mix it with a Diet Dr. Pepper.
In the REALLY busy season, the 4th Red Bull gets poured around 10pm when we try to get a head start on tomorrow morning before crashing for 5 hours and back at it tomorrow morning.
OK, so the story of how I quit is that I was reading Jack Reacher books at this time and his beverage of choice is black coffee. I was like, I'm manly and shit, too - I can drink coffee. So I did. I decided to do it and the next day literally walked over to Sheetz and poured a 12oz cup of coffee.
I had never. Had. Black. Coffee.... In my life.
It was disgusting at first, but now it's all I drink other than water (and the occasional glass of [insert alcohol])
So now I'm grindin', relentlessly drinking coffee. When it wasn't bookstore busy season, I was on the road. Monday morning, 5am, coffee, driving to who-knows-where. Sometimes it was close by, sometimes it was hours away.
One particular trip took me from Virginia Beach to central Virginia. My 1993 Honda Accord EX Coupe in Arcadia Green Pearl with a 5-speed manual and power everything was one of my favorite cars - but this one in particular had NO HEAT. You heard me. How does that happen, you may be asking, because the car generates heat simply by running? Well, what happens is very similar to what can happen with a person's arteries - the pipes carrying the hot water get so blocked up that the water is not moving so the air blowing across what would be hot pipes simply remains cold.
So I had a propane heater in my car. Again, you read that correctly. A propane heater. Inside. My car. In case you want me to say it again to make sure: a propane heater inside my car. It was hella cold, alright? I was traveling at 4am and I had no heat. So I propped a Coleman propane heater in the passenger floorboard and cracked a window ever so slightly. It was enough to keep me warm until the sun came out.
So on this 4-hour trip from VA Beach to Central VA I stopped for gas and left the heater on with my backpack on the passenger seat (I hadn't had my coffee yet). And the bag tipped over somehow. Fell directly onto the heater and melted the front of the backpack, a bank bag inside, and was millimeters and/or seconds away from burning the thousands in cash inside (used for buying books). I clearly couldn't afford a better car than a '93 Accord with no heat - there was no way I could have afforded to pay back that money.
But it worked out. I spent $50 on a new backpack, grinded that week out, and ended up making some scratch.
What I was doing with all that cash was buying books from professors. They get sent the "Instructor's Edition" textbooks that many students have purchased online - or direct from shops like the Textbook Brokers I used to work at. In fact, part of my job used to be cutting the cover of the book so it didn't specifically say "Instructor's Edition" so our reviews on Amazon or Chegg wouldn't go down. Anything for a buck, eh?
It's a weird business. Some professors had very strict "ethical" codes against selling these books, while I've bought thousands of dollars worth of books directly from Ethics professors (the irony is not lost).
I asked a Finance professor at East Tennessee State University once for some financial advice and he joked that he was selling his books because he was not very good at practicing what he preaches. He said:
"You know how nurses and doctors still smoke? Just because I'm a Finance professor doesn't mean I'm good at my own finances."
I thought that was funny as hell. And I kept grindin'. Drinking coffee, driving to the next school. Bringing the books back and "slingin'" them in busy season.
I liked watching American Pickers at the time. I pictured myself like them; their tagline was: traveling the back roads of America, looking for rusty gold. Mine was traveling to the colleges of America, looking for paper gold.
About 1 in 20 professors were booksellers. I had to go through a lot of "no's" and a lot of angry or indignant looks. Some would try and lecture me - go figure. Sometimes a bookselling professor was surrounded by a bunch of others who despised the practice and they'd ask me to be quiet and close the door while we conducted our cash business.
They'd tell me about their kids wanting Christmas gifts, their spouse who was out of work, or their parents they were taking care of. Sometimes they just wanted an extra $100 to take their significant other out for a date night. Other times their car was having issues (I could relate) and they needed to sell some books they didn't really want to but didn't have another way to make quick cash.
It was not a job for most people. Getting told no 19 times before getting 1 yes was hard. But I was relentless. I needed to get out of that '93 Accord and stop breathing propane fumes - which I eventually did. I needed to pay off the credit card debt I'd accumulated and school loans - which I did. And I needed to gain valuable life skills like talking to people, building relationships, and good work ethic (ha, see what I did there?)
It didn't matter what I did at the time - I needed to do it. My views have changed a bit. I won't go back to traveling the country looking for paper gold in the form of textbooks, but I'll still bring that relentlessness to whatever I do. I'll still get up early and work hard no matter what. Only real ones around here, welcome to my hood.
Thanks to @whatuprell via Unsplash for the old Honda pic
Also, ya gotta dig deep for the gif - Hank Hill is a propane salesman - though he'd be aghast at putting a propane heater inside a car, he appreciates the grind
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