Happy Meals and Porsches

"There are countless books with formulas on how to achieve success, and they contain all manner of good ideas. I’ve never read any of them." — Ferry Porsche

I pulled up to a stop sign with NOFX blaring from the speakers. It had been raining all day and a cool mist still hung in the air. It was my sixteenth birthday, and for the first time in my life, I was driving legally by myself. It was all coming together. Freedom. My dad tossed me the keys to his car for my first solo joy ride.

Excitement was high at the stop sign that night. I remember it like yesterday. I dropped the hammer in a display of juvenile exultation.

While the “scientific” term for what happened next would not exist for another ten years, I still did it. I Tokyo-drifted over a tree and through a brick wall in my father’s car. The car was smashed to within an inch of its life. I had been insured for mere hours. I climbed out, stunned. 

That was it for me as a teenage driver. My father became less enthusiastic about me out in the wide world gripping grain as they say in the south.

The term carrera is Spanish for “career” or “race.” It became popularized across all tongues by one of the greatest sports cars of all time—the Porsche 911 Carrera. The special thing about the Carrera is that it is a roaring bastard of car, with an engine in the wrong place and lines that have remained mostly unchanged since the JFK assassination. It is luxury with a punk rock resolve. It stubbornly ignored the status quo, until it defined it.

The finest minds in German engineering have toiled on the Carrera for over fifty years. The car exists today as the byproduct of all of the engineering and technology those brilliant engineers birthed over decades and decades of winning races and smashing through engineering brick walls. It is not the fastest sports car, but it is the truest to its core. It has always been fast, loud, and different. 

The engine was not in the right place, so they engineered around it.

The ignition was in the “wrong” place; it still is to this day. 

The styling was likened to a VW bug; the designers in Stuttgart didn't care. They worked around its eccentricities and “weaknesses” and the car is forever a legend.

For Porsche, the 911 is a race and a career. It is, in every way, shape, and form, a carrera. Today, when you turn on a 911, and the engine roars to life behind you —in its growling machinations you hear exactly what it wants to say to the world: f*ck you. 

That is also how I felt when I began my own carrera about two weeks after my wreck. Due to my short and damning record as a driver, I was on my own in procuring a set of wheels. I set about finding a job where I could generate enough money to pay the monthly tab on a car. I settled for the one place that would hire me.

I got a job at McDonald’s.

On my first day, my mother dropped me off. I nervously walked in and was introduced to my shift manager. I wore black slacks, as instructed, and they handed me a comedically oversized pink-striped T-shirt with the yellow arches on the left breast. To this day, it is the worst shirt I have ever worn. While in the restroom getting dressed for my first shift, I thought about the legendary entrepreneur Ray Kroc and his propensity to clean up the bathrooms when he visited his McDonald’s locations. I cleaned some urine off of the toilet seats with a tissue. Emulation. 

Except I was not Ray Kroc, and that was made abundantly clear while I was training to make French fries over the boiling vat of trans fat vegetable oils just hours later. With my vision hazy, I dropped and picked up steel baskets with varying efficiency for around an hour. What a terrible idea, I thought.

That first day, my feet slipped around the slick floor until I found my grease legs in this new world. I learned to ignore the ever-present, nauseating smell of oil in the air. It was a minimum wage job, and it felt like it.

Start anywhere.

I worked every other day. My mother would drop me off right after school on school days. I would work until 10:00 p.m. After a few weeks, it was clear that it would take me decades to buy a car on this kind of job.

The register, the fryer, the grease drains, the heat—none of that really bothered me much. The worst thing about McDonald’s was the playground.

Back in those days, the enclosed McDonald’s playground was a perversion of human existence for employees. It was a free-for-all harassment zone, a place you avoided unless absolutely necessary. There were four-year-old hecklers, over-caffeinated ten-year-olds, entitled soccer moms, and a general feel of suburban purgatory. To this day, I TRY to avoid fast food playgrounds at all costs.

...

I was manning the register when I heard the news.

My manager came in from outside pinching his nose and declaring the playground a hazmat zone. “A kid got sick in the ball pit.”

While cleaning up a dribble of urine off a toilet seat was a karmic way to connect with a legendary entrepreneur, this ball pit business was a bridge too far. But I knew it was my job to clean it up, so I grabbed some cleaning supplies and a few trash bags. I exhaled and gingerly climbed into the pit, one leg at a time.

Now, each ball had one of three designations. If a ball was clean, I would put it into a clean bag. If a ball had just a little heave on it, then I would scrub it clean with some soap, and place it in the clean bag. If a ball was coated in vomit, then I would discard it into the vomit bag. This was the system.

For what seemed like a lifetime, I inspected every single ball in the ball pit one by one. I could tell the sick kid had eaten a lot of Chicken McNuggets. I internally debated how many it takes to create this much barf. 7.6, I thought. Kids half my age called me names and urged me to hurry up, impolitely.

That is where my carrera really started. It did not start when I founded my first business, or got paid for writing about travel, or went to Asia the first time, or even when I started Menguin. It began right there, in that godforsaken ball pit. 

I knew that day at McDonald’s that I wanted to make something more of my life. 

The 911 Carrera didn’t truly start in 1963 when it hit the Frankfurt Auto Show. It did not start when it won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1968. First, it was an idea. In 1959, it was just a sketch by Ferdinand “Butzi” Porsche. Somewhere along the way, it managed to become great, and today, over one million 911’s have been sold. It remained true to itself, even when conventional wisdom deemed some of its attributes to be inappropriate, like its rear engine—a feature that only exists in one other modern production car, the diminutive Smart Fortwo. Even its designer, Ferdinand “Butzi” Porsche, was a castaway of the conventional, having been kicked out of design school due to his insufficient talents - just a few years before creating the most iconic sports car silhouette of all time. 

There is a good chance your journey started long before you consciously decided (or decide) to be an entrepreneur or leader or whatever it is we are supposed to call ourselves. It is important to leverage every shred of context and learning and inspiration that is already installed. 

There is also a good chance that you have certain attributes that are strange or imperfect when viewed through an external conventional lens or your own harsh intrapersonal dialogue. This can be discouraging. Don’t let it discourage you. Like those German engineers who toiled on the 911 Carrera for over fifty years, figure out a way to engineer around it. Find strength in your circumstances. Davids beat Goliaths every day by surprising us with how beneficial a perceived weakness can be when recalibrated as a strength. Today, a Porsche 911 GT2RS goes around the Nurburgring in six minutes and 47 seconds - this is a car with an engine in a "different" or "wrong" place. Only one production car is faster.

Shortly after we sold Menguin, I was picking up happy meals for my kids in my new 911 - a car I had been working towards for decades. A young kid, probably 16, took my order. When I pulled around the corner to pay him at the first window, he marveled at my wheels. “I love your car sir. What do you do? What do I have to do to get a car like that?”

I told him, “You are doing it. Never be too good for any job. I started my career right where you stand.” 

I pulled the transmission into neutral as I coasted forward to the next window and let the rear engine roar to full life behind me as the exhaust pipes emanated a gargly pop pop pop that sounded like the industrial revolution spooling into full swing over dusty Leeds. The turbos wheezed and swirled, dramatically delivering me to the second window. 

Carrera.