“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
AGATHA CHRISTIE
English author and playwright
If you’ve read my autobiography, much of this will sound familiar to you. However, even after we put our lives to paper, life moves on. I’ve gone through changes—with my family, my wife, and even the way I’ve chosen to view my distant past. All of the history you are about to read informed my identity as a businessman and an entrepreneur. So, even if you’ve heard it before, let’s turn the clock back and remember.
Let’s start with ME.
How did I get here?
I was born in Haifa, Israel, on August 25, 1949, in a hospital overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. My Hungarian mother and father had survived World War II and were able to escape to Israel, barely six months after it became an independent state.
My mother, Florence, was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. She was first imprisoned in the camps at age fourteen, and witnessed her mother and her grandmother walk into the gas chamber together. Her brother was also killed. My mother met my father, Feri Witz, in Jand, Hungary, right out of the concentration camps. In 1949, they were able to get to the new state of Israel.
When I was about seven years old, my father walked out on our family. What followed was the realization that, without him, the only ones that my mother and I could depend on were ourselves. Once the rug had been pulled out from under us, it was up to my mother—and then, eventually, up to me—to make a living. A hard enough life lesson to learn, but one that I learned at a very early age.
Life in Israel from 1949 through 1958 was hard. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment, with bullet holes in the walls from the various Israeli-Arab conflicts over the years. We didn’t have a television at home. In fact, I had never even heard of TV and couldn’t have imagined what it was.
We didn’t have a bathroom. We had an outhouse, which was literally a hole in the ground. We didn’t have toilet paper. We used rags, which were then washed and reused. We didn’t have a bathtub or a shower stall. My mother would fill a metallic bathtub with water, pull it out into the sun to warm it up, and that was where I bathed. I had never heard of toothbrushes. Or toothpaste. Or tissues. When I finally learned that Americans used tissues, I was shocked to learn that you could blow your nose into a thin piece of paper and then throw it away. We used a handkerchief, and then we would wash it. Nothing was ever thrown out—we were dirt poor. We didn’t have a car, and at the time I couldn’t imagine anyone having one. You walked. Or you would take a bus. We didn’t have a telephone. We couldn’t afford one, so we didn’t call anyone.
Food was rationed in Israel in the 1950s, because Israel was a new country (formed in 1948, the year before I was born). The infrastructure was in its infancy—running water was sporadic, and food was in short supply. There were certainly no brands as we are familiar with them here—bread was just bread. Butter was just butter. You’d get a certificate, and once a week you’d be allowed to purchase milk and a little bit of meat. No brand names, just milk and meat. You could also buy rice and bread, but I never saw brand names. All of the food at the grocery store was in big sacks. You would get a paper bag, or a newspaper, and then you would wrap up the food to take home. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We had an ice box, which was a piece of furniture that functioned essentially like a cooler.
Despite the absence of luxuries in my early life, I was always happy. I still am. Growing up with little, it never took much to please me. My favorite thing in the world as a child was bread and jam. As long as I had my beloved bread with a heaping wad of jam on it I was happy. It’s still the bane of my waistline. When I eat breakfast now, and the toast and jam comes, I smear it on, and Nick, Sophie, and Shannon always tease me about it. But the jam and bread goes back to my childhood and is a subconscious reminder that I actually don’t need much to be happy, as long as I can sleep safely and soundly and have a full belly. Yes, I know this all sounds a little cornball, but perhaps it’s a good thought to bear in mind as you start your journey to reach your entrepreneurial goals.
You actually don’t need much. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it all.
My early years of school in Israel were uneventful. I attended kindergarten and grade school. I played in the dirt with rocks. We ran around and laughed. It was a happy time.
I have to confess, though, that I wasn’t all that keen on going to school. One day, I decided to play hooky and hid out under the wooden one-story school building, and stayed there until school let out. Then I went home. Of course, I wasn’t smart enough to pull the wool over my mother’s eyes, and she soon found out I had lied. I learned another hard life lesson: lying doesn’t work. In fact, I found out lying can be a pain in the ass. Literally.
I was a loner, mostly. And still am. We lived in the small village of Mount Carmel (yes, that Mount Carmel, the one in the Bible), which was very close to the city of Haifa. My mother couldn’t afford to buy toys, and I was too young to care. I had a long stick and a rock, and those were my toys. I also had Mount Carmel—I could go hiking, and daydream. We couldn’t afford to have pets, either, but when I was six years old I had a scarab beetle that I kept inside an old-fashioned matchbox, which I filled with sugar granules. The beetle was as much a companion to me as a cat or dog; I used to talk to it.
My journey as a young businessman, in this environment of minimal resources and opportunity, started out with a venture as small as you could imagine. One day, I’m not sure why or how, I came up with the idea of going up Mount Carmel and picking cactus fruit to sell to the people coming home on the buses that made their last stop at Tiraat HaCarmel, where we lived. I decided that I needed a partner and chose my friend Schlomo, a Moroccan boy my age who lived downstairs from us.
That was another good life lesson. Often, you won’t be able to do it all yourself, so you will need to carefully pick a partner. Choosing the right partner is a very important decision, and can be the difference between success or failure. The person you choose should have the same work ethic as you do.
Schlomo and I spent the entire day up on Mount Carmel gathering the cactus fruit and hauling it down the mountain to the bus stop. We put the cactus fruit in a vat filled with ice and water, which we borrowed from the local grocery store, and sold it to the people who were coming home from work.
Both Schlomo and I felt a sense of purpose, a sense of pride, and a general feeling that we were doing something important. We didn’t realize that it was a business venture, and we wouldn’t have known what that phrase meant. But we did have a sense that if we worked hard, we might make money. And that was an exciting idea: making money.
It still is.
After a hard day’s work, we were thrilled to find that we had made a grand total of two dollars (I’m simplifying the amount to spare you the math of converting from Israeli shekels, which was the currency at the time). Other than sweat equity, that is, the work that we’d put in, we had virtually no costs. Therefore, the entire two dollars was our net profit. We divided the amount, leaving me with one dollar. Remember, in 1956 a dollar was a decent amount of money. Today, the equivalent could be ten dollars, depending on how you adjust for the rate of inflation and monetary exchanges.
It was getting dark. Schlomo and I returned the vat that held the cactus fruit, and we hurriedly started the climb back up to where we lived. On the way, I stopped by an ice cream store and bought myself an enormous ice cream cone for two cents. To this day, I still vividly remember the taste. It was the most delicious ice cream cone I have ever had because it was mine and I bought it with my own money. Nothing tastes as sweet as something you’ve earned. And I still had a bulging pocketful of coins left.
When I got home, my mother was upset that I had been gone all day. Then I took out the coins in my pocket and put them on the table, and my mother stopped talking about how worried she’d been. The astonished look on her face will forever be etched in my mind. She cupped both hands over her mouth, eyes wide open, gave me a big hug, and said, in a hybrid of Hungarian and Hebrew, “That’s my little man.”
At that moment, although I was stinging from the cactus pricks that covered my hands, arms, and face, I knew that work was good. Work resulted in money. Work and money resulted in food. Work and money resulted in happiness.
And that is the most profound capitalist lesson I have ever learned, though I was far too young to understand it at the time. All I knew was that I was proud. My mother was proud. And I had a huge ice cream cone I had worked to earn.
By the sweat of thy brow, the fruits of thy labor, or words to that effect. They’re in a book my people wrote. It’s the biggest-selling book of all time. Maybe you’ve heard of it: it’s called the Bible.
With Me, Inc. I’ve written my own bible. One that I hope you’ll find useful. Someday, you will write your own.