From Yellow Footprints to Closing Tables

From Yellow Footprints to Closing Tables

It’s 3 a.m. in June and the air is already heavy, thick with salt and swamp. The kind of heat that sticks to your skin even in the dark. I’m standing on yellow footprints at Parris Island, seventeen years old, heart pounding, wondering how I went from high school hallways to this furnace of sand fleas and shouting voices.

The Marine Corps didn’t give you warm-ups. Nobody cared that you hadn’t slept, that the air felt like soup, or that your head was still spinning from the bus ride in. You learned right then: pressure doesn’t wait. You either adapt or you break.

I trained as an aviation electrician, micro miniature repair. Work where “close enough” wasn’t even in the vocabulary. One slip, one shortcut, and a multi-million dollar bird stayed grounded. That kind of pressure rewires you — teaches you that execution isn’t optional, it’s survival.

And that wiring stuck. I’ve carried it everywhere since: onto sales floors where I had no clue what I was doing, into businesses where failure was more likely than success, onto boats in the Caribbean with paying clients on deck and a storm stacking up on the horizon. Same rhythm every time — size it up, make the call, execute. No excuses, no back doors.

Now I sit across from clients at closing tables instead of drill instructors or cockpit panels. Different stakes, different scenery, but the same demand: when it’s your turn, you show up and deliver.