You're a young lad who thinks he's invincible. One day, while early in your career, you "scab" for a non-union shop, which carries little or no insurance. There's a banana peel (which you left) on a roof rail. You slip and fall. Two stories. Right on your back. You get a check for $2,350…and that's it. Game over.

You're just not good. You tried. You hammered. You yammered. But your work stammered. And you ended up just going from job to job.

You're union. You work thirty-four hours a week and take home fifty bucks an hour on average. It puts eighty grand a year on your family dinner table (after twenty years' work). You have a simple lifestyle and around the house, you…tinker. Not a door squeaks. Not a window sill is anything but level.

You make a good living, and in your spare time you rebuild dilapidated homes and resell them. In the beginning, the homes were tiny; you could buy them for $50,000, spend $20,000 refinishing, and sell them for $100,000. And then the numbers went up. And you had three or four homes going all at the same time. You were able to retire a millionaire at sixty, and then build your own dream home. By yourself.

You became a developer, built The Great Golf Course Condo Development that The Eagles sang about, and made tens of millions. The trees you killed along the way sometimes come to life and haunt you in your dreams like the dark parts of Disney films. But those images quickly go away when you flip the start engines to "on" in your shiny new jet.