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its best.
    Yeah, I know now: I and my investor buddies had just participated in the biggest real estate fuck-up in the history of American business. We just didn’t see it.
    The first glimmers of the collapse, in fact, were barely noticeable.
    Some people saw it on Wall Street. Me, I learned about it firsthand from the comments the SEC tacked onto the first set of documents we sent describing our public offering. It asked us to get the financing underwritten.
    â€œNo problem,” I said.
    I’d done this hundreds of times and had connections throughout the industry. I started taking meetings with the lenders with whom I had worked over the last several years, thinking it would be an easy sell. But every time I wrapped my pitch, they’d be sitting there, staring at me, with an awkward grin on their faces.
    Yeeaahhhh, that look said, we’re not going to be investing in that anymore. The market’s turning . . .
    I figured they were just skittish, so I took more meetings. Guys, do you see the opportunity here? A billion fucking dollars. Can you smell that, guys? We are within a month of the offering! We’ve been working on this for more than a year . . .
    Crickets.
    It took me only a few meetings to realize that nobody was biting. That no one would ever bite again. The worm had turned. The industry was sunk. My company was in over its head and heading toward bankruptcy. We had spent a majority of our cash reserves on the costs of the public offering. My personal assets were safe; I’d wisely kept them apart from those of the company. But now I had to dismantle the behemoth I’d created. It took me fifteen months to shut the wholething down, while, on the sidelines, millions of other less fortunate investors were scrambling to save themselves and their skins.
    Fifteen months of shucking off what I had worked so hard to create and what everyone in America was now regarding as the world’s worst idea ever.
    I tried to be philosophical about the loss. After all, business was in my blood. I’d started that chain of ice cream shops when I was fresh out of college. Then I’d sold them and moved on to another business, then another and another. It was what I did. I was an entrepreneur. Guys like me don’t just go out and get a job. We look for opportunities and we create businesses where there are none. People, products, and services are our paint, brush, and canvas. Creating those companies is what inspires us.
    But something had changed inside me. Something I had rarely spoken about, even to my wife.
    When I was dismantling my latest company, I came across some documents that forced me to rethink the course of my entire life. Among them was a list of my company’s assets on one particular day: September 30, 2006. Looking it over, it occurred to me that if I had stopped buying properties on that day alone and sold off everything, my company would have escaped the housing crash unscathed.
    Why didn’t you stop, Chris? I asked myself.
    The answer, when it came, was hard to stomach.
    Because it wasn’t enough.
    What was enough, Chris?
    I didn’t know. The sick fact was that, at the time I was gobbling up those properties, I was a thirty-eight-year-old who had never learned the meaning of enough. If I made $1 million, I’d want $10 million. If I made $10 million, I’d want $100 million. If I made $100 million, I’d want $1 billion. And I was closing in on that billion, for my company at least, when it all tanked.
    My goals in life had consisted of running toward a finish line painted with a dollar sign.
    Some nights I couldn’t sleep, thinking of how I was going to move the next mountain to expand our holdings. The daily stress had been so unbearable that I’d nearly ruined my health. I was lucky to have escaped alive.
    And now, as I looked out over the ashes of that company, I had to wonder: What was the point of it all?
    I realized I had measured my