Las Vegas, Nevada Real Estate Agent’s Las Vegas Homes, Condos, Land, Commercial Real Estate and Personal Blog

Background

My dear wife Karen, whose opinion I value greatly, told me that she didn’t like the last few posts and that these posts were not reflective of my personality and style. I agree and will change things accordingly.

First a few words about me so you can get a picture of my environment as it is essential to this discussion. A bad accident can be a point of discontinuity in a person’s life and an auto accident turned mine upside down in October 1996 and due to the same accident I don’t remember much about my life prior to the accident other than being a habitual underperformer. I had studied electrical engineering and ended up with a low C average and was drifting through life aimlessly. One day I came across a quote from Michael Jordan. It said “AT SOME POINT YOU HAVE TO STOP ASPIRING TO BE THE MAN YOU WANT TO BE AND START BEING THE MAN YOU ASPIRE TO BE”. I went back to school the next semester and started taking courses again. There I met two people who had a profound effect on my life. One was Mr. John Price, quirky but a certified genius, his IQ was off the scale (really). If I remember correctly, he had attended MIT and was able to get BS and then a Master’s degree in electrical engineering in two years. He took me under his wing and taught me how to think. The other one was Mr. Saeed Karamooz, one the world’s foremost and respected designers of communications routers, whom I talked into moving his company to Las Vegas and am honored to have as my best friend for over 20 years. He taught me how to work. His goal was to outwork the Mandarin and Indian graduate students who are legendary in academic circles for work ethics. To make a long story short I was conditionally (passed a test on undergraduate courses) accepted into Graduate school due to the dean of the college of engineering’s recommendation and passing a test.

My confidence gradually increased and I started acing graduate and PHD level courses. One of my major achievements which you can relate to was writing an algorithm and program for a vehicle to park itself that got me an A+ in artificial intelligence. Then I decided to tackle the problem of Carbon Filament Winding (Space Shuttle Busters are built using this process), this is as complicated a problem as you can have in robotics which was my specialty. My mistake was choosing the subject for my thesis and unfortunately couldn’t beat it.

At that time (1995) the internet was taking off and I decided to be the first to open an online auto business. In a trip to Phoenix to help my step-son set up an auto dealership I got into a nasty double accident. We got hit in the side of the car and hit a reinforced cement wall which guarded a propane tank head on. We hit the wall so hard that many cement blocks where thrown 15 feet from the wall. It was a miracle that the rebar reinforced wall exploded like that or we would have ended up dead.

My life turned upside down at that instant. I was badly hurt in the back and knees. The emergency room which I ended up in Phoenix actually did a pregnancy test on my step-son Jason Shaw and things went down from there. Pain at extreme levels has a hypnotic effect. For a couple of years I only could sleep a few hours a day, if you could call it sleep, it was more like passing out for half an hour and the pain would wake me up. One is willing to do anything to get a little bit of comfort and the doctor’s way was injecting me with steroids. Steroids at a high level are poisonous and I don’t react to them well, either physically or mentally. I call it crashing. I would get very cold all of a sudden and start vomiting repeatedly until I turned grey; it is like being in the grip of the devil. I have immense respect for life and believe that my life doesn’t belong to me only and my family has a big share in it, so I never thought about suicide, but there were times that I prayed to GOD that if it is GOD’s will to take me, now would be a good time. This went on until I found a world class Dr. in Beverly Hills named Dr. Mahmood Rezaian, who is one of the pioneers of endoscopic back surgery. The way it works is much like a root canal except it is done on the disk and no cutting is involved. I had two surgeries on my back and neck which relieved the nerve pain but the joint and muscle pain remain, although it is manageable. We used to live in Nebraska at the time; Nebraska’s weather is harsh and very cold in the winter and hot and humid in the summer. I am arthritic now and was mostly bedridden there, so we decided to move to Las Vegas. At the time we had no idea what we would do in Las Vegas. My health improved noticeably here and I saw a good opportunity in real estate. I have been quite successful in my real estate business. Enough for now, hopefully you have a feel for where I am coming from. I will analyze my new business plan in the next blog.

THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE, don’t ever forget.