Our fantasy life series is quickly becoming a fan favorite. Check out the previous posts here.

The staff here at wfh office is loving these semi-fictional works. The characters are made up but the events are real and are a combination of two to three real-life success stories of people who have started at the bottom, or hit rock bottom, and then worked hard to find entrepreneurial success.

Today’s story is about Mack.

Mack was always surrounded by problems. Sometimes they were his and sometimes they were other people’s concerns. But Mack always seemed to have a knack for solutions. Eventually, he was able to turn his solutions into a profit.

Mack the Problem Solver

Mack’s life started off the same way many American lives begin. He was the son of a mechanic and a teacher. From a young age, they taught him to think through problems, find solutions, and then fix them with his own mind and two hands.

His early years were spent playing with toys and looking at picture books. But unlike other kids, as he became older, he continued to tinker and read. His mind and body were sharp. This pleased his parents a great deal. They saw the best of each of them in their son.

Mack went to elementary School and made plenty of friends and enemies. Other kids were sometimes jealous of him. He was able to think on another level. The teachers tended to dote on him. They challenged him and pushed him hard.

Everyone around Mack thought he was on a path to greatness. Unfortunately, no path is a straight line in this world. Mack’s curved and meandered more than most.

The Trap

Once in middle school, he started to get bored. It was a bigger school with more kids that were meaner. The teachers seemed to care even less. And his parents thought they had raised him properly and didn’t need to micromanage his self-growth.

With the freedom from parental control and the lack of caring by teachers, Mack found himself running with a bad crowd. It was with this bad crowd that Mack learning how to fight. He learned how to chug a beer, smoke a cigarette, roll a blunt, and cut a line.

Everything parents tried to protect their kids from, he found with this group.

Unlike those in his group, Mack became a master of deception. He was able to maintain decent grades. He created just as much of an illusion as he needed to continue living his lifestyle. His freshman year of high school, he and his buddies got trashed on a random school night. They were loitering outside of a local college hangout trying to pick up college girls and some college boys didn’t particularly care for the behavior.

Mack and his friends had typical fight wounds but the college kids fared much worse. Two of them were put into the hospital and one of them nearly died. Mack and his friends were sent to detention facilities with two-year sentences. This stint in a corrections facility followed him through the rest of his youth and his adult life. But it was also where he attended the school of hard knocks and learned about life and what would happen if he didn’t change.

On Lockdown

For the first time in his life, Mack knew fear. His parents raised him to be a good person. Until the night of the fight, he had never done anything wrong unless it was to his own body and mind. He regretted his actions and from the brief conversations he had with his crew since the arrest, so did they.

All of they vowed to be better and try harder once this whole situation was over. But first, they had to serve their sentences.

The first couple of weeks were the hardest. The new guy gets picked on in lockdown. He got beat down multiple times and harassed and even threatened with sexual assault.

All of it stopped when Mack befriended an older teenager named Seth. Seth was serving ten years for a robbery gone wrong where an elderly man ended up dead. As soon as he turned 18, he was going to be sent to a maximum security facility. Not just because of the crime, but also because Seth was a member of a gang. Seth and Mack got along fabulously.

They were both smart and regretted their decisions and wanted to get out of jail and make their lives better and redeem themselves. Their favorite place was the library. They read the classics and created a book club, which was oddly successful.

They also discussed current affair and life philosophies with their group and were referred to by other prisoners and the guards as “the intellectuals”. Mack also got back into tinkering with things and fixing broken ones. Everything from small engines to electrical devices.

The Intellectuals and his personal projects made the two years in juvie fly by. When he got out, he returned to his old school just in time to start his junior year.

Junior Year

When he returned home, things weren’t the same. People feared him. Those who didn’t looked down on him.

Kind of like he was a criminal. Which he was.

Even his parents didn’t treat him the same. But he knew he needed, and wanted, to make them proud of their son once again. He got up early and worked out, just like he did while he was in jail. Then he showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and went to school.

He pulled straight “A”s his first semester and afterward, asked his folks if he could get a job. They reluctantly allowed him to do so, as long as he maintained his GPA and stayed out of trouble. He got a job washing dishes at a local restaurant.

What surprised his family the most is when he started paying rent. When they asked if he got a job just to pay them room and board, he admitted it.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

And that became his motto until this day.

Life After High School

Mack decided to forego college. He felt like he had read more books and studied and learned more about life than everyone else his age and probably some college professors.

Instead, he continued working and living with his folks and still paid them rent. While they were upset he didn’t want to further his education, he understood his argument. He was clearly a much different person than before he was locked up. He was the son they raised.

It took him a while, but all of the members of the intellectuals were released from juvie and decided to meet up on the outside. They still used it as a book club and to discuss current affairs, but also as a support group.

This is when Seth came to him. Like Mack, he got out of jail, moved in with his mother, and worked to save up money. The two of them had tens of thousands of dollars to invest in a business.

They wanted something that was hands-off and could be fairly close to passive income. The two felt they could create an empire but they needed to start the business on the right foot.

What they decided to start with blew everyone’s mind. They opted to go in together on a set of self-storage units. You can go here to discover more.

While they had a large loan payment, they managed to be successful fairly early on. So they decided to open more storage units.

Ten Years Later

Seth and Mack are still business partners.

They now own half a dozen self-storage facilities as well as several franchise restaurants. From the jump, their focus was to hire people to manage the businesses for them. They wanted money. But they wanted to have the time to work on personal projects.

These days, Seth and Mack now do quite a bit of speaking. They go to juvenile corrections facilities and speak to the young men and women.

They tell them it’s possible to move on. They can make their lives better. But they have to work hard and not fall back into bad habits.

Their businesses provide an income to allow them to get out and be active with their volunteering efforts. As much as Mack would like to go back and not make some of those mistakes again, he knows if he hadn’t made them, he would not be nearly as successful and fulfilled as he is today.

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