God help me, I've done it.

[Doc]

(By the way, Doc, what exactly DO you do? And how is it that you can do all that you do and own a house full of animals, an adoring wife, wear dreads and a kilt, and have a sex life that you've described in many, MANY other threads? How do you do all this and still post here?!)
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Delegate responsibility.

That's the long and short of it.

I manage an empire of charity. I run various homeless shelters, adult education programs, battered women safehouses, food pantries, and soup kitchens. We are one of the few rescue operations in the US that are entirely self supporting and receive NO government funding at all. At the heart of it all is industrial clean up. From the scrap clean up comes money, through recycling all those materials. Bricks, steel, wood, etc. There are no free lunches. Each man works to his own ability. This generates a ton of money. For a lot of goods, we exchange labour for services. We may send a group of men (And women, I am an equal opportunity ogre) to work in a bakery in exchange for breads and such. I run this whole mess like one would run a business. When this mess was dumped on my lap, it was hermoraging money, everything was run down, there was drugs and alcohol everywhere, and what few employees there were... Were just plain awful. People that did not care about their work. I take all these homeless men and I put them to work... They were a resource, sitting around and doing nothing. Men that refused to work were tossed out. Men that stayed were offered the best meals and accomodations that one could hope to find in a shelter. (Over time... Took a long time to build up to that point.) Each penny was carefully strangled out of the budget, and still is. Because of the unusual nature of how I run everything, we lost our non profit status. That's ok. We are sitting on a surplus reserve of eight digits, and we have enough financial power now that we can pull through anything. We employ armed security at our battered womens shelters, we have our own school for the children with a full compliment of well paid teachers, an army of social workers, various accountants and other mundanes that nobody thinks about, and all manner of people who are well paid productive employees that hold back the homeless masses from the rest of society that doesn't want anything to do with them. And because of my ruthless and merciless approach to business, I have made it work when others insisted that it could not be done. It's funny. My business is to help other human beings and lift them out of the gutter. But to do this, I must be utterly devoid of any compassion or tolerance for screw ups. This whole thing lives or dies by how carefully I steer it. I have no choice but to run a tight ship... What people think is a minor meaningless mistake can have ruinous consequences later.

I manage most of the mundane stuff from at home. I am constantly emailing stuff back and forth. I get faxes. I am on the phone a lot... Or not at all, depending on which part of the year we are in. Should matters need my personal attention, and NOBODY wants that, my driver comes to pick me up and bring me into town. Late at night I look at all the paperwork, budgets, proposals, new ideas, progress reports, all these things involved in empires, and I play games to keep my hands busy while my mind thinks. There are moments of furious activity followed by lulls and doldrums of extreme boredom.

And you must understand... The best things in life are created under pressure. Diamonds, wine, all manner of fine things. When I put the squeeze on folk, it's for their own good. People do not realise what they are capable of doing until somebody motivates them to do it. In extreme moments, of intense pressure, this means somebody motivating them with the proverbial whip. And in the long run, everybody profits from this.

As for the dreadlocks, well, I have worn those for a long long time now, way back when it was still very dangerous to do so. They were more of a political statement back then, rather than a fashion statement. The kilts are a recent fixation. The animals are my true career in life. Looking after them keeps me sane. I find animals to be better company than most people. And my wife agrees, and shares this view.

And you have taken the first steps to living your life on your own terms, doing what you damn well please... By starting your own empire. Make what you want from it. Be your own person. Just remember your karma... If life deals you a good hand, you have a responsibility to return the favour to some other folk. If you were to go to a hospital and offer to do a bead crafting class for those poor kids with no hair in the cancer ward, they would love you and give you all sorts of warm fuzzy feelings. This is the key to all success and is the true source of wealth.

Now, I gotta go answer some emails.