Todd Rose - Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment

For my father, Larry

For my son, Zain

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, the American Declaration of Independence

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Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that whenin a decade, a century, or a millenniumwe grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler

Its safe to say nobody saw Jennie coming.

In 2005, using the ten-inch reflecting telescope at Farm Cove Observatory in Auckland, New Zealand, Jennie McCormick discovered an unknown planet in a solar system fifteen thousand light-years away. A few years later she pulled off another uncommon feat when she discovered a new asteroid, which she patriotically christened New Zealand. She has coauthored more than twenty papers in academic journals, including the prestigious Science. The actress Gates McFadden, who played Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, sought out Jennie at a science fiction expo to request her autograph. Yet one of Jennies lesser known accomplishments might be her most impressive of all: she became an internationally respected astronomer without obtaining a college diploma of any kind.

In fact, she never even graduated from high school.

Jennie was raised by a single mother in the river city of Wanganui. I never fitted in well at school, she recalls. I was a teenage girl with hormones, I didnt like the way I looked, I didnt like my shoes. I was headstrong and didnt have a lot of parental guidance. I just wanted to get out of there.

At the age of fifteen, she dropped out of school and took a job cleaning out horse stables. Not long after, Jennies mother left her. Compelled to make her way on her own, Jennie attempted to pass the high school equivalency exam. She was not successful. By the time she was twenty-one, Jennie had become a single mother herself, supporting her infant son by serving chicken combo meals at a fast-food joint. Her future, to put it mildly, looked bleak.

Then came her turning point.

One night in her midtwenties, Jennie was visiting relatives who lived on the edge of an extinct volcano caldera, far from city lights. A family member handed her a pair of binoculars and urged her to peer up at the Milky Way, saying it was a sight that could only be seen in the backcountry. I can still see myself lying down in the wet grass and looking through the binoculars at the sky and just, Oh my God! Wow!, Jennie recounts. All those stars, it was just awesome. I was hooked! I knew nothing about them at all, nothing, but after that I just had to know more.

Jennies stellar epiphany motivated her to learn everything she could about astronomy. Though she had little knowledge of science and few educational resources, she patiently trained herself to make precise observations with increasingly larger telescopes. In 1999, after eleven years of independent study and practice, Jennie cobbled together a domed observatory on her patio out of cast-off equipment and rusty parts. Five years after she completed her backyard Farm Cove Observatory, Jennie employed a sophisticated observational technique known as gravitational lensingharnessing the gravity of intervening stars to bend and focus distant lightto behold an exoplanet with a mass three times that of Jupiter. She became the first amateur to discover a new planet since 1781, when William Herschel discovered Uranus.

Another person nobody saw coming was Alan Rouleau. Named one of the top tailors in the country by Town & Country magazine, he designs handcrafted wardrobes for corporate titans, celebrities, and professional athletes. His boutique, Alan Rouleau Couture, resides on the swankiest stretch of Newbury Street in Boston, where he serves as the VIP tailor for the Taj, the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons, and the Mandarin Oriental. He has been called a virtuoso of exclusive fabricPiacenza cashmere, Drago super 180s, and Loro Piana super 200s all make their way into his modish creations. Alans unique expertise blends mathematical precision, an exceptionally deep knowledge of the qualities of different cloth, and one of the most unappreciated aspects of bespoke tailoringunderstanding each individual client on his own terms.

You have to take into account their personality, their age, their skin tone, their career, their lifestyleand especially their aspirations, explains Alan. Youve got to recognize not just who they are, but who they want to be. Alans easygoing confidence and roguish charm invites clients to open up and reveal themselves, even those accustomed to the most attentive service and possessing the most discriminating taste.

You might guess that attaining such an elite level of mastery would require a lifetime of devotion to ones craft. And indeed, in the United States, most upscale tailors are raised in families who have been fashioning custom apparel for generations, or else are genteel imports from Europe where its not unusual for tailors to be apprenticed in the art from boyhood.

Alan followed neither path.

He grew up in Leominster, a hardscrabble town in central Massachusetts, as one of six children. After he graduated from high school, Alan enrolled in Southeastern Massachusetts University, an inexpensive regional college, but given the number of siblings, his parents could not afford his tuition. Alan tried to pay his way through college by taking on multiple part-time jobs, attending classes during the day, pumping gas in the evenings, and loading UPS trucks before dawn. It didnt work out. Alans exhausting hours prevented him from keeping up with his schoolwork, so he took a leave of absence in the hope of earning enough money to one day return to college. He wound up working as a bartender in the mill town of Gardner, serving fifty-cent drafts to college kids and blue-collar workers. It was not a very promising foundation for professional advancement.

But what Alan lacked in resources and connections, he made up for with savvy people skills and canny business instincts. When Alans boss was unexpectedly forced to sell the bar where he worked, Alan seized the opportunity to purchase the business. Even though he had no assets and was only twenty years old, Alan managed to persuade a bank to loan him the money to buy the bar by arguing that his people skills would ensure his success as the new owner. Alan was right. He increased both customers and profits and eventually paid the loan off. But he didnt stop there. He also bought the building the bar was in, then opened a real estate company. He bought a four-decker apartment building. Then he bought another building and converted it into a restaurant. He purchased another bar at a racquetball and tennis club in the nearby town of Fitchburgthen bought the entire club. By the time he was twenty-eight, Alan had parlayed a night gig intended to pay for college into a small-town business empire.

Despite his enviable success, he felt that something important was missing from his life. A few years later, Alan looked in the mirror one morning and realized, This is not who I truly am. There is more to me than this. In a move that shocked everyone around him, Alan sold off all his businesses and relocated to Boston, where he tried his hand at something that even those who knew him best would never have predicted: making mens suits.

It was a radical career pivotbut one that so thoroughly filled the void inside Alan that he immersed himself completely in the art of crafting custom apparel. After two years of diligent training and practice, at the age of thirty-five, he won his first national fashion award. Many more would follow. Soon Alan Rouleau Couture was holding its own against the most established and prominent tailors in the country.