How a Near-Death Experience Sparked My Drive to Become a Successful Entrepreneur
When I was 20 years old, I almost died in a car accident.
February 13th, 2007, I was driving home from California State Polytechnic University, when all of a sudden my tire blew out. I spun out of control and my car flipped over on the freeway four times. When it finally stopped, I got out on the side of the road and looked around. Somehow, I was alive.
This was the pivotal moment that made me realize life shouldn’t be taken for granted.
I could have died — I should have died.
Before that, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had a 1.2 GPA in high school. I went to community college, because that’s all I could get into. I was just another twenty-year-old with no real aim in life. But after that car accident, everything changed. I could have died — I should have died. Instead, I walked out of the car and reassessed my life.
I decided I was going to become an entrepreneur.
Fast-forward just a couple of years, and I was working on building my first app. It was a platform for influencers to run more effective campaigns with brands, long before influencer marketing had really taken off. I taught myself how to code, brought in a trusted friend from college as the VP of the company, partnered with a few of my friends who were influencers, and within the first 60 days we closed about $110,000 in revenue.
From there, it was a race to continue generating revenue to fund the next iteration of our app, and continue building the business.
Today, that app idea has become theAmplify, and we’ve been fortunate to have worked with some of the biggest brands in the world: AXE, Lionsgate, Nissan, Amazon, Ford, The NFL, CoverGirl, and more.
When I look back on my journey as an entrepreneur, all of my success has been the result of focusing on what matters. This past year, I was included on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Advertising and Marketing — and a decade ago, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. That, in itself, is a testament to the importance of having a vision and then going after it with everything you’ve got.
I really believe it was that near-death experience on the highway that flipped a switch in my brain and helped me understand I needed to focus. It wasn’t just about getting good grades in college, or climbing some corporate ladder. If I was fortunate to be alive, then I wanted to do something with purpose. I wanted to make an impact, and more than anything, create something new.
I’m sure I’m not the only entrepreneur with a story like this. You hear stories all the time about how someone failed out of college and had no idea what they wanted to do, or how they bet it all on a single idea they came up with in their dorm room. What I’ve always found to be the common thread in all these stories is belief in yourself and what it is you’re doing. That’s the most important part. If you don’t believe in yourself enough to take the first step, then nobody else is going to follow you. But as soon as you take that first step, someone else sees your vision and chooses to follow. And then another. And another. Until a few years goes by, and you’ve got a full team and a successful company.
The reason I think it’s important to share these stories is because this is what I wish someone would have told me back when I was 20 years old. The truth is, I didn’t know what entrepreneurship was really like until I started building something myself. But the benefit of social media today, and the Internet, and our ability to share with one another, is to take these stories and pass them along to the next person, the next 20-year-old who doesn’t know what he or she wants to do and is looking for a little guidance. It’s incredibly important to give back, and every great entrepreneur I’ve ever met enjoys sharing what they’ve learned along the way.
Sometimes it takes having your car flip over four times to wake up and decide where it is you want to go in life.
Other times, reading about it happening to someone else is enough to get you to see things from a different perspective.
Worth sharing?
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Please comment below if this resonated with you, and reach out to me on Twitter or by email (rezvani.justin@gmail.com) to tell me your thoughts.
