Chapter 1. Our story begins with a simple but important premise. The goal of The City School is to create a world-class educational experience for our students that is accessible to all families—regardless of their ability to pay, the size of the family, or the age of the child. I mean this: at our school, students will all be challenged and no one will be left behind. I'm often asked what I think of that statement. In all honesty, I think it's exactly right. I want to be clear that we don't put our stamp of approval on a student when they walk through the front door at 9:00 A.M. every day. That would be absurd. Instead, we want to educate students who are willing to put in the time and work necessary to succeed. If you love being on a team, you can be on our team. If you hate school, you can walk away and not come back. Regardless, you have an opportunity to learn in a way that provides meaning to your life. We want our young people to know that anything is possible in this world. I know this firsthand because I'm living proof of that. When I was sixteen years old I had no direction, no skills, no money, no credit, and no idea how to start a successful business. How did I accomplish this? By focusing on the goal that I wanted and making decisions that would propel me toward that goal. The question is, How did I do it? How does a young man from the poorest zip code in America, who has a record of failure and failure after failure, find a way to turn around his life? It's simple. I believe in myself and the people around me. I believe in hard work. I believe in putting in the time to succeed. And I believe in making the right choices in my life. Many people want to do something but don't know how. All they need is a hand to help them along the way. My story begins with an encounter. My father was a mailman. He used to work on Second Avenue and Third Avenue in the city of New York, collecting the daily mail from the post office and delivering it to our building, a seven-story tenement known as a walk-up on the Lower East Side. All I remember from those early years is a cold, dark, windowless apartment with a toilet that gave off an awful odor. That odor changed in my adolescence and transformed into another odor—alcohol. I can still hear the slurping of an open bottle as it nears empty. Not the clinking of champagne glasses, mind you, but the glugging of scotch or gin. I would hear those sounds at dinner and then the crash of the bottle hitting the hardwood floor. The bottle never broke, but the sound of it being emptied was a clear sign to me that the dinner conversation was over. I didn't know it at the time, but my father was an alcoholic. Although he never touched me or my mother, we were all affected by his behavior. I was taught that he loved us; otherwise he wouldn't have worked so hard to put food on the table, to provide a home for us to live in. I didn't understand how someone who loved us could want to drink so much—a fact that became obvious when my parents divorced and my mother remarried a violent alcoholic. For years, I hated my stepfather and his behavior. But I still had my father, who at times still had his own demons and was an emotional wreck. My parents were both born and raised in the South. By that I mean that they both grew up with a deep-rooted poverty mentality. In the South, if you want to get anywhere, you have to work very hard, and in my family's case, you had to go into business. I came to understand that it wasn't enough to know a business as a concept, as many of my friends and classmates did. You had to own a business and know the intricacies of every aspect of it. My parents' view on work was that if you love what you do, you should stay at it until you get paid. This was their model of being successful in the United States. My family was poor. But instead of focusing on money, they worked at their jobs and stayed focused on a goal. Even though my parents never talked about what we were going to do financially, I felt I was on the right track because I did feel focused. I am grateful to my father for the many lessons he taught me in that dark apartment. He taught me how to save money by never buying a new shirt, always looking for the same one at a used-clothing store. He also taught me how to go through life with very little and how to appreciate the people around you. The one most important lesson he taught me was this: The secret to success in this world is focus and the ability to execute. He lived by his motto: "Someday your ship is going to come in. But you don't know when. You don't know where. The only thing you do know is that if you are waiting for the right time, you will be waiting all your life." This was a philosophy he followed. Instead of sitting around with a cheap beer in front of the television or at the bar playing pool with his friends, he would go to the gym to run stairs or lift weights. When he wasn't working, he was on the streets delivering the mail. To him, work was the way to succeed and the way to make money. He didn't always talk about life's great lessons with me; he showed me. On the other side of the spectrum was my mother. She was a book lover. Books were her refuge. Every morning she'd open up the paper and start reading the obituaries and the comics. The only reason I can remember that was because I grew up in New York City and my mother spent time down here visiting family. We moved there from Chicago at the age of twelve. My mother would sit and read _TV Guide_ the way some people like to watch TV. I remember an incident with a friend of mine named Robert. He was seventeen years old and a serious basketball player. Robert came to the apartment one day after school and went into my mother's bedroom to get dressed. She immediately called my father, "You better get home." "What did I do?" my father said. "You know your mother reads the paper to see who died, and she saw that they found Robert in the river with a bullet through his head." I was horrified and asked my mother if this was true. She started laughing. "That was a good joke," she said. "There are no murders on _Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous._ " Robert and I continued playing basketball after that incident. I always wondered if I had saved Robert's life if he would still be with me today. I wonder the same thing about my father's death. He gave me a lot of responsibility at a very young age. It made me the man I am today. He taught me discipline, hard work, and dedication. I love my father dearly. He was an important and influential part of my life. During the times that I thought about my father, I'd sit down at the kitchen table and write him a letter, which was something I did as a kid. It was my way of telling him that I had a lot of respect for him and that I was proud of the man he was becoming. To me, it was a way to teach him a lesson: never drink and drive. I asked him to drive to the local 7-Eleven and pick me up a bottle of Thunderbird and a can of beer, so we could enjoy the family ritual that we'd had at home. It was our private moment that would never be shared with anyone else, especially my mother. And although I was a teenager at the time, I respected my father. I wanted him to learn this important lesson: don't get drunk and drive. I wanted him to be a good example for me and so that we could do something as a family. When I went out with my friends after school, I'd see him getting drunk and then he'd drive off. I would think, _If I am ever driving around, don't drink and drive!_ I knew I couldn't talk to him about these things because I didn't want to make it seem like I was judging him for drinking. I felt I needed to teach him and help him make good decisions. I'm a firm believer that everyone is influenced by those around them. This is something you will learn at The City School. The City School is about discipline and accountability. Discipline is learning to say no to ourselves. At that time, we didn't do that enough. At home, we didn't do it. In my home, when we wanted to have fun, we did. It was during those times when my father got drunk that we were both at fault. If I'm honest, it was a reflection on me because he didn't want to miss a night with his friends. I knew this and I couldn't have been prouder. Being a teenager, I think I was influenced by the way he got drunk, but I was also influenced by the way he was sober. I think one of the reasons why I worked so hard during those years was to impress him, to make him proud. I'd wake up and hear a truck back into the alley. I was always curious as to what he was doing to make that happen. When the truck backed in, he was