The most meaningful memory I have from childhood isn't a birthday or a holiday. It's the Saturday morning a salesman came to our door and everything that happened after my mom chose to answer it. I don't actually remember her opening the door or what her face looked like in that moment. I was probably in my room. What I remember is the result: a decision landing in our living room that would follow both of us for years.
At the time, we were living in government-subsidized housing. We lived on food stamps, now known as SNAP. Money wasn't "tight." Money was a daily negotiation. My mom wrote checks for things we needed, knowing the account didn't have it yet, and then lived on a quiet prayer that her Friday deposit would hit before the check cleared. That was the rhythm of our life: optimism, pressure, and a thin line between making it and getting caught. (a line we often tripped over)
The knock on the door was a salesman, standing at the door like a plot device, holding out a full set of 1988 World Book Encyclopedias. Crimson faux-leather covers with gold trim: heavy, formal, almost ceremonial. They looked like they belonged in a house with a fireplace and a study, the kind of home I dreamed of as a child. Not a tiny, cold, sterile apartment like ours.
I'm sure he sold the educational benefit of these books. How I would perform better in school, how I could advance in life, how I would have access to the knowledge of the world at our fingertips. What he was really selling, intentional or not, was a dream that I would be able to advance beyond my station.
He said the price like it was normal. Without remembering the exact wording, I wouldn't be surprised if he said, "the investment" rather than price.
$700.
My mom didn't have $700. It might as well have been $7,000.
But she had something else. A kind of naive hope that didn't look like optimism. It looked like a decision. She made a small down payment and agreed to installments stretched out over years. It wasn't "buying books." It was closer to financing a future.
I was ten years old. I didn't understand what a payment plan meant. I didn't understand what it meant to carry a financial decision month after month, with no guarantee it was going to pay off. What I understood, instantly, quietly, was that those books mattered. That my mom had just made a bet on me.
When the encyclopedias arrived, they changed the room. They didn't just sit on a shelf; they announced themselves. Dark red. Gold trim. The kind of red that felt rich even when nothing else in the house did.
Here's the part I didn't connect until recently: that red is everywhere in my life now.
The color palette on this website. The colors I'm drawn to. The way we use it prominently in our home today. I never once thought, Oh, this is because of those encyclopedias.
But now? It feels obvious. Like those books didn't just give me knowledge, they stamped something into my brain about what possibility looks like.
Over the next four years, I read the entire set.
Cover to cover.
Years later, watching The Matrix, there's a moment that stuck to me in a way I didn't expect. Neo downloads a skill in seconds, opens his eyes, and says: "I know kung fu." That's obviously Hollywood, but the feeling is real. That's what those encyclopedias did for me, slowly and quietly. Page by page, volume by volume, they didn't just give me facts. They installed a framework. They gave me language for things I couldn't name yet, context for a world I hadn't seen, and the confidence that I could walk into new rooms and figure it out. Not overnight. Not magically. But inevitably.
Those books weren't just conveying knowledge, they were forming my Growth Mindset.
The Thin Line Between "Selling Hope" and Predatory Behaviour
I've thought about that salesman a lot over the years.
Was he brilliant or predatory?
I keep coming back to this: he wasn't selling paper and ink. He was selling hope. He was selling an image of a kid going further than he's "supposed" to go, to a mother pulling her family out of a situation that doesn't offer many exits.
That's good salesmanship.
It's also… potentially something darker, depending on how you look at it.
Because he was going door to door on Saturday mornings, and he knew exactly who he was talking to. He wasn't selling encyclopedias to people who wanted encyclopedias. He was selling them to people who wanted a different life.
And if you don't have a lot of money, hope can be the easiest thing to overspend on.
For years, I held a warm, almost romantic view of those books. They were a turning point. A gift. A symbol of belief.
Then I spoke to my mom about them recently, and it hit me hard, that the story didn't feel warm to her at all.
She remembered the encyclopedias vividly, but her voice had pain in it. Almost angst. Like she could still feel the pressure of those payments. Like she could still feel the fear of what it meant if she was wrong.
My version of the story was cozy: a kid, a set of books, a door opening.
Her version had a shadow: a decision that haunted her for years.
That's what I missed. It wasn't just the sacrifice of making payments. It was the emotional cost of making a choice like that when you can't afford to make mistakes. When every month is already spoken for. When you're carrying responsibility alone, and a purchase that big isn't just "tightening the belt," it's risking that the belt snaps.
I could hear it underneath her words: What was I thinking? Was I irresponsible? Did I get played?
And in that moment, I realized something that feels obvious now and somehow never occurred to me then: it's possible for something to be beautiful for the child, and brutal for the parent.
So I told her.
Not casually. Not in a throwaway way. I told her clearly, like I was trying to rewrite a paragraph she'd been reading to herself for decades.
I told her those books mattered. That they weren't just encyclopedias. They were leverage. They were confidence. They were identity. They were the first time I saw, in physical form, that learning could be a way out, not in a fantasy way, but in a practical one. That those crimson covers weren't decoration. They were a stake in the ground. I told her, "I would not be where I am today, living this dream in London without her buying those books."
If that purchase haunted her, I wanted her to know she didn't carry it alone anymore. And if she'd been wondering all these years whether it was worth it, I wanted the answer to land where it should've landed a long time ago: yes.
The Belief That Never Went Out
I didn't have a formal name for it back then, but something got installed in me at ten years old:
Knowledge is an investment. Not a hobby. Not a nice-to-have. An investment.
You put something into your mind, and it pays you back later, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in ways you can't trace. It pays you back when you're trying to lead people, when you're navigating uncertainty, when you're in a new environment and you need to understand the game faster than the room expects you to.
Years later I read Carol Dweck's Mindset and recognized the pattern she was describing, the idea that abilities aren't fixed, that effort and learning compound over time. I'd been living that way since I was ten. I just didn't have the label.
A Career That Looks Like Left Turns (But Isn't)
I never had a tidy, linear career plan. What I had was a simple operating system that started with those encyclopedias and never really stopped: keep learning, keep stretching, keep moving toward bigger problems. Have vision, set goal, pivot, iterate, document, repeat.
I took the first job I could get in sports, then kept following the work that scared me a little. I got better on purpose. I asked questions other people were too busy to ask. I stayed close to league offices and team business services because they had the repository of consolidated, documented ideas from all the teams, and industry as a whole. I read constantly, subscribed to Sports Business Journal, treated every season like a case study, and stacked small improvements until they turned into momentum. A lot of it was growth mindset. A lot of it was intentionality. A lot of it was stubbornness. And a lot of it was curiosity, the kind that makes you believe there is always a better way to do it and then refuses to let you stop until you find it.
Minor league hockey to minor league baseball to NASCAR to Italian football, and now I am in London as Chief Revenue Officer for Como 1907, the club in Serie A, now dreaming of Champions League, living a life that would have felt impossible to the kid in that government apartment.
On paper, it looks like a string of left turns.
But underneath it, it's been the same throughline the entire time: I read to grow. I read to lead better. I read to think more clearly, to understand the people I'm working with, and to adapt faster than the environment changes. Every book is a deposit into something I can't fully account for, a reservoir of perspective and language and pattern recognition that pays out later, usually when I'm not expecting it.
So Where Does "2HundredBooks" Come From?
About ten years ago, I set a goal: read 200 books in a single year.
At the time it felt ambitious but not insane. I was deep into speed reading. Audible during commutes. Often reading two or three books at once. Two hundred felt like a stretch goal, but still within the realm of possibility.
I never hit it.
My best year was 50 books.
By conventional standards, that's failure. I set a goal and fell 75% short, and I've never even come close to 200 in a year since. And honestly, I'm not sure it's even a wise goal. There's a version of reading 200 books where it becomes about accumulation rather than understanding, more about the number than the growth.
But here's what I've come to believe: the pursuit was the point.
Those 50 books and the hundreds that followed over the years, changed how I think, how I work, how I lead, and how I see the world. The goal of 200 was never really about the number. It was about the commitment. To curiosity. To growth. To never stopping.
2HundredBooks is a nod to that original, unattainable goal. It stands for the belief that ambitious reading, even imperfect, even incomplete, even falling 150 books short, is one of the most powerful investments you can make in yourself.
My mom understood that standing at the door with a salesman she probably couldn't afford to trust.
And now I understand something else: she didn't just buy encyclopedias.
She bought a possibility, then carried the cost of it for years.
If she's been holding any regret about that decision, I hope she knows now what I didn't say clearly enough when I was ten:
It mattered.
It worked.
And I'm still trying to live up to it.