Raul A. Gonzalez

I started working at twelve, picking radishes and hauling buckets of eggplant on a farm in Bountiful, Utah. Nobody made me. I just wanted money of my own, and I kept going back to the row. That is still the most useful thing I know about work.

At twenty I spent two years on a mission in South Texas, meeting strangers all day with no leads and no script. That is where I learned to say “Who cares?” and go, and where I first ran what I now call Break Barriers Week.

After that I sold door to door: pest control first, then solar. I went months barely making a sale a week before it clicked, and once it did, I went on to sell more than $12 million in solar, open new markets, and recruit and train reps. Some of them came from fast-food jobs and reached their first $10,000 month. Teaching people to believe in the structure long enough to get their first proof turned out to be the thing I love most.

Since then I have built and run businesses of my own, with no funding and no template to copy. I have also lost a company, drifted for six months through jobs that were not me, and found my way back. The ideas in this book came out of all of it.

I grew up with a simple plan handed to me: get the degree, get the job with benefits, work thirty years, retire. Nobody around me had drawn anything different. This book is the one I wish someone had handed me instead.

I live in St. George, Utah, with my family. My faith matters to me and shapes how I think about work, patience, and what is worth chasing. I am not interested in telling anyone to walk away from the people or the beliefs that hold their life together. I am interested in the rules they never agreed to.