Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  I was deflated. I thought, No, you old fuck, I didn’t. I sulked out to my BMW cursing my paltry take of more than a half million dollars. “You’re such a loser, Carolla. A measly five hundred and forty three thousand. You’ve devastated your poor grandfather. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  But the next year rolled around and I got my Social Security statement and saw that I had made $1,237,903. I immediately hopped in the car and sped down to Grandpa’s. The man didn’t have long to live, and I needed to rub this shit in his face. You know, because I loved him so much. So I sat down with him and said, “Hey Grandpa, you know how last year you asked me if I had made a million dollars? Well, this year I made over a million dollars.” Grandpa paused, looked down, then looked me in the eyes, and said, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

  It was such a Jewey move. He gave a little and then he took it away. He had given me the Jew-jitsu. Used my own momentum against me and choked me out with my own gi.

  It was infuriating, but he was right. And that’s the point I want to end with. Money doesn’t buy you happiness. I hope you didn’t read this book as “Get rich and successful, and everything will be perfect.” It won’t.

  Don’t get me wrong. If you found these pages motivational and took away the idea that if, like a younger me, you have dreams but no support—or even anchors in the form of family and friends telling you to shut up—and no record of success, that it’s still okay to try, well, then I’m gratified. Because you only get one go-around, so you should just put your head down and keep moving forward. But there are no guarantees in life. At no point did I ever think when I was hauling shit on construction sites and cleaning carpets, “This will make a great chapter in my book someday. I can’t wait to talk about it on syndicated radio or The Tonight Show.” No. I just kept trying.

  But I want you to really absorb this idea about money and happiness. Of course being destitute sucks. Not having enough money to pay your bills blows. I know it: I was there. But as my good friend Biggie Smalls once said, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” (I miss you, homie.) There is a sweet spot, and hopefully you’ve found it. Enough to raise a family and have a modest-sized house. When you get past that, you just start chasing your life and never stop to enjoy what you have.

  This year I went to my recently passed-away grandmother’s house, the one I put a kitchen on. My mom and my stepdad were remodeling it so they could move from their piece of shit to a slightly better piece of shit. I was looking around and had a flood of memories, having been essentially raised in that dump. I was walking through, looking at what they were remodeling and seeing all the trinkets and shitty carpentry I remember from growing up.

  After I came home from the visit, it was a cold night so I decided to take a steam. (I built a steam room in my house.) I put in my ear buds and put on a towel then sat schvitzing and thinking about that house and the lousy memories attached. As I started getting emotional, the steam room got a little too hot. Then just as a cosmic kick in the balls, Kenny Rogers’s “Through the Years” came up on the iPod shuffle. So I left the room. As soon as I walked out, I saw my two kids sitting on the edge of my bed. I was covered in sweat and Kenny was blaring in my ears. I looked at my twins sitting on my king-sized bed in a home I built with my own hands, absorbed the juxtaposition, and started bawling. Since I still had the ear buds in when Lynette walked into the room, she saw me sweaty and crying, “Daddy loves you so much” for what appeared to be no reason. But it came from the emotional whiplash of being in my childhood home to see how far I’d come. Or, more accurately, how far I’d dragged myself.

  And that’s what life is all about. Not super-garages or television shows or hanging with celebrities. If you can get those along the way, then fine. But life is about emotional growth. Humans are the only creatures that get to witness and partake in their own evolution. I love the fact that we can actively change ourselves, but I hate the idea that it’s squandered by 99 percent of the population. We appreciate change on a physical level—like before-and-after shots of people on Jenny Craig. But there are no before-and-after shots of someone maturing—a “before” picture of me shotgunning a beer with a pen in my one-bedroom and an “after” picture of me depositing money into my kids’ college fund.

  That’s what this book is about—not getting better houses in the physical sense, but in the symbolic sense. Working hard and using your talents, whatever they may be, to pursue your dreams, whatever they may be, and to get a better life for yourself, in whatever form that takes for you. Thanks for reading, and Mahalo.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank Lynette first because I didn’t in my last book. I’d also like to thank my agent, James “Babydoll” Dixon, my literary agent, Dan Strone, my editor, Suzanne O’Neill, and the whole team from Crown Archetype.

  And I definitely need to thank super-fans Giovanni Peluso and Adam Dristle for their tireless and borderline creepy archiving of everything I do. Without them the writing of this book would have been significantly more difficult. And finally, Mike Lynch, without whom it would have been impossible.