Today we have a very special guest, John Lee Dumas, entrepreneur and military veteran.

John, I’m going to get right to it, you’ve had an interesting background and career. It appears to be extremely smooth with EntrepreneurOnFire and the stuff you’ve done over the last two years, but I’d like to go back a little ways into your earlier life. What were you like, for example, as I see you very, very motivated and highly functional, highly detail oriented, etc. is this something you always had or were there any changes that were the result of the military?

John: I led a very sheltered life for the first 18 years, and because of that, I wasn’t that entrepreneur from day one. You hear Gary Vaynerchuk who is making $2,000 a weekend trading baseball cards. I was really doing as little possible to just enjoy life to the max; playing sports, having fun in high school, doing those type of things. It truly wasn’t until my time in the military where I encountered many life and death situations, being a deployed officer to Iraq for a 13-month tour of duty in 2003/2004 that I really realized: “Man, I am the person that’s responsible for my success or demise.” When I had that shift, Thomas, that’s when things started to change.

Pretty quickly after the Military, I saw that that was also able to be the case in the civilian world. As an entrepreneur, I also realized that I had responsibility for my success or demise. Not necessarily on a life and death format anymore, but on a success and failure format. I decided that that was going to be my goal, to take the reins, to be really in control of everything that I could control and make the most of the situations.

Thomas: Did you have a lot of success before the military?

John: Before the military, no. I was a very average high school student. I was a very average college student. I didn’t excel in anything. I really didn’t pile a lot of responsibilities on my plate at all. I wanted to be free, I wanted to be lacking any real responsibilities, which I think is one thing that really pulled me into entrepreneurship – the ability to be free and to really control my own destiny.

Before I jumped into the U.S. Army, that was more on a: “How can I put as little on my plate as possible so I can do what I consider fun?” That was really my mentality and attitude. Because of that, I was just pretty average at just about everything.

Thomas: What’s interesting there is here you’ve been hyper-successful, if I can use that term (if it is one), but you had to at some point learn that you could. You had to be the little train that could. What happened in the military that made you realize: “Wait a second. I can do this”? Because you really didn’t have those successes. You went jumping from one thing, to the military, and then shortly thereafter you became super successful.

John:           The military was the first time that I had no choice but to accept responsibility, and it wasn’t just a little bit of responsibility; it was massive responsibility. That massive responsibility encountered the lives of 14 soldiers that were under my command in the four tanks I was in control of. That was a responsibility that I couldn’t just walk away with or take lightly. It was a very heavy burden that I took at a very young age, especially for someone that had kind of been avoiding those burdens and those responsibilities for most of his life.

I just came to that realization when I stood in front of my soldiers as we were about to go into a fire fight, or that next mission, or whatever it might be that their lives could very well be dependent on how prepared I was for this mission. Their lives could be dependent on how I react when it comes to becoming under fire, and all of these decisions that I had to make.

That’s when I just made this mental shift in my mind that said: “You...