I don’t know anything about his family, but in my mind his father is a true hero. Think how easy it would have been to discourage a kid with only one hand. Watch TV, Jim, watch the game. Pitch? Who are you kidding? But they must not have discouraged him at all. My late father-in-law, Irv Yatzkan, used to say that the job of a parent is neither to encourage nor discourage your children. Just courage them. Help them to have the guts to figure out what they’re good at, and pursue it. Help them find their unique way to shine, and then wait and see what happens.

In business, these attitudes wound up benefiting me in the short and long runs in several practical ways. First, many people who in other companies might have been pigeonholed at some lower level, but who have vision, have risen to the top and become crucial to our success.

A second obvious benefit of treating everyone as an equal is that people really put much more of their heart, soul, and creativity into a company when they’re given a lot of independence and know their contributions are valued. Even if all this weren’t the case, though, treating human beings as equals would be the right thing to do, just because it is the right thing to do. That it happens to work is just one more proof that G-d really did set the world up in the best possible way.

Recently my wife threw a “surprise” fortieth birthday party for me. Now, obviously it’s difficult to surprise someone with a party when they reach “the big four-o,” unless they turned senile at 391/2. What did surprise me, though, is that she had bought me a big, shiny, stainless steel hot dog stand with a customized umbrella (the one I’d always dreamed of but could never afford). It was right there at the party waiting for me to dispense hot dogs from. You can see it on the cover of this book.

I naturally pretended I was really happy. I certainly didn’t have to pretend I was surprised. But inside I thought, now she’s really lost it. She must have spent thousands of dollars for this stand and, all pessimism aside, I’m not going to give up IDT and go back to selling hot dogs. What am I going to do with this thing?

Little did I know. . . . This year, rather than going to camp, my fourteen- and eleven-year-old sons decided to spend part of their summer going into business in the parking lot of our office selling hot dogs. It wound up being so much fun that several of their friends, and even my younger kids, soon joined them. It turned out to be the best summer they ever had. They’re even planning new, innovative items like knishes for next year. Strange thing is, they sold more hot dogs in a day than I ever did. Part of this was no doubt due to their delivery service to our several buildings. A small part, though, was probably due to the fact that many times when someone needed a decision from IDT’s chairman, they finally located me hanging out by the cart, and usually heeded my suggestion to buy a hot dog first.

One last thing about my old hot dog stand. I ran it for three years, summers and weekends, and in my whole life I’ve never enjoyed any business more. In every other thing I’ve ever done I was only a part of the process, dependent on others to make the whole operation run. Not only that, but in every other business, there have been jobs I truly hated, like facing the rejection that comes from making cold sales calls. I did these jobs because I wanted to succeed and, in general, I liked being in business. But only at the hot dog stand was I constantly happy. Probably this initial, positive experience with entrepreneurship made it inevitable that I would stick with it even when things stunk. Also, during those three years I learned everything I really needed to know about how to run a global company: Treat people right, keep innovating, don’t give up your spot no matter who tries to take it from you—either AT&T or the father-son duo from the park—and make the best onions. Follow these rules and you’ll be just fine.