I’d have had no stories about Fish, or for that matter Dave Barth, Jonathan Rand, Howie, or Jim if I’d stayed overwhelmed with my brochures and directories. As you remember, that’s what got me started on this whole topic of hiring. It was still 1988, four years before I ever met Jim. I needed to hire a second, a partner, someone who could help me expand out of my basement and become big. Someone with real ambition and talent who’d work for peanuts and finally help me get to a higher level. In some of life’s most crucial decisions, like getting married, you look around, see what’s available, listen to your logic, hunches, and emotion, and then you throw the dice. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

I chose Marc Knoller, a junior loan officer at a big bank. He was nothing in business, but the hardest worker anybody had ever seen on communal and charitable projects. So I threw the dice and I asked him. Right away, I regretted taking the gamble, for his sake. I tried to rescind the offer.

“It’ll never work,” I told him. “You’ll be out on the street. You’ve got a family. Keep the safe bank position.”

“Too late,” he told me. “You got me thinking. I’m tired of the safe life. I want to gamble too. And I want to do it with you. Don’t worry if I’ll succeed. I guarantee I will.”

Oh, great, I thought. I’m finished. Now I’ve got some bank clerk who suddenly thinks he’s Indiana Jones and there’s no turning back. This’ll never work. I should have played it safe. I’d been a fool and thrown the dice. Now they were out of my hands and tumbling down the felt. As I said good-bye to my savings, I had no idea I’d finally hit the jackpot.

This was my state of mind in 1988. Things were going well and I just wanted things to keep getting a little better each day, without confronting any huge challenges or chances of rejection head-on. There are just lots of big opportunities with low probabilities of success you don’t pursue to save your energy for surer bets.

Rejection didn’t seem to matter to Marc. Exhaustion didn’t seem to exist for him. Hard work, intelligence, loyalty, success, and frugality were his only concerns. I mean, the man started calling people at eight in the morning. I never saw him eat, and he’d stay at it until there was nobody left to call at night. Fear didn’t seem to faze him. I was afraid to call the really big ad agencies and global corporations. They’d never advertise with me. They’d just laugh. Marc called them, and called them, and called them. And suddenly the contracts started rolling in, not just from America, but from around the world.

Our two publications grew to a dozen. The few hundred advertisers swelled to several thousand. The revenue climbed. Our staff grew. Where once I’d always played it conservative, with Marc as a partner I’d started to grow more venturesome.