He was 25 years old, a high school graduate by GED, a student at ITT and to finish him off, a father and a husband. Stories of his plans to graduate in half of the time by taking double the recommended course load, and of the long nights he spends awake regretting all of the choices he made in high school, with a child in his arm and a dream within grasp. I began to respect this man for his work ethic, not his high school rank. John became more than a resume to me; he became a man with struggles and achievements, likes and dislikes, a human. The more we learned about each other, the more opaque the lines between the words I had taken for grand revelations and friendly camaraderie of normal workplace chatter became. Every day he would speak of the invisible puppet strings that guide our lives, controlled by the idea of wealth; and every day I would listen eagerly, trying not to miss a word. He hated money, hated the fact that one thing can control a man's destiny, and hated the fact that he worked eight hours a day at a Super Target only to attend classes every afternoon. His disdain for money echoed from every word he spoke.  Wiser words had never been uttered from a tongue of just 25.

John's ideals quickly became my ideals, his beliefs mine. Clouded by my respect for his dedication, I mistook everything he said for truth and began to mold my philosophy around his speeches. I had become a machine set to one function, how to acquire a college acceptance letter and secure my career in business, how not to end up like John. I had discarded my old motivations for wanting to enter finance. The interaction, the communication, and the intimacy of business that had once fueled my passions we replaced by this vain pursuit of security that only wealth could offer. I had become a machine that could not feel, could not experience, could not dream, but simply and merely, accomplish.

I learned several things during my time at Target. After experiencing my first job and my first real taste of money, I came out with both an appreciation for the importance of capital in today's world and a deep contempt for the power it possesses. When we are at our lowest, most destitute state, our real motives are laid out and our real character emerges. The qualities that lie latent in every CEO, every politician, and every Business Leader begin to manifest themselves in the CEOs and leaders of tomorrow. I could understand this through John. The dual nature of desire became apparent to me this summer. When I stopped dreaming about creating my own Startup Company, and began imagining how big my paycheck was going to be, I became a puppet, blinded by potential commas in my bank account. The most important lesson I learned and by far the hardest to accommodate was one of balance. There is a balance between the acknowledgement of money's role in our lives and the lustful obsession of it. Still searching for this balance, I hope not only to continue my job at Target and the operation of my sprouting internet business but also to attend Northwestern University to learn from PhDs the same principles I did from a GED, sauce stained smock and all.

The divorce of my parents, the strain on not only myself but my mother as well, and even the day I became an uncle did not affect the same magnitude of change in me as that summer. I learned of wealth, struggle, and adulthood from a man not much older than myself who had gone through it all. I learned what it means, on my own terms, to be a man.