The Come Up

By Nathen Hache

The come up is used to describe one who elevated themselves to success. To become successful, or to come up, is what we aspire to achieve. We all define success differently when it pertains to us as individuals. One thing that we can agree on is, your path to the come up is a grind with many challenges along the way. The Come Up is about my journey, successes, growth, and failures to get to where I'm at today. I enjoy a path to success story as much as anyone. What sets my story about from others? Well, it's my story and my experiences to my come up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662402081

Book preview

Who I Was

In order to get to my come up, we’ve got to start from the beginning (I’ll try not to bore you). Let’s get one thing out in the open. I didn’t grow up rich or poor. When I was five years old, my dad had a video recording of me at a show and tell saying I wanted to become a pilot when I grow up. My exact words were I wanna fly a plane. I said it as shyly and innocently as any five-year-old could have said it.

I recall what led me to wanting to fly a plane like yesterday. My favorite movie at the time was Dumbo. Not the 2019 version. I would watch Dumbo multiple times a day. The part that always hit a sweet spot for me as a kid was when Dumbo would fly around in the circus toward the end of the film. As a kid, that was the greatest thing for my imagination and led to my desire to fly a plane. It was something I wanted to experience so badly as a kid.

In my early teens, I was on the top of the food chain when it came to the early Mortal Kombat video games. I may be embellishing a bit, but I was damn good and hard to beat in that game. My favorite characters were Scorpion and Sub-zero. My parents and I would go every Friday night for pizza, and then I would showcase my skills when I finished eating dinner. This led me wanting to be a video-game programmer because I believed if video games were so easy to play, they would be just as easy to program. I soon discovered that was far from the truth when I took a computer-programming class in high school.

After my rude awakening that video-game programming was not for me, I felt a level of insecurity when I would hear my friends talk about what college they were going to and what they were going to do in life. We all had dreams of big bank accounts, luxury cars, and women, of course (come on, we were teenagers). The difference was, my friends had an idea of how they were going to achieve it. Really! I was still trying to figure out who my prom date was going to be.

Junior year in high school my counselor wanted me to get serious as to what college I was going to attend. Are you kidding me? I just want to get my driver’s license and a job so I could buy a car. A lot of things seemed annoying to me as a teenager because I was frustrated that I didn’t know my plan or had one yet. Watch out, world. If you come into my personal bubble, I’m taking it out on you. I’m just kidding. I wasn’t that bad. I kept a lot of things to myself, and I didn’t share this with anyone at the time.

I hadn’t given any thought as to what college I was going to apply to. I even considered going to a community college in my hometown near Palm Springs for a couple of years then transfer to a four-year university. I applied to California State University of Fullerton only because they were doing onsite campus admissions. Plus, my counselor strongly suggested that I attend. I had no idea where Fullerton was located. By taking this leap of faith—at the time it felt like a waste of time—it was one of the best decisions that I made, which helped set the path of my come up.

Prior to my first semester at Cal State Fullerton, I was shy, uncertain of myself, and had questionable confidence at times. My confidence was this way because I didn’t know who I was as a person. I just wanted to be successful financially. That was not enough because I had no idea how to get there. People just don’t give you money; you have to have something in exchange for it. I didn’t even have the best grades, nor was I a top student. I was just rolling with the punches, and I had a very passive personality.

I was shy and passive as a kid. Occasionally I would get picked on by other kids at school because I didn’t speak up for myself. This altered how others viewed me. They viewed me as slow and enrolled me in remedial courses in elementary school. It didn’t take long for teachers to notice that I did not have a learning problem. Obviously, I hadn’t come out of my shell yet. I didn’t speak up for myself as I lacked confidence. This stemmed from being compared to other kids and hearing how smart they were and all the good things they were doing. As a child, this affected me. I didn’t know it at the time; this made me feel like I didn’t have anything to offer and suppressed my confidence and self-esteem.

If I can go back in time and tell my younger self and others anything, I would say, Your come up is in the works and don’t worry about them. The ones who laugh now will cry later. You know I have to put scripture somewhere in my books and apply it to life’s example. The scripture that most resonates with me is John 9 verses 1 through 12.

Jesus passed by and saw a blind man. His disciples asked Jesus if the man or his parents sinned for the man to be born blind. Back then their way of thinking was based in part on some biblical texts that assumed a child could be punished for the sins of the parents (Exodus 20:5). Jesus didn’t speculate what caused the blindness and shifted to what could be done about it. Jesus answered, Neither. Jesus calls himself the light of the world and demonstrates the truth of his claim by bringing light physically and spiritually to a man born blind. Jesus did not heal the man immediately. Rather, he puts mud on the man’s eyes and tells him to go and wash it off. The blind man did just that; even before he has received his sight, and for much of the chapter, the man will bear witness to a Jesus whom he has never seen.

God uses people—as you may have read in one of my books, How to Find You—to do His work. Just like the blind man, they thought I was slow. Little did they know, this is the story of my come up.

Who I Became to Be

Ipersonally believe college is an introduction to real-life experiences. Through its natural course you’ll discover who you are and who you are not. The year was 2002, and I started my freshman year in college with a bang. I literally started with a bang because I rear-ended my brand-new 2002 Ford Ranger into a commercial vehicle. It was during bumper-to-bumper traffic, so I couldn’t have hit him going more than ten miles an hour. That’s my guesstimate. We pulled over to the side of the road; he had no physical signs of a collision. My truck on the other hand looked 100 percent guilty, and the front of my hood looked like an upside-down V. I was okay and able to drive my truck to campus for dorm check-in. You may be asking, what does this have to do with the story? It’ll be a while, but I promise I’ll round back to it; just stick with me.

I declared psychology as my major freshman year at CSUF. As you may have read in my previous book, How to Find You, I took an intro psychology course in high school. My teacher at the time made it look so easy and packaged his lectures to where all his students were involved. This made me consider being a psychology teacher. After taking a Psychology 101 course my first semester, I realized this subject was outside my realm. I didn’t change my major yet because I still had no idea what to declare.

Within a couple weeks, I was in between classes when an individual on campus handed me a flyer. I don’t recall every detail of what the flyer said. I do recall $15 per hour, flexible schedule, and bonuses listed on the ad. This sounded good to me, being a broke college student. You know what I did next.

I went in the same day for the interview. The office was one block away from campus. I drove there to get familiar with Fullerton after the interview. I walked upstairs and into the office. I would say the space couldn’t be no more than two thousand square feet and a little outdated. I mean, the carpet was avocado green. I was greeted by the receptionist; she gave me an application and had me sit in the meeting area down the hall with about fifteen other applicants. I felt inferior in that environment since this reminded me of being compared to other kids when I was younger.

After waiting some time, I was called into the manager’s office. She was blond, young, in her twenties or early thirties, and attractive. I was nervous, and I just gave the best representation of myself as possible. Her youth and down-to-earth demeanor helped me get over being nervous. For the sake of the story, let’s call her JP. She began to explain what the job entailed. What was the job? It was to be an in-home knife salesman for Cutco cutlery. This was way out of left field for me. I will say the knives are high quality, expensive, but worth it, and I own some to this day.

I didn’t have any sales experience at the time. I even thought maybe this was not the right job for me at all. JP continued to explain the process, the people, training, the benefits, and the flexibility with such finesse and grace I just bought in. I was sold. My last question was, How does the $15 per hour and bonuses work if this is a sales job? Her answer was sincere and soothing. If a presentation was made that did not result in a sale, I was guaranteed $15 if it was a qualified prospect (married and homeowner). Bonuses were commission based on products sold (I don’t remember the commission structure). I did ask JP what her top earners make. Rather than saying, she told me that some of her top performers were able to buy brand-new cars by selling knifes during summer breaks, and one of her top earners earned $20K over a three-month span. JP saw the excitement in my eyes like I was going to make that kind of money by default. JP did a very good job to manage my expectations and made it very clear that individual results would vary depending on how hard I was willing to work, and these were not guaranteed, but she appreciated my excitement. Either way, I was in.

I had to invest a small amount for the knives for my in-home presentations. I don’t recall the amount offhand, being that it was 2002. I do recall that their reactions when I shared my excitement with family and friends of my new job. When I told them that I had to make a small investment for a kit to get started, they all thought I was crazy, naive, and gullible for spending money for a job. They would all tell me the point of a job was to get paid, not pay to be employed. My defensive wall immediately rose, and I didn’t