My Brute Force Strategy for Addressing Legal Issues in the Alcohol World

What once was a real disability is today overcome by sheer will

I get to go to South Bend, Indiana on November 16th and speak at an event sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Law School. I’ll be speaking at a symposium concerning wine law and the wine industry. The specific subject I’ll be addressing is the Dormant Commerce Clause, the 21st Amendment, wine regulation, and consumer access to wine. I’ll be speaking not only in front of industry colleagues but also law professors and practitioners. I’m very excited about this opportunity. It’s an honor. But it’s an honor that in my younger days would have been impossible—impossible not because I did not know the subject matter or because I was not recognized enough to warrant an invitation. Rather, it would have been physically impossible because my body would not allow it.

After graduating from high school, my mother and I did not have the funds to send me off to college. So, instead, I planned to attend community college in Marin County while I worked full time in order to save the funds to head off to a four-year college a couple of years later. It was during those two years at community college that I discovered exactly how deathly fearful I was of speaking in public.

The very idea of being called on in English or History class to answer a question from the professor made me physically shake. The actual act of attempting to answer the question dried up my mouth to a degree that when I spoke, I could not be understood. This physical reaction I had to speaking in public compounded the fear that caused the problem in the first place.

It got so bad I had to drop out of junior college after a year rather than continue to risk these reactions.

In the wake of dropping out, I took a job selling Kirby Vacuum cleaners door-to-door. I made very good money because it turned out I was very good at communicating one-on-one and a pretty good salesperson (Plus, the margins on those Kirbys were criminally large). But during the two years of selling these machines, it became clear that my future depended upon me getting a college degree. I needed a strategy for confronting the fact that I was likely to get called on during the 3-6 years of classes I knew I needed to get under my belt.

My strategy amounted to what you would call, “Brute Force”.