Ivan smiled and said, “It’s true though. I owe everything to the people I teamed up with. And some of the ideas were mine, but other ideas I listened to and went along with.”

“Like what kind of ideas, specifically?”

“Well, the I.D. Promotions idea I got from calling the Padres’ Emilio Alvarez E.A. So I plugged my initials in as I.D., and it just worked for me.”

“So you just happened to have the perfect name, then.”

Ivan shrugged. “Whatever works for you. But that’s the point. You never know what road will lead you there. And you can’t really follow behind other people. That’s their road. You gotta find your own way.”

“Yeah, but how hard is that? Seriously.”

“It’s as hard as you make it,” Ivan told her. “It would have been harder for me before I decided to just go for it. But before then, I wasn’t even trying. That’s how it is with a lot of us. We’re not trying. Or not trying to make it big. We just talk about it occasionally. But if you talk about it enough, then you need to start doing it.”

Levonia looked him over and said, “You know, it always sounds so easy when successful people reflect. It’s almost like all the right things just seemed to happen for them all at the right time. I mean, you hear that movie producer Tyler Perry was once homeless, and then you look at him now and say, ‘But was he really homeless?’”

Ivan said, “I bet he was. And I bet that when things started to happen for him, it all came together fast. But you work so hard that you don’t even have time to stop and notice it. That’s the zone I’m telling you about. But you have to want to be there to get there. And you gotta work for it.”

She said, “Okay, now, I have to ask you this, Ivan. Since your company was doing so well so fast, then why sell it? Why not ride it all the way to the top? You could have made a billion dollars like Bob Johnson and BET.”