Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. Our guest on this episode is Andrew Samuel, author of the new book, Our American Dream, cultivating a life of

success, joy, and purpose. Andrew has been a successful banker for many years, at one point

being the CEO of a $5 billion commercial bank, but his early life gave absolutely no clue that he'd one

day be building successful banks and

taking companies public. Andrew's book tells the story of how he went from being a poor, skinny

little kid in India to ringing the opening bell at NASDAQ. And it also offers advice Andrew

believes can help others become successful. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.

It is my pleasure and happy to share. Talk to us a little bit about those early years in India living in poverty.

Oh, you know, I have such fond memories of that time. My father and mother had four children.

I was the third of four children, two older sisters and a younger

sister. And my dad was a military man. So he primarily spent about 11 months out of the year

away at different conflicts that India was involved in at that time. So he wasn't around much. So we lived with my grandmother and my mother's

three brothers and two sisters. So there was probably about 16 of us in a 14 by 14 room,

just one room. We ate there, we slept there, we socialized there, and we didn't have indoor plumbing,

and we didn't have electric supply, so if there was any homework to be done, we had to go out

to the street and find a street lamp that we could sit under.

But I just have a lot of fond memories about that. We didn't have

much at all. I mean, we were fortunate if we got one meal a day. And so we all kind of pitched in to do

whatever we could to make money. And I share in the book a little bit about the Kow Dung story.

It's interesting in those days, Kow dung was valuable for a lot of things.

You know, instead of a dirt floor, we actually had a cow dung floor. And the reason for that is

a dirt floor, the dust tends to rise. But cow dung was smeared on the floor actually locks the dust down so you don't have dust in your home.

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