After a Pickup Hit Him, He Turned Down a Million Dollars

Ari Emanuel, then a young Hollywood agent, had noticed cars whipping past one corner near his office and thought someone could get badly hurt there. In early summer 1994, walking back to work after lunch, he paused at that same corner for the crossing signal.

Once the signal changed, he stepped off the curb and glanced sideways to find a black pickup truck right on top of him. The impact threw him onto the hood and then onto the pavement, where he ended up sprawled on the asphalt, bleeding.

The frightened driver shouted in his face, asking if he was all right. Emanuel, reasonably sure his spine was still in one piece and that he was not paralyzed, told him through gritted teeth how badly he was hurt and vowed to make him pay if he ever could move again.

The crash changed how Emanuel thought about his career. Within months, he would turn down a long-term deal worth a million dollars a year from ICM, the agency he had just joined, to start his own company from nothing.

At the time, he had just arrived at ICM after brief stints at InterTalent and CAA, the giant agency where he had started in the mail room. He spent hours rolling calls, working through dozens of separate problems with dozens of different callers, then walked alone for an omelet and a script at lunch. He kept asking himself why he could not stand stability or sit still.

Lying in the street, unable to stand, he moved from tearful gratitude to regret. His regret was not about stepping off the curb. It was about doing life wrong, letting other people discourage him, letting his own anxiety steer him, and accepting the delusion that there was plenty of time. As Emanuel later wrote, "Life is not a dress rehearsal. Opening night is right now. The curtain is already up."

Five days after the accident, he dragged himself back to the office. He made a point of getting in before anyone else each morning, calling for his assistant to line up more calls even before the assistant had arrived. For months, he wrote, he worked harder than he ever had while pushing himself through physical therapy.

That was when ICM offered him the million-dollar-a-year deal, enough to marry, start a family, and provide for them in a big way. One voice in his head, sounding like his father's, said take the deal. The other whispered, "Life is not a dress rehearsal." At the next staff meeting, listening to the bosses talk around the conference table, he thought, "Not even for a million dollars."

He went on to start his own agency, Endeavor, on March 29, 1995, his 34th birthday, beginning with four people rolling calls nonstop.