There have been stretches of my life when I have gotten up before four in the morning to go to work, worked through the day, handled everything else I had committed myself to, and made it home just before midnight, knowing full well that a few hours later the alarm was going to go off and I was going to do it all over again. That is not a motivational poster. It is not some carefully manufactured entrepreneur story somebody cooked up after becoming successful. That was simply my life, and for years I have outworked most of my peers.
Because of that, when somebody standing next to me complained about having to work, complained about the hours, complained about the boss, complained about the company, complained about having to come in on Monday, or complained that Friday was taking too long to get here, it meant almost nothing to me. I had already learned something that I still believe today: being unhappy with your professional life does not relieve you of responsibility for what you do about it.
If you are miserable professionally, you have options. You can complain. You can walk into the shop, the hospital ward, the construction site, the warehouse, the jobsite or the office cubicle every morning and make everybody around you as miserable as you are. You can leave. You can change companies, change careers, learn another skill, go back to school, move across the country, start at the bottom somewhere else and build yourself back up. Or you can shut the fuck up, do the job, stack the Franklins, work harder, get better, and use the money and experience you are earning to actually build something that belongs to you. I have chosen the last one plenty of times, and sometimes I have chosen the second. What I have never understood is spending years choosing the first.
There is an uncomfortable truth buried underneath a lot of workplace bitterness. Some people spend so much time attacking what somebody else built because they have never developed the discipline required to build anything themselves. It is easier to criticize somebody else's company than to start one. It is easier to mock somebody else's idea than to risk looking stupid pursuing your own. It is easier to explain why something will fail than to spend five years finding out whether you can make it succeed. For some people, when they cannot build something of their own, their instinct becomes destruction. If it cannot belong to them, apparently nobody else should be allowed to enjoy what they have built either. I reject that mentality completely.
We live in an extraordinary period of history because someone from almost any background can build something. You can write a book, start a company, build a website, create a product, design merchandise, develop a brand, start a media operation, learn engineering, find manufacturers, reach customers across the country and speak directly to millions of people from a phone sitting on your kitchen table. People love saying things like, "If you build it, they will come," or, "See a need, fill a need." I have never liked living my life through cheap clichés or off-brand motivational slogans. If one more internet entrepreneur tells me to "rise and grind" while filming himself drinking a fourteen-dollar smoothie at ten-thirty in the morning, I may personally confiscate his podcast microphone. Still, occasionally there is some truth buried underneath the nonsense: eventually, you actually have to build something.
That is what Forged Before Dawn means to me. It did not begin as some corporate branding exercise where twelve people sat around a conference table deciding which words tested best with eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds. It came directly out of the way I have lived. At the same time, the idea behind Forged Before Dawn is older than I am. I did not invent the values behind it. I inherited many of them from people who were working, sacrificing, raising families and building lives long before I showed up. Do not worry, we will get to that.
"Built while the world still sleeps" means something to me because I know what four in the morning looks like. I know what an empty road looks like before sunrise when almost every house you pass is dark. I know what it feels like to punch a clock while nearly everybody you know is sleeping, and I know what it is like to finish one responsibility only to immediately start working on another. Forged Before Dawn may be an energy drink, but the idea behind the can is much bigger than the product.
It represents the period when you are building something before anybody cares. Before the customers, before the followers, before the congratulations, before anybody calls you a founder, before anybody believes the company is real, and before there are polished photographs, finished websites, business filings, advertisements and products sitting in somebody's hands. There is a period in every serious undertaking when nobody gives a damn except the person building it. That is the forge.
I learned that lesson long before Forged Before Dawn. When I was twelve years old, I started what I called Lacey Landscaping. Nobody ordered me to do it. Nobody told me that I needed to become a twelve-year-old entrepreneur, and there was certainly no grand business plan. I simply realized that I could work, people needed work done, and work could be exchanged for money. So I hustled. I mowed lawns, did landscaping work, found things that needed doing and figured out how to get paid for doing them.
That mattered because it established something very early in my life. I never believed that I had to wait around for somebody else to create an opportunity for me. If there was work available, I could work. If there was not enough work available, I could try to create some. Nobody made me hustle at twelve years old. I made that decision myself, and in one form or another I have been making the same decision ever since.
That mentality carried me through some things that easily could have become excuses to think differently. I grew up with a heart defect, and at sixteen years old I underwent my first heart procedure. That was the frightening one. At eighteen, I went through another. Those experiences have stayed with me, but I made a decision very early that I was not going to organize my entire identity around something I had been born with and could not control. I was going to organize my life around the things I could control: how hard I worked, whether I showed up, whether I kept my word, whether I learned, whether I saved, whether I built, and whether I got back up when something knocked me down.
So I entered the workforce and worked every hour I reasonably could. I worked different jobs, different shifts and different industries. I learned production, manufacturing, equipment and the realities of how workplaces actually function, not from a management textbook but from standing on concrete floors and doing the work. I believe society would be healthier if more people rediscovered some respect for that attitude. I am not saying everybody needs to destroy themselves working twenty hours a day. That misses the point completely. The point is ownership. Take ownership of your circumstances, your career, your finances and your ambitions. If something in your life needs changing, then start doing the things necessary to change it.
At the same time, I have refused to let my life become nothing but a timecard. I have traveled. I have gotten on airplanes and gone places I wanted to see. I have gotten behind the wheel and chased stories. I have jumped out of an airplane. I have met people whose lives were completely different from mine, interviewed people, investigated subjects that interested me and discovered that writing gave me another way to build something. I could take what I had seen, what I had learned, what I believed and what I wanted to understand better, and turn it into something another person might actually want to read.
That writing has taken me into engineering, manufacturing, energy, space exploration, politics, public policy, business and stories about ordinary Americans doing unusual things. I am still building that part of my life too, just as I am building the businesses, the products, the websites, the merchandise and the other ideas I have accumulated along the way.
There is Forged Before Dawn. There is Liberty Legacy Coffee Company. There is the merchandise, the writing, the websites, the events and the concepts that currently exist in different stages of development. Some of them may succeed spectacularly. Some may fail. Some may eventually become something completely different from what I originally imagined. That does not bother me. I would rather have a garage full of prototypes, a computer full of unfinished projects and a notebook full of failed ideas than spend forty years explaining why everybody else's ideas were stupid.
Everything I have done, however, ultimately traces back to something far more personal than entrepreneurship. This weekend I am another year older, but that is hardly the important anniversary in my family. My parents are celebrating forty-five years of marriage. They had eight children before me and one after me. I am number nine in a family of ten children, and when I look at what my parents built over forty-five years, suddenly building a company does not seem quite as intimidating.
They built something that lasted. When you come from a family that large, you learn very quickly that the universe does not revolve around you. Somebody always needs something. Somebody needs a ride, somebody needs help, somebody needs dinner, somebody is arguing with somebody, somebody is celebrating something, somebody has screwed something up and somebody needs to be picked up. A large family teaches you responsibility, compromise, loyalty and resilience in ways no business seminar ever could.
When I think about why I keep pushing myself, why I keep trying things, why I keep building businesses, writing, traveling and chasing opportunities that sometimes sound ridiculous when I first describe them, a large part of the answer is my family. I want my parents to see what their family produced. I want them to know that the sacrifices they made turned into something. I want my brothers and sisters to be proud of what I build, and someday I want some of the things I create to become part of the larger Lacey family story.
Then, of course, there is the question people occasionally ask about another part of my life. Yes, I am still single, although I have not always been. Every few years I meet a woman who decides this whole operation looks interesting enough to investigate, and eventually she discovers that the operating hours are apparently unacceptable. I work strange hours. I write at strange hours. I travel. I disappear into projects, and when I believe in an idea I can become completely consumed by it. So far, none of them has been quite stubborn enough to tolerate the schedule permanently. Maybe someday somebody will be. Until then, there is plenty of work to do.
And that brings me back to Forged Before Dawn. When somebody sees that can, I want them to understand that the name is not fictional branding. In a very real sense, it is autobiographical. Forged Before Dawn represents a philosophy that existed long before the company and, in many ways, long before me. It is the belief that nobody is coming to magically create the life you want, and nobody owes you the business, the promotion, the audience, the book deal, the customers or the opportunity.
You can complain about that reality, or you can become skilled enough, persistent enough, disciplined enough and productive enough that eventually somebody has to pay attention. You build before they notice. You work before they applaud. You learn before you are respected. You invest before there is a return, and you create before there is an audience. For a long time, almost nobody is going to care, and that is normal.
The world usually sees the finished product. It rarely sees four in the morning. It does not see the empty roads, the overtime, the failed prototypes, the invoices, the ideas that went nowhere or the projects that had to be started over. It does not see you sitting at a computer after everybody else has gone to bed, trying to figure out how the hell to turn something that exists in your head into something another human being can actually hold in his hand.
But that is where almost everything worth having begins. It begins before the world wakes up, before anybody knows your name and before anybody thinks you can do it. That is where you forge yourself, and if you keep at it long enough, that is where you forge the company too.
That is why I called it Forged Before Dawn.
Built while the world still sleeps. Because before thats what my parents were doing