Gary Pinkerton uses 30 years of ethical leadership gained at the US Naval Academy and honed as a nuclear attack submarine Commander to improve the lives of his clients through his work as a wealth strategist with Paradigm Life, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and real estate investor.
Chip on My Shoulder
I grew up in southern Illinois, dairy farming. My father would be milking the cows at three o'clock in the morning and then again in the afternoon, rain, snow, or shine. I remember 10-plus years where he didn't take a vacation for more than a few hours.
In high school, I was going to school in an embarrassing, old car wearing hand-me-down clothes. Our worn-out farm equipment often failed and we'd have to manually collect and stack all the hay, 10,000 bales a year, into the barn. My friends would go to sports practice then come over and get paid to help us. There'd be no paycheck for me and no ability to go to sports.
This was the mid-1980s, and we hadn't yet broken high interest rates – 18% variable interest rate loans on our farm. We would get a new loan, and then a couple of years later the introductory “Teaser” rate would go away and the payments would be crushing once again. Soon the bank foreclosed and we were broke living in a trailer on my uncle’s land.
All I was thinking about the first 20 years as an adult was monetary wealth, and that my kids weren't going to live this future. Now though, I feel like my children are probably disadvantaged. My background created this chip on my shoulder. I had motivation to change my situation and worked as hard as I could to get straight A’s and get accepted to the Naval Academy, then submarines and finally my own boat.
Nuclear Submarine Commander
I commanded the USS Tucson, a Los Angeles class, one of the last ones built in the late 90's, which seems old, but it was a third of the way through its life when I had it in 2009-2011. Submarining is certainly a unique lifestyle. I think the longest that I've been underwater without opening the hatch is probably 70 days. But there are people who have gone quite a bit longer. Once you know there's a good chance you may be out for a while, you bring about 90 days worth of food with you. After that, you get creative, as in figuring out new ways to eat the three bean soup out of a metal can. We made our own water and air onboard. We had lots of parts and the ability to make more parts. So with the exception of food or a very unique part, we could operate indefinitely.
In command of a submarine, you have a team of 150 people. It's an amazing group. They're the best of the best in the military. They're not all extremely excited to be there every day, but they're motivated, and equally important to their patriotism, they're extremely smart. When I took over, the ship had just been through an almost two-year overhaul. Everything was made brand new with the latest electronics. The crew had to learn how to go to sea again. They succeeded and we her on her first deployment in Asia, and it was just incredible. It was a very difficult
challenge at the beginning with a tremendous result at the end. It's something I'll never forget. I'm truly humbled and honored. Yet as I finished that tour that brought many accolades, my personal life was crumbling.
Needing a Change
Initially, I thought I just needed to be in a different role in the military. For years I was consumed by how amazing it would be to command a submarine and then to be promoted to Admiral. But I was married and a dad. And to be honest, I was gone so much that I didn’t really know my kids and they didn’t know me. Reflecting on all I learned from my dad in those long hours on the farm, the legacy of experiences and lessons he’d left me, I realized how fortunate I’d been, not the work or hardship, but that it had given me so much time with my father. I needed to be
around my kids much more and could not achieve that climbing the ranks within the military.
I spent most of my last years as a Navy Captain in the DC area working in big government leading a division for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, another incredibly rewarding opportunity to work with the best of the best, and this time across all the Services. This experience taught me something very important about myself: Senior military roles and big government life were not for me. I realized that my love for America was not about patriotism, but rather our constitution’s enduring focus on protecting the rights of individuals, their life, liberty and property. I wanted to help sustain this 250-year-old experiment that our founding fathers started.
I shifted my focus to helping business owners and entrepreneurs prosper by improving their finances and sharing their unique genius with the world, the practices I saw and loved when I was a kid on the farm. There was no Amazon, things we needed were made locally. Someone just started making it and often thriving business was born. My dad and I made apple crates for orchards for a few years because they needed them and we had trees, a sawmill and were paid well to solve that challenge. I love that about America. But DC taught me when you have a big government whose goal is to get bigger, it takes more taxes, which is crushing for the small business owner and the exact opposite of what our founding fathers intended. There's an important reason the Bill of Rights says that all rights not specifically given to the government are to be withheld for the people. It is essential to limiting government overreach and taxes. Every organization and company, once created, takes on its own life, and like organisms, its primal function becomes ‘sustaining life.’ Historically this leads governments to greater bureaucracy, larger budgets, and tyranny or socialism. Even in America, government ends up working against its charter to protect people's rights and get out of the way so that they may flourish. My Pentagon time included a government shutdown and everyone showed up but no work was done; all effort was on not being the organization that got eliminated or reduced.
The American Entrepreneur
If somebody were to hear me talk about this, they would ask, “Are you saying government is bad?” Absolutely not. I think our government is amazing. It gives people the confidence that if they do the work and put the money in to create something, whether it's a product or a service, they get to benefit from it. 250 years ago, America was first to try this experiment and the results are obvious. Countries that followed, have similarly prospered.
Those who know Napoleon Hill know the phrase think and grow rich. If any part of that is true, and I believe it to be, the potential of the human mind is massive. Yet there are millions of people that come to the end of life not having shared their unique genius with the world because their environment doesn't support it, their time is consumed making ends meet and they've been beaten into belief that it's not possible. Helping people set up a personal economy so that they can focus on their passion and achieve greatness is what inspires me.
It comes down to people having the ability to, first, focus on what they're uniquely good at or interested in and, second, prosper from that. What does my business of high cash value life insurance have to do with that?
Funding a Personal Economy; a Foundation to Wealth
I help people build a personal economy where they'e got control over how they use their resources and what they choose to do in life. A personal economy lays a foundation that enables you to invest in yourself and your business, far more important than investing in your 401K. And to be successful long term, you need reserves in a place that’s protected and private, and you need to offset risks that typically cause many families and small businesses to fail, like inflation and high taxes. I use insurance-based financial planning and services to solve
that foundational level. At the core, my team educates on the use of an insurance policy as a vehicle where you store emergency money, reserves for your businesses or properties, and cash for upcoming major expenses and investments, where it’s protected and can grow three or four times as fast as it would in a savings account and without the impact of taxes.
To recap this financial foundation, the life insurance benefit, privacy, protection, and tax-free wealth available through this strategy is amazing. And it is the best vehicle for enabling financial dreams and growing permanent wealth. Let’s Keep America Great!
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