#129 Howard Chasser: Love What You Do Or Start Over

What does a childhood obsession with comic books, a family health food store, and a Roberto Clemente rookie card have in common? For Howard Chasser, they're all threads in a life built around passion, people, and the relentless pursuit of doing work that actually means something. Howard spent over 30 years running a natural food store on Long Island that his parents opened in 1976 — navigating the loss of his father at 17, a monster expansion, a brutal economy, Superstorm Sandy, and a divorce — before walking away and ultimately finding his way back to what he'd loved since childhood: sports cards and collectibles. Today he runs a thriving sports cards business built not on transactions, but on trust, genuine enthusiasm, and an ability to make people feel like family. This is a conversation about reinvention, resilience, and what happens when you finally stop fighting what you were always meant to do. In this episode, Howard shares: Why the things we're meant to pursue often find us before we're ready for them — and how a $68 baseball card his mom almost didn't buy changed the entire trajectory of his life How soft skills will outwork hard skills in the room — Howard was a B+ student surrounded by straight-A accounting majors, but his years behind a store counter made him the one people actually wanted to hire Why you can hold an apology and a boundary at the same time — the moment he snapped at an employee taught him that accountability and delivering a message aren't mutually exclusive What a difficult customer's secret revealed about human nature — the woman who cursed at his staff turned out to be a mother whose teenage daughter had terminal cancer, and it changed how he sees every hard interaction How the right door often only opens after the wrong one finally closes — after a year of uncertainty post-store, Howard reluctantly returned to card shows and stumbled into his true calling right before COVID sent the hobby through the roof Why your kids reflect your energy, not their own chaos — a therapist-backed insight that transformed how he showed up as a father, and a lesson that applies far beyond parenting