We were lucky to catch up with Mike Faricy recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Mike, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I’m a baby boomer and the oldest in a family of five children. With five children in the 1950s and 60s we were one of the smaller families in the neighborhood. Both my parents worked and the general rule in the house was ‘If you’re closest to the broom, sweep the floor.’ We had to make our beds in the morning, hang up clothes, cut the grass, shovel the sidewalk, all that stuff. I went to an all boys high school. It was a time when discipline was expected. If you fooled around in class, the instructor, all men, simply brought you out into the hall and hit you. It was very black and white, no gray areas. I remember one of my english teachers telling us that “At some point you have to put your rear end on the chair and get the work done.” I worked after school in a grocery store from age fifteen to seventeen. In the summer I loaded trucks all day with ninety pound bundles of shingles. At the end of the day I was too tired to get into trouble. I was in the army when their routine was we would accomplish more by 9:00 in the morning than most people do all day. It’s how I grew up and it’s the only way I know.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I work seven days a week writing crime fiction. Currently I have over 80 published books and novellas out there. I work very hard but I’m blessed to be able to make a living doing something I love to do. I come from a long line of storytellers and I’ve just taken it a step further and put the stories into books. No one in my books is parachuting onto the roof of the white house to save the President or combating some international crime organization. All my books are about people who make bad decisions, but then, bad decisions can make for an interesting story. I write with a sense of humor and release five or six books annually. That said, I receive daily emails from people wondering when the next book will be coming out. My Dev Haskell series is about a Private Investigator, Dev Haskell. I write the series for crabby old guys like myself, but the vast majority of my readers are women. One of the things they like is the fact that in each book Dev has a relationship with a different woman, who, by the end of the book tells him ‘Lease, don’t ever call me again, ever!” Women just love it. My Jack Dillon Dublin Tales series is about a US Marshal who, through a series of events, is assigned to An Garda Síochána, the Dublin police force. I married an Irish woman and I live in Dublin, Ireland for part of every year. So, I’m very familiar with the city and that makes for a lot of interesting tales. With the advent of the internet the book business has become crazy. There are over a million new books released every year. I’m just lucky to enjoy the work and as I said, make a living doing it.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Looking back, one of the things that molded me as a child was we were read books every night before we went to bed. My parents brought us to the library every week and we could pick out a book. It formed in me a love for books and for reading. I should stop here and express my thanks to the patient teachers I had in grade school who encouraged and taught me how to read. With books I was able to learn about events, history, sports, adventures. With books I was able to read instructions on everything from physical work outs, to games, and then how to do things properly, including writing a book. If there is something you’re interested in doing, or something you have to do for work, or in your home, or in a relationship you can learn what to do by reading about it. You’re never going to start out being the best at something, but if you practice, work at it, you’ll always improve. How many times have we heard someone say, ‘Oh, he’s really good,’ or, ‘I can’t believe she knows how to do this.’ That didn’t just happen, those individuals started at the beginning and kept at it. They’re still keeping at it, working to make themselves even better.
Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?
My extended family has been the most helpful for me in overcoming challenges and developing skills. One of the best things they’ve done is when I tell them something isn’t going well, or I’ve been trying but it’s taking too long. They usually respond along the line of, “Oh you think that’s bad, well when I started out I . . .” My son is a tradesman. He works hard at his job and is very successful. He told me that when he first started he was sent to a job site. The foreman on the site had a reputation of being really tough and hard to work for. On his first day my son arrives and he’s lining up his tools and getting ready to work. The foreman steps behind him and starts yelling and swearing, shouting he’s taking too much time. My son doesn’t turn around, he just looked off into the distance and said, “Dad?” As if he heard that sort of thing all the time and it wasn’t going to bother him. The foreman laughed, they’re good friends, and now my son is a foreman.
Contact Info:
- Website: mikefaricybooks.com
- Instagram: MikeFaricy
- Facebook: Mike Faricy Author
- Linkedin: Mike Faricy
