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
