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Meet David Sinclair of Clarity Car Washing and World Powered Designs

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Today we’d like to introduce you to David Sinclair.

David, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Short Version: Clarity Car Washing was started so I could free myself from a dead-end retail job to be able to pay for my tuition and find out what I was truly capable of. I started with a bucket going door to door to get my first customer and three years later, I now service all of San Diego county and have hundreds of clients. I’ve met many inspiring people who have helped me along the way.

Longer version: Growing up, I moved around a lot and experienced many unfortunate events, however, in the end, by conquering my fears, I have been able to go from a homeless drug addict to successfully build a car washing business and beginning a company focused on scaling mental health solutions. Okay, so I know that doesn’t sound all that glamorous, but to come from such a low point where you are psychologically doubting yourself every day, I have learned some truly valuable lessons.

My family moved to San Diego from Oceanside, CA to escape unruly gang violence. My mother told me the final straw was when a crossbow arrow shattered one of her windows in the restaurant she was running…for the second time. Upon moving to San Diego, life was a series of moving around from apartment to apartment trying to survive in a very expensive city. Being raised in a single-mother household with a sister didn’t allow the socioeconomic success a traditional nuclear family would have. With this, we had lived in garages, tiny apartments, and even spending Christmas at a Motel 6 from being kicked out of the place we were staying in. By the time I made it to high school, I had moved over 15 times. Chaos and instability were second nature to me.

These events, while not that traumatic at the moment, being just a kid, left a very real and lasting wound that self-actualized in the coming years. Growing up with such little opportunity, just barely surviving, put me into a mental rut that was insisting that I did not deserve better, that I was worthy of no love or success, and neither should I expect it. Growing up with my mom working two full-time jobs and going to school left me and my sister to our own accord many days of the week. Not that she was a bad mom, she is a great mom, but she was doing her thing to make sure we would survive. While I never got into trouble as an early teen, I soon began to live in a state of constant anxiety. Since I was a little kid, I was afraid of seemingly everything. I would cry easily; I would be shy and not talk to many people. I was even scared to answer the phone because it was ‘the scary unknown’.

I experienced many scary unknowns in high school, including encounters with death and its effects. One week in class, one of my friends was gone for a few days, presumably sick. However, after that 3rd day, we learned that she wasn’t just sick, she was dead. Her mother had shot her and her husband in the head. Senior year I experienced the death of another friend who got into a terrible car accident right in front of my high school and was only 40 feet away when it happened. I was the school’s host of our little news show and had to talk about my friend’s death to thousands of my peers. The loss was earthshattering in that Ryan wasn’t a bad kid. He was a straight-A student, long-distance runner, and his dad was a pastor. He was good. These things are unexpected but can happen. Shortly after high school, I learned of another friend who overdosed on drugs when she was hanging out with her boyfriend at the time. It was strange because in the volunteering club I ran my senior year, she and I would go out and collect bottles and cans from the classrooms during lunchtime and everything was so innocent and pure then, but bad things can happen to good people.

With these scars showing themselves, I began to do worse in school. Growing up I had amerced myself in books and learning, in an attempt to have some stability and identity. However, this identity was brutally challenged in high school as studying required more emotional control to stay focused. Every year I would get progress reports stating that I was very bright, but was very lazy and should apply myself more. Somehow, I managed to keep my grades up just enough to be the dumbest smart kid in my classes. However, since early on, my writing and drawing was something that I always excelled at when I really got into the zone. Timed writings in class I would write beautifully, but in papers that were written over the course of weeks, failed to meet the standard. This education identity I had built myself was now beginning to fade, though as I always thought myself to be a math-oriented person, and math took the biggest emotional toll on me. Somehow I managed to keep my grades up high enough to be accepted to San Diego State University. This, while exciting news, was the beginning of the most difficult part of my life thus far.

Going to university is when I realized just how different I was from everyone else, and it forced some very uncomfortable truths right into my face. See growing up, I was naturally inclined to be more introverted. Doing so allowed me to keep my cool, and doing my own thing was all I could do when I was changing living arrangements so much. I realized that I had a real fear of talking to new people. Although I had come a long way from being afraid to answer the phone, I now realized just how hard it was for me to maintain a friendship when there wasn’t the structure of the same class schedule and the same groups always there. Now I had to face the truth of friendships, that they take a lot of work. So, I didn’t make many friends in the first few years of university, which was strange because in high school I had so many friends.

This new matrix of the university was beginning to become even more terrifying as I learned studying was exponentially more mentally taxing in higher education, especially in electrical engineering. I would find myself frustrated to the point of tears when I couldn’t figure out math problems everyone else was getting. Many exams I had received were failing grades and I was having to retake many classes. In sophomore year of college, I had the idea to check and see if I had ADHD. I was told in a 30-minute consultation appointment with a psychiatrist that I did, in fact, have ADHD, and I was prescribed the highest dose of Adderall a patient could receive.

I remember that feeling of taking it the first time. It was truly beautiful. I know that sounds weird to say about a drug, as if I’m trying to romanticize it, but it wasn’t about the drug. It was this newfound confidence and optimism it gave me. It felt like for the first time in my life I could read and work without beating myself up mentally. I could finally love who I was, which was transformational when compared to the bottled-up trauma I had inside me.

I started taking this medication daily, and when it wasn’t enough anymore, I started taking more to get the same feeling I had that first time taking it. I hated not being on it, it was like living life in Jell-O, everything moving so depressingly slow. This was the danger of the new identity I was forming. See it brought me back to when I was the smartest kid in the class and all the appraisal and validation that came with those accolades. I finally felt smart again, and couple that with the increased social ability it gave me, I became an entirely different person. This new identity was taking hold, and every time the drug wore off, I went back to plain old dumb, socially awkward, me. See it gave me the confidence to start my business, to spend hours editing my website, and to do a better job detailing. The drug became my better half, me that wasn’t afraid of everything, and was taking on any challenge no matter how difficult. It was exhilarating until it wasn’t any longer.

At the peak of my drug addiction, it wasn’t about studying anymore, it was about trying to maintain some semblance of sanity and emotional control. I began finishing the entire month supply bottle of pills in a matter of a week or two, going on study binges where I wouldn’t stop for hours and I felt great. But the side effects started to rear their ugly head. See with every up there is a down, and you can’t escape the consequences of trauma forever. I would crash after hours of working, and I would not socialize. I began developing a contingency to progress. I still enjoyed people, but the meaningless work I was doing felt so much more important while on the medication.

Not only that but I would get horrible crashes involving anxiety and depression that I could feel slowly creep into my head as the drug wore off. It got to the point where I decided to ask my doctor for Xanax. Being the doctor he was, he promptly agreed to write me a prescription upon my request. During this time, I had experienced significant changes in life and began drinking more and abusing more pills. It got to the point where I ran out of money and had no new customers. I moved into a temporary shelter and for three days, I was laying in bed shaking from Xanax withdrawals. I realized something was wrong and I stopped taking everything all at once.

One day soon after, I was just finishing a customer’s car, when everything went dark and I woke up on the ground to EKG stickers all over my torso and paramedics trying to talk to me. I am told I had a seizure and could have very easily died. It was since then that I realized I needed to make a change. I started ditching the medication and got a different psychiatrist and left Adderall and Xanax in the past. I started focusing on me and learning how to rebuild my life socially, psychologically, and financially. I soon found this was all very difficult due to not having a father figure to show me how a boy is to become a man. Even so, I kept failing and getting back in the fight.

This is what has ultimately led to my success from my grim past. Keep getting up and remembering all the dark times and realizing how I need to keep going. I can’t let all my hard work be for nothing. So if that means I have to work 12 or 16 hour days washing cars then so be it. I would much rather be physically tired than tired of life itself. I’ve been almost two years sober from Adderall and Xanax. Since then, I’ve really learned more about psychology from self-study and therapy. I’m even switching majors to psychology because of the drastic amount of changes in perspective my past has had on me. I learned of the four fundamental fears in life: 1. Fear of the unknown, 2. Fear of being judged, 3. Fear of losing control, 4. Fear of taking the first step.

I started looking at everything that had gone wrong in my life as a result of fear. Fear of answering the phone from judgment and the unknown. Fear of studying for judging myself and further losing control of my identity. Fear of taking the first step in quitting Adderall and Xanax because maybe life would be worse. By acknowledging when I’m simply just being afraid and facing the fears head-on, I’ve been able to create a stable mobile car washing business and stand up on my own two feet for the first time in life and It feels amazing.

Since these major changes, I have started my 2nd business, “World Powered Designs,” as a solution to the mental health crisis. See, when I walk around in society today, I can feel the fear everyone has. You look into peoples’ eyes and you can see that they are unsure of themselves. I know the look because I’ve been there many times. Even in an era of mass abundance and prosperity, people are becoming more depressed and suicidal than in the past. With my experiences, I know I can help others. Through my trial by fire upbringing, I had to learn the importance of discipline, emotional control, and how to rebuild your purpose and identity when you’re given very little to work with.

I think that people are just missing a purpose and identity. I think that people can be so much more than they currently are. I think individuality is important and acceptance of one’s circumstances and why they are the way they are is vitally important to a functioning society. We can choose to either live free or live succumbing to every fear. One of my favorite quotes from a song is “I’d rather die up on my feet than to live down on my knees”.

Freedom is both a right and a responsibility that has many hardships attached to it. However, even a slave can be mentally free, and the ones who seek freedom know they deserve it, and thus they are not mentally caged. In life, we can put ourselves in mental boxes of how we think everything is and what everything will be for us. However, we don’t truly have control of our lives, whether it be what family we’re born into or who lives and dies on any given day. We must realize that we live in a limitless life.

Most people don’t care if you do something as long as it doesn’t negatively impact them, so live free. In the end, the thing that keeps me going is that I want to inspire others to believe that even in times where you are nothing and have nothing, you can begin to fight back and earn your right to live on this earth. I liken getting out of the ghetto and poverty as my personal Shawshank Redemption. Every move you make to escape poverty is like trying to break out of jail. No one wants you to succeed and you will gain many enemies or haters in the process, while you can’t put a price on freedom, you can tell your story of attaining it. In the end, I want to be able to tell the best story and while on my deathbed thinking of all the scary things I had to conquer, I hope another kid like me can see that you are so much more than you think you are, as long as you’re willing to fight and continue to think differently.

Has it been a smooth road?
Coming from homelessness, abject poverty, single-parent household, and dealing with drug addiction. Many mental barriers to escape poverty and start a business at the same time.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Clarity Car Washing and World Powered Designs – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
I treat every customer as a real person. I’ve befriended many clients and I specialize in making sure each car detail is a unique service tailored to their needs. I also don’t leave a job until its done right and to the customer’s satisfaction. I’m proud of the reputation I’ve built with over 90 five star reviews and hundreds of clients, remembering how poor I was when I started has been a rollercoaster of emotions and struggle that is all worth it. 

For the 2nd business, I am specializing in scaling mental health care and using the internet, I have already impacted thousands of lives through my articles and videos which is truly humbling.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
San Diego is just beautiful. Born and raised here, and I’ll always call San Diego my home, but it’s very expensive to live here!

Pricing:

  • Exterior Detail (Small vehicle) – $80
  • Exterior Detail (Mid-sized vehicle) – $100
  • Exterior Detail (Large vehicle) – $120
  • Interior Detail (Good Condition) – $80
  • Interior Detail (Okay Condition) – $100
  • Interior Detail (Worse Condition) – $120
  • Exterior Wash (Small vehicle) – $20
  • Exterior Wash (Mid-sized vehicle) – $25
  • Exterior Wash (Large vehicle) – $30

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Image Credit:
Studio Luniste

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