Very special thanks to my chief operating officer (COO), Doug Wyatt, who has been my alter ego for the past six years and somehow tolerates my temperamental nature while making me appear smart and sane. It’s a tall order, but he does it beautifully. Many thanks to my smart and talented marketing and video production staff, Dale Warner and Andy Mitchell, for making me look like I know what I am doing. Special thanks to Kevin Small at Result Source, and all the wonderful folks at John Wiley & Sons for making this thing happen.
Also, many thanks to “the speaker in the sneakers,” David Behr, for making our live events happen all across the country. I owe an endless debt of gratitude to the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey for his kindness and generosity and for writing The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which forever changed the course of my destiny. His passing was met with the sadness of millions of admirers around the world. Dr. Covey was one of most influential leaders of the twentieth century. He was also profoundly influential in my life, as his work saved me from certain self- destruction. In 2009, I was privileged to meet and work with Dr. Covey after he endorsed my first book, The Upside of Fear. Somewhere out there, Dr. Covey is making the angels better leaders. He will most certainly rest in peace after having left this world significantly better than he found it.
A very special thanks to Laura Oien, Judy Slack, Michael Hansen, and everyone at Tom Hopkins International for their help and support. Of course, a special thank you to the legendary Mr. Tom Hopkins for his support and example of how a true professional carries and conducts himself. Thank you, Tom—you are most certainly the real deal. Thanks as always to my mother, Mary Goodeau, and to Eloise Ilgen (aka Nana) for their love and support and always accepting my collect calls from the joint. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize Janet Cole for her support over the years, without which my story may have been a very different one. Janet, you are a sterling example of how a woman maintains her dignity and class despite the vicissitudes of life. My love, devotion, and gratitude to Taryn and Skylar, who gave me the missing pieces to the puzzle of life. You inspire me every day to be the man God meant me to be.
And finally, a super-duper very special thanks to my son, Hunter, who has been my constant and unwavering source of inspiration and has made me so very proud to be his father. Son, you have made me a better man, and I love you more than words can adequately express. Matti is a lucky girl.
And although what so many people claim is true—that you can measure a person’s character by how he responds when the chips are down and his back is against the wall—there was nothing in this man’s life to suggest he was even remotely prepared to overcome the challenges before him. But you never know what someone can accomplish if he or she wants it badly enough.
On June 10, 1996, this individual stood motionless in a prison cell—a cell indistinguishable from so many others that had served as his home for more than six years—devastated over the recent news that his father had died. He looked deeply into the eyes that glared at him through the scarred stainless steel mirror in his tomb. Through the initials scrawled by unknown tenants before him, he saw the reflection of an unemployed high school dropout and a three-time loser who had spent his entire adult life in this hopeless state of despair. For as long as he could remember, he had known only prison, poverty, and struggle. He had no money, no hope, and by all accounts, no future.
He had never held a steady job or owned a home, and he’d abandoned his three-year-old son. He had never done an honorable thing in his life. As he stared at his pathetic countenance, grieving over his dead father, the son he’d left behind, and the life he’d essentially wasted, he considered the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson—who he had just discovered: “We become what we think about all day long.” He concentrated on these words and repeated them to the man in the stainless steel reflection. “We become what we think about all day long.”
The next day, Eugene started vomiting and writhing with stomach cramps. Within twenty-four hours, his dehydration was so pronounced that a panicked Beverly took him to the emergency room. His temperature started rising, hitting 105 degrees as he sweated a yellow halo of perspiration onto the hospital’s sheets. He became delirious, then violent, yelling and pushing when nurses tried to insert an IV into his arm. Only after sedation was a physician able to slide a long needle between two vertebrae in the small of his back and extract a few drops of cerebrospinal fluid. The doctor performing the procedure sensed trouble immediately. The fluid surrounding the brain and spinal nerves is a barrier against infection and injury. In healthy individuals, it is clear and quick flowing, moving with an almost silky rush through a needle.
The sample from Eugene’s spine was cloudy and dripped out sluggishly, as if filled with microscopic grit.1,3 When the results came back from the laboratory, Eugene’s physicians learned why he was ill: He was suffering from viral encephalitis, a disease caused by a relatively harmless virus that produces cold sores, fever blisters, and mild infections on the skin. In rare cases, however, the virus can make its way into the brain, inflicting catastrophic damage as it chews through the delicate folds of tissue where our thoughts, dreams—and according to some, souls—reside. Eugene’s doctors told Beverly there was nothing they could do to counter the damage already done, but a large dose of antiviral drugs might prevent it from spreading. Eugene slipped into a coma and for ten days was close to death. Gradually, as the drugs fought the disease, his fever receded and the virus disappeared. When he finally awoke, he was weak and disoriented and couldn’t swallow properly. He couldn’t form sentences and would sometimes gasp, as if he had momentarily forgotten how to breathe. But he was alive.