In Search Of Heroes Spreads Good News About Everyday, Real-Life Heroes Who Deserve Recognition For Their Good Works

Robert Channing: The lowest point in my life? You know what? I’m an optimist. There were two low points in my life. One was when I became a professional entertainer, and I was very optimistic. I studied all the best people in the world, and then I performed my show and I had another gentleman that was jealous.

I was probably only about 18 years old and this gentleman was 36. I was in the same market that he was in. He would try to shut me down and put me down, because he saw how strong I was when I was performing. People were attracted to me and they loved what I did.

It was the same type of mentalism that he did. Although it was different, it was my personality and he had a different personality. He was jealous. Actually, it hurt me. My own true feelings, I didn’t want anyone to feel bad about me. I didn’t want anybody to look down and say this guy was bad, or this guy is doing something wrong. I almost felt guilty because I was doing so well for myself that people become jealous of what I’ve done.

Nerissa Oden: The lowest point in my life was probably when I felt like my mother didn’t want me and that my father didn’t want me. I came from the divorced family. I didn’t really know my dad. My mother wasn’t getting child support.

She felt like she had been betrayed by the courts. She couldn’t get child support from my dad. So she said, “Look, it’s nothing against you or anything, but you're thirteen now. It’s time for him to take care of you. He has to live up to some of the responsibility. I just can't do this anymore.”

I'm her third child. I definitely understood what she was saying, even at thirteen. It still hurt, nonetheless. Then, when we go to the father’s house, the father’s like, “We really need to get you back to the mom. No, I don’t want a single responsibility.”

That also felt like rejection. That was probably the lowest point in my life emotionally. I ended up being back with my mother because I basically turned into a runaway for a little bit. I ended up back with my mother.

My mother took us to counseling. I guess, probably on the third or fourth counseling session, I finally opened my mouth and started talking. That was the lowest point in my life. I'm not sure what would’ve happened if my mother hadn’t agreed to come rescue me or take me back.

Posted by ralph at 01:07 PM | Permalink

Heather Seitz: When I started, I started initially as a real estate investor and I’m still very active in that market. I wanted it so badly and I had, had a boyfriend at the time and we’d spent the holidays over in Spain and had come back and were not in a good spot. I had all my credit cards maxed out, $200 in the bank and we were living at his sister’s house.

Then sure enough we were going to come back, get everything together and we were going to go head off to Europe and live our life in Spain. In less than two weeks we broke up and I had another two weeks to get out of the house.

Penniless, I mean it was pretty tough plus I thought this was the person that I was going to spend my life with. Needless to say there were days that I didn’t want to get out of bed. During this time I had this training that I went to, the free training that sold me into a $4,000 training.

Well now to sweeten the pot I’d now committed to another person that I would pay them back the $4,000 by the end of that month. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror one day and was like what are you doing?

There are a few key moments in my life that I can look back at where as they say the rubber meets the road and you just say you know what, it’s a decision and you can’t really tell somebody and no goal-setting book or anything is going to do it. When something faces you and you’ve got the option to roll over or to get up and fight. It’s what you do in those moments and those are the decisions that shape your life and I chose just that.

I said well I’m going to fight this and I’m going to prove to everybody that says I can’t do it, wrong and I’m going to get my confidence back and I’m going to move forward, and that’s what I did.

Posted by ralph at 01:02 PM | Permalink

Bill Hibbler: Well, I started out at 15. I was doing the guitar thing. What I saw then is in order to do my job; I had to get backstage. I had to get through security. It’s kind of like a salesman that has to get past the secretary or the receptionist. You know… the gatekeepers. It was really kind of similar.

I would walk up at first and I would try to explain, “Well, I’m here and I’ve got these guitars.”

A lot of times I was asked by the band to be there, but somebody would mess up. My name wouldn’t be on the guest list. The security guys could care less. It was like, “Whatever. Your name is not on the list.”

So I observed that that wasn’t working. I was just going up trying to explain my situation. Going to all these shows, I would watch the stage door. I would see a road manager or someone come along and sometimes these people would have their backstage pass on and sometimes they wouldn’t.

I saw many people without a pass. Some guy with a briefcase covered in backstage passes from other shows would come walking in and he wouldn’t stop and try to explain. He would just walk in the door like he owns the place. It’s his production. He belongs there.

Those people were usually British. If the security guard questioned them, they were just kind of like, “What are you talking about?” They just looked at them like, “Of course I belong here.” I wasn’t consciously aware of it but I began to model those people. I went out and got my briefcase and I covered it with stickers. I didn’t have a bunch of backstage passes yet so I covered it with guitar manufacturer’s stickers.

I was a good mimic. I could do the British accent as well as the Brits could. That became the deal. I remember the first time I tried it. I just walked up and walked in the door.

Nobody asked me anything. If they would ask, it was, “Hey. Hello. Where do you think you’re going?”

I would just say “I’m going to the dressing room.” “Well, where’s your pass?” “I don’t know. I left it on the bus”, and I would just keep walking and they would sort of shrug and say, “Okay,” and let me go. I’ve even had arguments with them. It was like, “Alright mate.

I’m going to leave. When the band comes and they’re looking for their guitars, then you tell them that you didn’t let the guitars come in because I didn’t have a pass, alright?” Then you start to walk away and they’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Go ahead, go inside. You’re okay. That was my early experience with learning to model other people.

However, that was not the lowest point in my life. That’s how I began to overcome obstacles.

What happened when I went backstage to those shows is I saw this guy, the road manager. I was fascinated. He’s like the manager of the band on tour. He’s running the show. That’s what I wanted to be, but, I had no idea how to do that. There was no internet or anything then. It was hard to find any kind of role models.

I realized what I really needed to be doing is working with local bands and just getting more experience and working my way up. I was afraid to do that. I dropped out of college after six weeks. I was an accounting major. That would have been a horrible mistake.

I was managing a stereo store and I was good at it. I had accumulated a lot of stuff. I had two big stereos and I had a Betamax, which was a big deal then, but I wasn’t making a lot of money.

So I couldn’t do that and pay my bills and keep all my stuff. So, what happened is, and I don’t want to go through the whole story but I ended up with a really nasty drug habit. This was late seventies up to about 1980. I’d discovered cocaine.

That just knocked me on my butt. I ended up pawning everything I owned.

It was all gone. I used to have like seven or eight vintage guitars, gone. Stereos all that stuff gone. I had this huge stack of pawn slips. That was all I had left. I came to the point where I had been served an eviction notice from my apartment. The power was turned off. I was about to be homeless.

A friend of mine that was a drummer in a band came by. I’d worked for his band when I was in high school. He offered me a job going on the road with his new band. Up until that point, I wouldn’t have taken it. I would have wanted to but I couldn’t afford to do that.

So, I had to learn the hard way, and I had nothing to lose at this point.
I just had my clothes. I put some things in storage and I eventually lost that because I couldn’t pay the storage bill, but I became willing. That was the key, becoming willing.

I didn’t have to worry about cocaine right then because if you don’t have any money, you don’t have any cocaine.

That was definitely the lowest point. I was physically in bad shape. I had lost everything. I was really beaten down, but suddenly an opportunity presented itself. Within probably a year of that happening, I was road managing Humble Pie.

I had met the guys when I was doing the guitar thing before. I just became fearless. I went to every show and I just made myself known. I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing but I was just everywhere. So I just increased the odds.

You could listen to the whole story and say, “Well, I was in the right place at the right time.”

It was like I was everywhere and I was willing to do whatever it took. Whatever I needed to do, “Okay, fine.”

I ended up doing that and basically living out a dream. Now the alcohol and drug thing continued to interfere, especially alcohol which I wasn’t drinking before then. I discovered alcohol. It took me until 1989 to finally get sober. I discovered AA. I discovered that there was a group of people that had been there.

Again, I was just learning from their experience. I haven’t had a drink or done any drugs since then, 1989.

Again, that was when I discovered that you can’t always do it yourself. There’s strength in numbers. It wasn’t people preaching to you “Don’t drink.” It was just people saying, “Well, this is what I did.”

I’ve tried to teach people to model what’s worked for me. I don’t want to preach to people what to do. I am just, “Here’s my experience.”

Posted by ralph at 01:09 PM | Permalink

Frank Garon: Well, who’s to say that I’m not at the lowest point in my life right now? If I was able to look back and look at my entire life history and how the story ends, that’s one way I look at it.

I like to look at it as I’m not in as good of shape and I’m not as happy and I’m not as healthy and well-rounded and successful as I am going to be tomorrow, because, like I say, I try to work on continuous improvement.

On the other hand, it is also important to know where I came from. I think going bankrupt was pretty low, and when my grandmother on my dad’s side died on Christmas day 1980, that was pretty low.

I think choosing to leave my previous marriage, knowing that I would never raise (then Frankie wasn’t even two years old), knowing that the decision that I was making that was “best” for all of us, was a decision that would have me not under the same roof as him, to love him and protect him and kiss him goodnight every night.

I’d honestly have to say that that one right there, now that I think about it, that was a low point. There’s not too much lower than you can get, than saying, “Alright, this relationship is very unhealthy. If I stay, it’s going to destroy my son, too. Teach him bitterness, and anger, and spite, and fighting and things like that. So I’ll just be a man about it and leave, so he can live a better life.”

I’ve got to say, that was not a good day. I laid on the floor and I cried once my ex-wife and my son drove away. I felt like my world ended. I would still, however, make that decision again at that moment in time. That would be my answer.

Posted by ralph at 01:11 PM | Permalink

Troy White: I think it probably hit me just over three years ago. I had spent eleven years in sales in the computer industry. I worked for some very large companies like Hewlett Packard. It was an industry that paid very well but I did not enjoy.

Right now my twins are four, so three years ago they were one. I came home from work one day bummed out because I was not enjoying my day and not enjoying my life and the direction of my life. Every time I came home my kids seemed to be getting bigger and I wasn’t seeing any of it, and I think to me that was really when I hit rock bottom.

I decided I was not going to live the rest of my life hating what I do for a living and missing out on everything that is so important to me. It was right then and there that I made a fairly quick decision. I talked with my wife, Kari, and we decided that it was time for me to go off on my own and start following the dream.

I have always had businesses on the side but it was time to commit fully to one. So I kind of took my low point and I said, “Well, what do you really want to do? Who do you really want to be” and I just started following that dream and never looked back. It’s been the best journey of my life.

Posted by ralph at 01:13 PM | Permalink

Kevin Hurley: The lowest point in my life would probably be about six or seven years ago when I really decided to focus on this full time. It’s an incredible challenge to build a business or to build anything up from the ground.

Obviously, financial burdens are a difficulty for many people. That would encompass, just having the faith, just thinking of the Rocky movies and to keep going and to keep going. There’s going to be light at the end of the tunnel. That would be my best advice. If you believe in something, lock onto it and don’t let go.

Jay Conrad Levinson: I’d say that probably the lowest point was when I thought that I had achieved my lifetime ambition working in Chicago. It was thirteen degrees below zero and I thought, “Boy, here I am having done everything that I wanted to do. However, it’s really cold here and I don’t think I want to live the rest of my life here.”

I thought that I was a success, but when I went to my advertising agency and went to the boss and asked them to transfer me I was told that that was just not possible and it dawned on me that I was really a slave in a three-piece suit. Although I wasn’t doing manual labor, I was doing hard labor and was still getting a place not fit for man or beast because of the weather.

When I had determined my lifestyle ambition I was twenty-one years old and hadn’t factored in the weather, but now that I was near thirty and I felt it, and I thought I was a free man, that I could do anything. So when I asked for that transfer I thought, “Of course I’ve earned it and I can do it.”

However, I was told that it was impossible to transfer me and I felt at the bottom, that all along I had deluded myself. I had been a slave. I thought I was just a nicely paid employee at an advertising agency with very little control over my life because here I was doing what I wanted to do but I didn’t have the freedom to pick up and move elsewhere. So that was a bad feeling.

I knew also that in order to get out of it I had to take the kind of action that would risk my career. I had to leave my job, leave my security, and leave my income, but I did it because I wanted to feel the sense of freedom all over again.

Posted by ralph at 01:04 PM | Permalink

Chuck Daniel: I guess a low point would have been when I was quite young. I was 21 at the time, and I was attending the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada.

I was off for the summer, and I woke up one morning with this giant swelling on my neck. At first, I was kind of freaked out because I hadn’t had mumps yet, and that can have some pretty severe consequences if you get it as an adult, but it turns out I had something worse!

I had a form of cancer; the technical term is lymphoblastic lymphoma. It’s a form of cancer in which people of that age, the age of 21, it is normally fatal, and so I guess, you could say the low point for me is that at that age when you basically feel like you are invincible, you’re getting some news saying, "Hey, you’re not invincible and you have a pretty severe disease and you have to come to terms with it."

For me, that was one of the lowest points of my life, at least in terms of the news and then, you have to come and gain some perspective that way.

I guess you asked, "How did it change my life?" I guess it changed it in some pretty fundamental ways. I don’t know if I’ve been pretty victorious against everything I’ve come up against. I have taken what I’ve learned from having cancer and been successful for most things.

You get a perspective that says, I decided that no matter what, I was going to do everything that I could to try and beat the disease, even though the treatment that they had at that time was not the greatest. The standard treatment was chemotherapy and radiation, and it wasn’t an exact science. They just did the best they could based on how they had treated people previously.

So, what I decided to do was that I decided I was going to try and beat it and I did beat it. I’m happy to say that I’ve been in remission for more than 20 years now.

The thing that happened from that is that I got the perspective of, I’m not invincible. I think part of my cancer was caused by the stress of a lot of things going on in my life just at that time, and so I learned to put things in perspective and not get so stressed out about certain things. Also, the fact that something even as severe as cancer can be beaten if you believe that you can beat it and that attitude has really affected everything that I have done from that point on.

Posted by ralph at 01:17 PM | Permalink

Willie Crawford: I want anyone reading this call to go to GitOffThePorch.com, and read my biography. I talk about getting up one morning, walking into the shower, taking a shower and in the middle of the shower collapsing and I made such a thunderous noise that my wife rushed into the bathroom and saw me lying in the shower dying. I’m convinced I was dying at that time.

She yells and screams at me “Don’t you do this, don’t you leave me”. She yelled and she screamed so much that there was a part of me that thought you know, I’m tired, I’m very tired. At that point I’d probably been drunk for like six months every single day.

I was a functional walking drunk. I would go to work and do my job and drive back and forth, and I could function perfectly normal but my body had said you completely overwhelm me, I’m tired and I’m lying on the floor of a shower with the water flowing and the room is going dark.

It was my wife’s yelling and screaming that I guess pulled me out of it enough to where she helped me out of the shower, and I sat down on the toilet lid and got dressed and they took me to the hospital where they sent me into treatment for alcohol addiction at the time.

A third of my blood was alcohol. It was in excess of .35 I think it was.

It should have poisoned my brain enough where my brain should have stopped working and so they sent me to a 28 day treatment program, and that was the low point of my life. It was the weeks leading up to that I had done a number of crazy things.

I spent three years in Alaska where I was assigned as a soldier and when you go out fishing, or in the wilderness in Alaska you can look behind you and see a bear or a wolf or a badger or some other creature that wants to hurt you.

I carried a 44 Magnum pistol with bare rounds and these rounds were powerful enough, where somebody can drive at you with a car and you can shoot through the radiator into the engine block of a car with a 44 Magnum and stop that car.

That is how powerful that pistol was. I went from Alaska to Florida with the military, I brought my pistol along, and at my lowest point I actually considered suicide. I can remember being out drunk and thinking I’ve lost control. I’m a control freak.

I thought to myself that I’ve lost control and I thought “Ah I’m going to end it all”. I actually stuck my gun to my head and cocked it and then I thought I don’t want to die alone I want somebody to hold me in their arms as I die. That is what stopped me from shooting myself.

I just didn’t want to be out by myself in the middle of nowhere with no one appreciating the fact that I was killing myself.

I wanted to be touched by another human being as I died. That was the lowest part probably in my life.

Many people go through that and it’s important for those people to realize that it’s ok to be that way, but you need to reach out to others and let them know that you’re struggling because there’s people who are there to help you.

People helped me and you know I turned around, but that was a low point in my life. I was on the verge of taking my own life. I collapsed in the shower and was on the verge of my body just saying ok we give up. You’ve abused me too much and I came back and at that point I was making over $100,000.00 a year on the internet.

You know things have turned around enough now where its seven figures and it happened and when the momentum kicks in its just amazing, just totally amazing. It’s mind boggling.

For me it’s all about serenity. It’s all about being at peace and at ease and comfortable with your role in the world, and if you’re not happy with where you are and with who you are, then you know something is out of kilter, but you need to find that balance because otherwise life is just not worth living to you.

Serenity is very important to me. Peace and happiness is very important to me. I mean I live in northwest Florida where I can get up any day and just go out go fishing whatever, and as long as there are no hurricanes, I can just go out and go fishing I can be out in the middle of the ocean.

The ocean is the most peaceful place in the world. I mean it puts me in touch with my tiny place in the world, because I am just one little tiny speck, a dot in the universe.

You can go out and look down in the ocean and see a school of a million fish and you realize how vast things are, and if you look on your depth finder and you see the ocean that spots like five miles deep which is incredible.

You realize that if you fell overboard you would never reach the bottom, because the water pressure and the things change and you would sink slower and slower and slower and you’d never reach the bottom.

That’s just incredible, but you know I’m all about serenity, I’m all about being happy with what I do and I when I was in the military I’d wake up everyday I’d look at the television and there was the news on and everyday there’s a conflict in the world. Theirs like 35 wars going on in the world right now whether most people think about it or not. I mean Korea has been at war since the 50’s.

They are still technically at war. You know the north against the south. There is about 35 wars going on in the world, and as a soldier I would look on the television and say “Where am I going to be tonight?”

I didn’t know and there came a point where I just said I’m tired of this and I want to experience some of my children’s birthdays and just be more in control of where I am at the end of the day, and that is when I decided I was going to leave the military and build my own business and make it a success. You see failure was never an option for me.

It was; you will build a successful business and you will make over a million dollars a year from your successful business. It was never an option that I could do anything other than that.

Posted by ralph at 12:52 PM | Permalink

Ted Nicholas: Well, the lowest point of my life, I've been very blessed that I haven’t had any real severe lows, I guess the closest I've come to the lowest point is after many years is when I started my first business at age twenty-one. I was voted outstanding businessman in my state at age twenty-nine and I felt much honored.

A couple of years after that, a long series of events, most of which were out of my control, I was in the candy and ice cream business at the time. Two of my many stores were bypassed and I lost a lot of volume. I couldn't replace it because there were new toll roads that were taking the traffic away from my shops.

I started a franchise business and I basically had to close the business and it was very painful to me because some of my franchisees, some of my suppliers were hurt financially and although they almost all forgave me immediately for the circumstances that caused that, for me, I felt emotionally very low during that period.

So I would say that is kind of the ultimate depth that I felt. I felt that, rock bottom, that many of the things that I believed in and still do were, how do I say it, I questioned some of the things that I so believed in at those moments. I had some questions; I had a lot of thinking and feeling to get through that period.

Posted by ralph at 01:01 PM | Permalink

Perry Marshall: That’s a good question. Everybody has different hard spots in their life. They are always hard for different reasons and lots of times you can’t compare one to the other.

My dad died when I was 17. There was a three year process of fighting cancer and the emotional roller coaster of “Dad is going to be okay, Dad’s not going to be okay, Dad’s going to be okay” and all that.

Most people, by the time they are well into adulthood have probably experienced that with somebody. I remember being really upset about that.

I remember having this conversation with my mom where I said, “Well, I guess God gave me a dad and if God is going to take my dad away then God can do that.”

Later on, it would have been about a month after my dad died, I was a senior in high school and I was taking this class. We had this interesting assignment to write a philosophy of life. By virtue of having been through the wringer with this I had given those questions a lot more thought than probably most kids do at that age.

I hope I remember this correctly; I wrote down three things and I turned this in. I said, “Nothing is worth living for unless it’s worth dying for, because to live for something is to spend time which you can not get back in pursuit of it.” That was the first one.

I didn’t make up any of this stuff myself. I got it all from other people. The second one was “The difficult things you deal with in life will make you a stronger, better person, but only if you let them.”

The third one I think comes from the Westminster Confession. It says, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

That was my philosophy of life at age 17, and I don’t think I would change that now. I think that was pretty good, but being forced to confront a lot of hard issues is, I think, the only way you really figure out what is important and what is not.

Posted by ralph at 01:06 PM | Permalink

Michel Fortin: I wrote a book over ten years ago that I just recently put to the Internet for free, and it was a book that I’d written as a way to teach my own self how to go through some of the hardships that I was going at that time. I was a go getting, goal-achieving, goal-oriented, Type A personality, do as much as you possibly can-type person and I realized that I was achieving a lot.

I was making a lot of money. I was a salesperson working on commission and I was doing very well until I realized that I was neglecting and ignoring other things, and especially my own self, the quality of my life. I was focusing too much on quantity of time rather than quality of life.

Well, lo and behold, in what seemed like a matter of hours I lost everything in my life, my home, my car, my furniture, my wife. I lost everything and then I went into bankruptcy and I even had to look at sleeping at the YMCA for shelter and then I started writing that book and I realized there are far more important things out there than, you know – first of all, people are more important and second of all is time.

Time is a commodity, a scarce commodity and what you don’t do in this moment is something you will never be able to do, in that moment anyways. When that moment’s gone, it’s gone. Do you want to spend it working like, you know, on your business?

Sure, if it gives you some kind of feeling that I’m doing something that I absolutely love to do or do you want to work in a job dreading those years until you retire? Or are you going to work so much that you neglect the people who you love? So the point, I’m saying, is that low of the low that I have gone through was the most precious and beautiful gift that I have ever received.

It was the biggest lesson that I had to learn and that’s what I – that pretty much encompasses everything I just said up until this point.

Posted by ralph at 01:15 PM | Permalink

Sharif Khan: As a very young child I grew up with a lot of racial hatred and prejudice because of the color of my skin and being a South Asian. I grew up with a lot of low self-esteem and low self-worth, and carried it all through my young adulthood.

There was a tragic time in my life when my father passed away. I was 18 and I was going to high school in the States at that time. That was a devastating experience for me because my father was my best friend and a beacon of light and hope for me, and he encouraged me to excel and be the best I can be. When my father passed away in a car accident, I fell into a spiral of deep depression.

Because of my low self-esteem and low sense of self-worth, I didn’t see any way out and I was immersed in darkness and didn’t know where to turn. At the time, my father didn’t have any life or car insurance. I had to pay my way for my last year of high school (a private boarding school).

I ended up corking and uncorking blood specimen test tubes, working in a lab, and separating urine and stool samples all day long. Not the most exciting summer job for a student. Within a very short period of time, I became an alcoholic at 18 and I was passed out drunk on the streets of Queens, NY and on the subways and didn’t have a hope in the world.

That was the lowest point in my life and also a turning point in my life, because that was a point I decided. I knew where I was heading and I didn’t want to end up like another statistic. I wanted to get myself out of that situation. For me personally, it was turning to God.

Letting go and letting God, and God intervened in my life. That was an incredible turning point in my life and turning to faith and the Higher Power in me was what gave me strength and got me out of that situation.

Posted by ralph at 01:21 PM | Permalink

Jeff Dedrick: Overall I’ve had a pretty darned good life. Some people have a lot of hardships. I was listening to your interview with Tom Beal earlier today and I know Tom.

He was talking about some of his experiences in life and it’s almost like an opposite extreme where I have a story where his parents were teenagers and there is a lot of divorce and the story of him being ejected from a car and not being able to walk, all of these things.

I’ve had a pretty good life overall now. Sometimes this is hard for me to talk about, but my wife and I did go through a rocky patch and I would have to say personally that was the lowest point in my life.

The whole thought that I could be losing my kids, meaning that the wife would move away to the other side of the country to the state of Oregon, I’m in the state of Wisconsin right now.

That was tough to even think because I knew the outcome of what could possibly happen of the kids being away from their dad. You’ve heard all of the stories and that alone caused me to decide for us to work on it. I might have told you the story that it went right out to the day before or maybe two days before the actual final divorce hearing that I called it off.

I would say that was the lowest point, but I also I had some control on it and I made that decision to change it. I’m really glad that I did make that change.

Posted by ralph at 12:55 PM | Permalink

Stephen Pierce: Lowest point? Wow! I would probably say when I think about where I’ve come from as far as the lowest point. I don’t have a college education or a college degree, if you will. I don’t have a high school diploma. I dropped out of high school, more like I got kicked out of high school because I was a big troublemaker.

I ended up being homeless for like three months. I filed bankruptcy twice. They threw out the second bankruptcy because I filed it too close to the first one and I didn’t know about the rules that you can’t file them too close to each other.

I was running the streets. I used to be a drug dealer and I ended up getting shot. It was a close call because the gun was being held to my head, but as more ruckus started to break out he turned and lowered the gun, and as he was running he fired into my right leg and that bullet is still lodged there today.

I actually went to the hospital. You know, you have this guy that’s off the streets with no insurance cards or anything they were like, “Well, it’s better to leave the bullet in where it is right now. It would probably cause more trouble or damage if we went in and tried to pull it out.”

That was pretty much, “You don’t have insurance to pay for it and we’re not going to do it.” I wasn’t paying them cash for it or anything like that.

I went through that. Then there was this horrible thing in my life. I got to the point where I felt this, “You know what? My life was pretty much destined to be a part of that group that never does anything good, that is always going to be experiencing poverty. That is always going to be experiencing trouble.”

I was supposed to be the opposite. I got to a point where I felt like, “I’m supposed to be the guy that those who are successful look at and then appreciate their lives much more.” It didn’t have to be that way, I was feeling that way.

I remember one time I was in the house and somebody that was really dear to me looked at me and said, “Everything you touch turns to dust.”

For me it was a huge mental battle and an emotional battle because I tried to find some kind of reference point that I could look at and say, “You know what, that is not true because I did this good. I did that good.”

I’m sure there were some little moments in my life up to that point where that was so, but all these big things just hit me like a hurricane.

In my brain it was almost like, “You know, you’re right. All these different things that I did were complete failures. I’m nothing but trouble.”

I got our family evicted when we were young because I was just causing trouble in the neighborhood. You know it is pretty bad when they say, “Listen you’re evicted, not because you are not paying your rent, but we are tired of that tyrant of a kid that you have. You guys gotta go!”

It just got really, really bad. I still remember that because it was more so a violent thing because I ended up fighting a bunch of the lifeguards that were on duty at a swimming pool.

They had the pool pass and that’s how they knew that I was one of the people. Some of the other guys that were equally involved they kind of got off and got away with it, but I think all these things come to kind of accumulated to a low point being in my life. Being not just one specific moment, but this extended moment where it wasn’t just a day or days or weeks.

It was more like months where I was just going through this process of trying to figure out what in the world am I going to do with my life. I think one of the turning points, when I really started to wake up was after I got shot.

It was at the Moses H. Cone Hospital out in Greensboro, North Carolina because that’s where I ended up getting shot at. I was sitting there thinking, “You know what? I could be dead right now.

I could be lying in the morgue on a cold slab as opposed to up here in a hospital about to get released in about a week or so.”

After being discharged from the hospital my dad, one of the reverends from the church I was going to and my brother drove down to get me. I had some time to reflect to try to figure out, “What is it I want to do with my life?”

I had some people that were telling me, “You know what? You are brilliant but you are using your brilliance for evil, if you will. You are doing things that are hurting people. You are doing things that are hurting yourself and people are just wondering if you want to live to see 19 or 20 years old.”

I was living life fast. I was running down the wrong streets and running with the wrong crowds. I didn’t have a sense of direction for myself and I was kind of following people who obviously didn’t have a sense of direction for themselves, because they were just following other people and it all led to these negative things.

I got into reading the Bible and then I got into reading other books like Think and Grow Rich, Success through a Positive Mental Attitude and those kinds of books. I started to think a little bit differently about what is possible.

When I was reading Think and Grow Rich, I was looking at how all these other people kind of had a great deal of failure in their life before they experienced success.

I started to think, “You know what? Maybe everything that I’ve gone through that is bad is not this huge signal or this huge sign that is letting me know that I am destined to be a failure, but that it is something that is normal and I just need to figure out what success actually looks like.”

I think many times in our lives we set up, “I want to accomplish this. I want to do this and I want to do that.”

So we kind of have this inner result in mind. We know where we want to go, but we don’t get there because we don’t understand what that road looks like. We don’t understand what it is supposed to look like to get to where it is we ultimately want to be.

We don’t know what the experience is going to be like. So when these winds start coming and beating up against our houses and these fires start to come into our lives, all this adversity, people will look at it as an omen or a sign from God that, “You’re not supposed to be doing this.”

Or something that’s saying, “You’re beating up the wrong tree,” or something. In actuality, being that I haven’t graduated from school, I haven’t taken that many tests, but I know that for somebody to get a degree in anything there is a large amount of tests that they have to take before they can graduate.

In life it is pretty much the same thing. Before you can move vertically to that next level in life, where you want to go and ultimately reach those dreams and goals and that level of fulfillment that you may define in material senses as far as cars, houses, money and whatever.

To get to those points there are certain tests that you have to take. I started to look at this. In my life I started to change my perspective. I started to look at different analogies.

For example, the purpose of fire to gold; fire is there to purify gold. I started to look at that and look at the different things that started to happen to me.

I got on this path. I said, “You know what? I’m going to try to start a business.”

I tried to start some businesses but they just didn’t really work out. Like 12 different businesses that I was looking to get into completely failed, but it wasn’t that bad.

In the beginning it was horrible, because I just didn’t understand, “Well, what in the world was going on?”

Then I kind of got it. I got it and I understood that nobody in life sets out to go into business and says, “I want this thing to be a complete failure” but it’s going to happen because that is just how life is.

You are going to have these things, but it just moves you closer to where you ultimately want to go. From that experience you gain certain wisdom, certain knowledge and certain understanding that you are not going to be able gain otherwise.

You aren’t going to get it from books. You aren’t going to be able to get it from a coach. You aren’t going to be able to get it through any other means except that hands on experience which makes you sharper and prepares you for that next level and that next venture that you are going to pursue.

I started to understand that these different things that were beating up against my life were more like the fire that was there to purify the gold, or the pressure on the rocks that bring forth the diamonds, or those strong winds that beat against the trees that makes for the strongest trees and the strongest lumber.

I started to get this better understanding of how to look at the different things in my life that were pretty painful at one point. It wasn’t like it was easy; it just got easier to deal with.

I developed a little bit more enthusiasm because I understood what it was all starting to come together and mean. That is a long answer to your question. It was an extended period of time, it wasn’t just this one moment, but I think it was probably like two and a half, three years of being at an extreme low, trying to figure out what to do, taking stuff to a pawn shop. I was homeless for like three months. It was pretty rough.

Posted by ralph at 01:19 PM | Permalink

Ralph Zuranski: My lowest life point was after I turned away from God in high school. I went to a Catholic high school, and there were no girls there. Most of the time, I just thought about girls and sex. It was right about the time that Playboy came out.

I started taking vitamins and working out when I was 13 and that completely changed my life. It actually started my path from being a 99 lb. weakling to becoming a muscle bound anomaly in the universe. I was your typical nerd with a big nose, horn rimmed glasses, and plastic pen carrier, but I had muscles.

When I started taking vitamins and working out I suddenly had this huge surge of testosterone. So I was thinking, “I have to get a date! I have to go out with girls! I’ve got to find a girlfriend! I’ve got to have sex!”

So that was in direct opposition to what I had learned in Catholic school as far as being a virgin until marriage. So I went to UCSD which is sort of a revolutionary college. It had a lot of communists on the staff. You had to take a socialist program, Humanities, that talked about the reason why you were screwed up is that you needed to rebel and you need to get involved in mind expanding drugs and sex.

Just to rebel against what your parents told you and what society was telling you. It was the time of the Vietnam War and so I was disillusioned with what was going on and so I figured, “The reason why I’m screwed up is because I’m not having enough sex, drugs and rock and roll!”

I decided I would go down that trail and I still remember the first day that I didn’t go to Mass. I decided I would go surfing instead. I was sitting out in the ocean and it was the time of the movie Jaws and I just kept on thinking about this big giant shark opening up its mouth and just consuming me, like the whale consumed Jonah.

Sitting out on my board as punishment for turning away from God, and when nothing happened like that, that sent me on a spiral on getting involved with sex and drugs and rock and roll, and psychedelics.

It completely evolved into a situation where I was smoking pot all the time. I was living with a guy that was into coke and all the horrible things involved in freebasing coke and I saw all that. Ultimately it led me to a point where I was just so depressed and I was ready to kill myself.

I still had that problem with depression. Even though I had money, sex and drugs I was just so depressed.

The idea of training a child in the way they should go and when they are old they won’t depart from it. I know my parents were praying for me and spontaneously at the lowest point of my life when I was ready to kill myself, out of the blue, subconsciously I started saying the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary.

That seemed to put me in a situation where I was able to find my relationship with God and either accept the free gift of salvation or just kill myself. Thankfully God gave me the grace and the faith to make the right choice.

Posted by ralph at 05:22 AM | Permalink

Jason James: Well, the lowest point in my life was when I got my car repossessed, I had four different maxed-out credit cards, I had quit college, I lived with my parents, I had no car, no money, no job. It was a really awful, awful time.

I was actually able to join the military, which I think is one of the best decisions I ever made. I joined the Marines, which I don’t know if you know a lot about the Marines but that is one of the toughest, most disciplined branches in the world. Just the three months of the basic training itself was the most challenging time I’ve ever had in my life.

So when I had entered I was sort of in this awful place but I got a new sense of hope when I joined the military. I saw that I had a lot to offer. I have a lot to offer the world. I’m a smart person. I’m serving my country. People are writing me letters saying, “Thanks for serving. Good luck in the future.”

So I spent four years in the Marines and I accomplished a lot of great things. I was in school for 1½ years to learn my job and in my graduating class I had the second highest GPA and I had the highest physical fitness score. I got this award which is called the Warrior Award.

If you are in the Marines you will know that once you graduate from MOS school, (Military Occupational Specialist) where you get trained for a job in the military, I was awarded what is called the Warrior Award which is voted on by your peers. Your peers vote who most exemplifies what it is to be a Marine, to have honor, courage and commitment, and I was voted that by my peers. There is a very special ceremony. I was in my dress uniform and I was awarded that.

That meant a lot to me because when I joined the military a few years before that moment I was in an awful place and in two short years I was in this wonderful place. I had the envy of others. I was in great shape, I had a lot of things going for me, I had great grades in my military school, and I got this award. It’s crazy how that changed my life.

I went on to serve and then when I got out I had this really unbelievable outlook on life. I was so positive. I was ready to take something and run with it, which at the time happened to be eBay which to this day is an unbelievable quick and easy way to make money. It’s so powerful and the traffic that eBay gets, millions and millions each day. It is a powerful thing.

Posted by ralph at 12:49 PM | Permalink

Cameron Johnson: This question is kind of unique, because I am only 22 years old, and have lived only a very small portion of my life. I have yet to experience some of the many things many people would cite as the low point in their lives, whether it is family issues, wife, kids; whatever the case, health.

I have been very fortunate that my family is very healthy and I have been very healthy, and my siblings and parents, and I pray that that continues, but I really don’t know what I could say the lowest point is. I am very fortunate. I am glad I could answer that question that way, though.

Jeff Wright: Probably the lowest point in my life was the destruction of my marriage. One of the problems that we perhaps don’t recognize as a problem in America, in addition to many of the things that have become put into law in our country, the area of no-fault divorce is unexamined and has caused tremendous devastation in our society.

When our laws move to a place where we said that the state’s interest in preserving the family is of lesser importance than one individual’s decision to end or destroy a marriage, particularly where there are children involved, we dealt with what may be a death blow to the more core underpinnings of our society and that is a strong family structure.

So I can say I was a victim of a no-fault divorce. I had no desire whatsoever, no intention, to become one of the (I suppose) more than 50% now of people who get married and get divorced.

That was a very, very low point for me. Now I had to go and get to a point of forgiveness, I had to get to a point of understanding that even some of the most negative things in your life can be used by God. I had to recast my misfortune in the context of what God was doing in my life and what he was preparing me for.

So I began to look at that experience, which was certainly not one that I would wish on anyone and didn’t ever expect to see in my own case, as one that I could overcome and use as a part of my development as a better person and as a more understanding and more forgiving person going forward, and that’s exactly what happened.

All of that came through the guidance of Scripture and through prayer.

Posted by ralph at 12:45 PM | Permalink

Dave Kekich: The lowest point was my injury. I lost basically everything I had, emotionally and physically, and even some relationships. I lost my business, and especially my attitude. Primarily, that was the worst part but there really is no magic bullet or quick fix to overcoming obstacles.

A lot of people talk about, well - this is a life-changing event and so forth, and when you see a life-changing event, usually a lot of things have led up to that to lay the groundwork for it, and when you see a certain breakthrough, it almost always follows a slowly building foundation for that breakthrough.

Now, if there was one breakthrough that changed my life and got me back on track, it was when I decided to hold a fundraiser for spinal cord injuries. I was working with the Spinal Cord Society at that time; I had a local chapter.

I held a drug-free power lifting event back in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a small town in western Pennsylvania. We called it, or I called it, the Eastern United States Power Lifting Championships. It was the first positive thing I had done in a couple of years.

I mean, I pretty much vegetated after my injury, and I put together this event, and it turned out we had people from all over the East Coast, and some people from the Midwest come to this relatively small town, and we got local newspaper coverage, lots of local radio coverage, and sponsors, and after it was all over, I realized my brain still worked, and that yes, it got me back on track.

I didn't go from stagnation to being in the stratosphere that day, but gradually it got me going, and I had ups and downs after that, but mostly ups. Overall I am way ahead in many ways now than I was when I was hurt, or before I was hurt.

Posted by ralph at 12:41 PM | Permalink

Jason Potash: It’s a business, but what sticks out in my mind is one of the most difficult challenges I’ve had would be going back just after I got married, about ten years ago now. I was working in a deadbeat job and not making very much money.

I basically decided to send my wife back to college to fulfill her life long dream of becoming a teacher. She’d held that dream for years and years. When we got married I said, “You know what? We’re young, now is the time. Let’s just sacrifice it and get a line of credit, send you back to school and of course, have a big fat loan, a student loan on our bank record.”

We had just gotten married and were looking to buy furniture so it was not a good situation. I moved into a small, basically one bedroom apartment. The joke was that you could take a marble and drop it on the floor in the kitchen. It would roll real fast to the other side of the kitchen.

The floors were slanted; we had raccoons living in the rafters. I’m not making this stuff up, there were raccoons living in our rafters and they were fighting at night. It was just a run down place. You get to that point in your life where you are like, “I just hope to God that it’s only going to go up from here because how much lower can we go here.”

Driving a beat up car and my wife wasn’t there for support and at that point in my life, my parents had been split up for many years and my mom decided to go back with my brother to live in Germany where her family was.

My family was gone and my wife was away, I had huge debt piled up, I was barely making ends meet, I had this crappy car that I was driving, and living in this run down apartment. That was basically rock bottom.

You know, I think that basically through my attitude and perseverance and knowing, believing in myself and just studying like crazy about all the things that would help me to succeed in business, and having a goal and some focus, that really helped me just to never lose sight of my goal, to know that this is a temporary situation.

If I was 85 years old and this had been my life for the past 85 years, you might want to get depressed and upset because you’ve done nothing. You haven’t changed anything, you’ve lived the same life you had when you were 20, 30 or 40.

That can be pretty sad but the fact that I was young, intelligent, had a lot of motivation, able bodied, able minded, what could stand in my way and stop me?

My driving persistence and desire to want to succeed was what really kept me going. It’s hard to give yourself a kick in the butt to keep going and to constantly tell yourself that things will get better. I’m going to succeed some day and this is just a test, it’s just temporary and I can change these circumstances with the power of will that I have.

That really kept me going, and it didn’t take me a year to get me out of that situation, it took me several years, probably at least three years. As I slowly built things up, each new month became a little bit better, and I knew I was just stoking my mental fire with information and knowledge to help me break the shackles of poverty and succeed.

I did, I faced the brink of bankruptcy. At one point I was willing to throw in the towel. A lot of my friends did who were in similar situations and I said, “No, I’m not going to give in.” I know I can just hang on to this bowl, and even though it’s throwing me around and I’m getting kicked back and forth, I know I can ride this thing out. I’m going to be a better person having gone through this again, this “test” that I’m being put through here.

Obviously, there is a happy ending to this story and my wife is still with me and she has been a driving force in my life and has really been one of my coaches to get me back on the saddle and give me a kick in the butt and say, “Keep going. You can do this, keep plugging away.”

It’s easy to give up, to crash and burn and throw my hands in the air and say, “This is not worth it, and I can’t take it any more.” There has been a lot of life lessons learned in that process as well.

I guess you’ve heard this before, but anybody listening today who is in that situation today, I’m here to tell you that it’s all up to you. It all depends on how badly you want to get out of that situation.

I remember even having jobs where I just hated, hated the environment I was in. My boss was a jerk, I hated the way I was treated, and the money was just garbage. I was being taken advantage of and it wasn’t a good feeling.

Many people go through that in life and they are not willing to make the change. They just go through that for 30 or 40 years and it’s sad. As opposed to people who say, “You know what? I hate this job so bad, I’m going to do whatever it takes to get myself the heck out of here. I don’t care what it takes. If it means I have to stay up five hours a night studying marketing or studying real estate or studying investment planning, I don’t care. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get myself out of this hellhole.

That’s exactly what I did. You have to reach that point in life, I think, where you say to yourself, “Am I willing to do whatever it takes to get myself out of this situation?” Whatever that situation might be.

When you come to that point, and you’ve really just entirely had it, I think that’s when amazing things happen and breakthroughs happen. It happened for me because at that point I just said, “That’s it. There is no turning back. I’m just going to rock and roll, buckle down, do what I have to do. Keep my nose to the grindstone, not complain, not whine and not moan but just do this and make it happen and not finish until I’m done and I’m satisfied and I’m living the life that I want to live.”

That’s what happened to me, as I said when I sort of was in financial ruins and so forth. It became the driving force to achieving the success that I have today.

Posted by ralph at 12:39 PM | Permalink

Lorrie-Morgan-Ferrero: I did have a lot of obstacles. I used to not want to talk about it but since you are doing this for kids I have to tell you that this is really important.

I was sexually abused. Nobody back then talked about it. I thought I was the only person in the world. Now, you can look around and you can get help. What I did was I just sucked it up. I just told myself I will get out of this house and I will survive. I will be successful. It was just a lot of inner dialogue.

I was looking back now I realize a lot of it was God. There is no way I could have survived the situation without a higher power. I wasn’t particularly religious although I did pray a lot, but, when I look back, I can tell it was something much bigger than me that pulled me through.

I just want to say to kids who are going through rough times in their homes, it will get better. Just pray and talk to somebody. Find a mentor like this program that you are doing. Find somebody who is doing what you want to do and do it. I didn’t have that luxury. I just had to pull myself through with God and that’s how I did it.

You feel completely helpless. Looking back while I’m thinking, “Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that” but, your just, you’re a kid and your locked in. It is a little different now because people will listen to you much more. Back then it was very hush, hush and you have a hopeless feeling.

Posted by ralph at 12:38 PM | Permalink

Alex Mandossian: Well, I’m very lucky. I’ve only had one really low point and it happened early in my life. I was 25 and I had lost everything, which in this case was a little over a quarter million dollars. The way I overcame that was simple.

I read biographies of other self-made millionaires and billionaires and the one pattern that keeps reoccurring over and over again was, “They had it. They lost it. They got it back again.”

Usually, it happens two and three times. I have been very fortunate. It only has happened once. So, my low point, other than death in the family of people I absolutely loved, which is a natural thing to occur, I had one low point financially.

It happened in 1989 and I overcame it. It took about 3 years to overcome it emotionally and 6 years to overcome financially. I believe I’m a better business person as a result of it. If I see it happening to someone else, I’m usually one of the first to stick my hand out because I remember the pain and the humiliation of the whole process.

Posted by ralph at 12:36 PM | Permalink

Frank Deardurff: I try to live very optimistically. To say that I had a low point it’s hard to pick out a low point. My mother has always envisioned in us or passed onto us that you always look for the good things in life no matter what it be.

Coming from a single-parent childhood where there were four kids, my mother never allowed us to think that we were poor or did without. We always had food on the table. We never stopped to think that it wasn’t steak and baked potatoes.

Trying to look for a low point I don’t know if that is possible.

T Harv Eker: First of all I want to make sure we don’t use the word poverty because I never used that word myself. Certainly I wasn’t well off financially, and then became a millionaire.

My parents came from Europe and they came with the proverbial clothes on their backs and nothing else. For us money meant survival, that s what I learnt when I was young. All my friends wanted to be baseball players and astronauts, fireman and policeman. I just wanted to be a millionaire. I left school early, at the end of the first year of college for my quest to the holy financial grail and for the next twelve years I was nothing but frustrated.

Finally, I met up with a friend of my fathers who was a multi multi millionaire and he gave me some good advice. He said “Stop trying to reinvent the wheel if you want to be rich do what rich people do.” So I started studying what rich business people do and in my next business I became a millionaire in only two and a half years.

The problem was that a couple of years later it was all gone again. I happen to have made my money in the fitness business and I knew about this thing called a set point when it comes to your weight and I realized that I was going to come down to the exact amount of money I had started with and I was back down in my bank book. It just kept on coming no matter what I did after getting to that spot and I realized that not only do we have a set point that comes to our weight but we also have a set point when it comes to our money.

I was very involved in personal development at the time because I was attempting to be a much better father than I had been and I had a newborn son and I wanted to make good on that and so I used those principles to reset what I called my financial thermostat or my money blueprint and I haven’t looked back.

Probably that time when I lost my money was one of the lower points and I just kind of looked up at the sky and said “God help me. If I make it I promise I will help other people do the same thing in the same way I know how.” I was very blessed to remake it and now that’s what I do.

I have kept my promise and my vow, to help other people with the same frustrations that I had. The interesting thing is that people, my name is T Harv Eker, the T is an initial that I gave to myself and the reason was because at one point when I was so frustrated I went to a friend of mine and I said “Its not worth this I am going to just go out and get a $30,000 a year job and be happy with that and just drop off the face of the earth without trying to do anything big.”

He said “Stop feeling sorry for yourself you have to remember that there has never been anyone before you who is you and there will never be anyone after you who is you, you have a thumbprint of your own and there is never going to be another Harv Eker in the world and never will be. You are very special like everyone else and you have got to utilize what you have got.”

That kind of had an effect on me and to remember that I put a T in the front of my name to remember that I am “The” one and only Harv Eker and I better start acting like it and keep acting like it.

Posted by ralph at 05:34 AM | Permalink

Randy Charach: I can offer a couple of different -- I don’t which one was lower. I’ve had several low points in my life. Let me discuss the first one that came to mind.

When I was 20 years old I started waking up routinely, like clockwork, in the morning -- I forgot the exact time, and it wasn’t exactly to the minute, but around four or five in the morning -- with excruciating pain down my left leg. This went on for some time. I went to see my general doctor and he thought maybe it was like from exercising and weights, a slipped disc or something.

I went to therapy, physiotherapy, chiropractors, all sorts of different things. Nothing helped, even pain killers. The pain was excruciating. This went on for probably for about half a year.

Finally, I don’t know how or why, but I tried using just plain aspirin instead of Tylenol 3s and this sort of thing, because it was affecting my life, being medicated and being in pain all the time. And that worked. It was interesting. I mentioned that to him and he said well, you know what?

I want to send you for an X-ray because maybe it’s something else. I went for the X-ray; that didn’t show anything. I started inquiring more with the X-ray technician and started doing a little research. My doctor was on to something. The aspirin was related to a rare bone tumor which we discovered I had, which was benign, fortunately. And that was discovered through a CT scan.

It wasn’t so bad. It might have been a year into it by the time we actually found out what it was. When I found out what it was, I was relieved because I honestly didn’t want to live any longer. The pain that I was having was so intolerable and the drugs that I had to take to live with it were creating other side effects. So I was relieved. All I cared about was can you fix it? And, yes. And is it cancer? No, it’s benign. They explained what that meant, the difference. And no big deal; simple situation.

It’s funny, Ralph. You know how whenever you go to a doctor they’re always the best? Have you ever heard anybody say I went to a doctor and I had this done and he’s the best? You ever hear them say and he’s like second best or the worst or for them to leave out the part that he is the best. Everybody goes to the best. It’s quite funny that way.

Anyway, I went to this guy who is supposed to be the best. He removed the tumor and then I was okay but only for five or six months and then the pain came back. I recognized this pain, this very distinct pain. It was like something hitting the nerve. Not just a regular pain; I knew the difference. So I had it re-X-rayed and it was discovered that he didn’t quite get it all. And so far we haven’t hit the lowest part. I am just building up to it, because this part wasn’t all that bad comparatively to what you’re going to hear, although it doesn’t get that much worse, either.

Then my father, who is a very loving father, he looked at this with me and said, you know, if you really want to take care of this, I will take you to Mayo Clinic in Rochester because they are supposed to be the best. And obviously the first guy wasn’t because he didn’t get it all for whatever reason. Let’s just go to these guys. So we went to Mayo Clinic.

I woke up from the surgery and there were two types of pain. There was the pain from the surgery where they cut open my leg. They removed some bone. They did some bone grafts, this sort of thing. Can you imagine how -- think about this -- that pain was like 5 percent compared to the other pain that I had been living with. The other pain was overriding it, so I knew when I woke up from the surgery they didn’t get it. I just knew it. They just, oh, no, no. You’re confused, dah, dah, dah. They sent me back home and I was right, they didn’t get it.

What happened was they didn’t re-X-ray and it had shifted a little bit, so really they went in and just sort of took out the wrong piece of bone.

It was horrible. So I had to recover from the next six months and then found another doctor locally in Vancouver where I live. He said, look, I can guarantee that this can come out. And what I would have to do is remove a bigger chunk of bone, put a metal plate in there to make up for that lost of structure. I’ll get it out. And I said, okay. Now, by the way, right now, just before talking to him, I’m at my low point.

Now to end that story and then come back to the lesson, he did perform the surgery and it was successful and I’ve been more or less fine ever since.

The lowest point was at that point after Mayo Clinic being unsuccessful, just thinking this is now going on like two years. I had to drop out of college for it and that’s a bit of excuse. I probably would have done that anyway. I went for one year of college while this was happening and I didn’t go back. I could have gone back, and again, there were different reasons I didn’t. I couldn’t go to school.

What it did do, and your question is how did I overcome this obstacle, is I had a change of attitude. The low point, the manifestation of my feeling, though, was like throwing food at people and swearing and hating doctors, people and just being a miserable guy, right? I was horrible.

That didn’t last too long. That lasted about a couple of months until I realized what I was doing. All of a sudden, and I’m not sure what it was, what I read or listened to or what somebody said to me, but it clicked that this is not a way to live, I should be happy. There are people with way worse. It was benign, I’m okay now or I’m going to be okay now. And I came back with vengeance.

I overcame it. It was just a simple like switch in my mind, that’s all it was that I switched. Just turned -- okay, forget it. I’m just going to do whatever I can. And I went out on crutches after that. In fact, that Ronald McDonald job, they hired me for it based on seeing some of my magic shows prior to me being laid up. I did some shows in between surgeries as well. When they approached me for the job, I said, well, yeah, but I have a surgery coming up and it’s going to be a few months recovery and then I will do it.

My very first Ronald appearance was the very first time I walked without crutches after quite a while and it was on stage at the Variety Club Telethon for the children’s hospital, walking on stage on this televised program as Ronald.

So that was something that really did change, truly did change my life, to be able to do that and overcome that obstacle and turn it around and come back with a whole different attitude towards people and life and challenges. It was something that, although I wouldn’t wish it on anybody and of course I’m not happy it happened, but a lot of good came from it.

Posted by ralph at 12:31 PM | Permalink