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YOU ARE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK
Somehow, in spite of all the troubles I had in school, I managed to get into a local university. I thought being a freshman in college meant a last opportunity to make a fresh start. I dreamt about making my family proud, and to showing the world (and, more importantly, myself) that I did have the potential to succeed. I was in a new environment. College professors taught differently than high school teachers did, and no one at this college had any preconceived notions about me. I worked my butt off, but I actually wound up doing even worse in my college classes than high school.
A few months into this, I started to face my reality. I couldn’t see the point of wasting time and money that I did not have. I was ready to quit school altogether. I told a friend about my plans and he suggested that, before I made a decision, I go with him to visit his family for the weekend. He thought that getting me away from the campus might give me some perspective. When we arrived, his father showed me around their property before dinner. Along the way, he asked how school was going for me. It was the worst question anyone could ask me at the time, and I’m sure my response stunned him. I erupted into tears. Not holding-back-the-tears crying, but straight up bawling. I could see he was taken aback by this, but his innocent question had broken the dam holding back so many pent-up emotions.
I told him the whole “boy with the broken brain” story while he listened patiently. When I was finished, he looked me directly in the eyes.
“Jim, why are you in school?” he said. “What do you want to be? What do you want to do? What do you want to have? What do you want to share?”
I didn’t have immediate answers to any of these questions because no one had ever asked me them before, but I felt as though I needed to answer them now. I started to speak, and he stopped me. He tore a couple of pieces of paper from his pocket diary and told me to write down my answers. (In this book, I’ll show you how to ask questions to learn and achieve anything faster.)
I spent the next several minutes writing a bucket list. When I was finished, I began folding up the papers and preparing to put them in my pocket. But as I was doing so, my friend’s father grabbed the pages out of my hand. I freaked out, because I didn’t think what I’d written was going to be read by anyone else, especially this complete stranger. But he opened the pages and read while I stewed in my discomfort.
It seemed as though he took hours to read what I’d written, though I’m sure it was only a minute or two. When he finished, he said, “You’re this close,” holding the index fingers on his right and left hands about a foot apart, “to getting every single thing on that list.”
That statement seemed absurd to me. I told him I couldn’t crack this list if I had 10 lifetimes. But then he took his fingers and, without expanding the distance between them, placed one on each side of my head. The space he was describing was my brain.
“That’s the key,” he said. “Come with me; I have something to show you.”
We walked back to the house where he took me to a room that I’d never seen before. It was filled wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with books. Now remember, at that point in my life, I was not a fan of books; it was like being in a room full of snakes. But what made it even worse was that he started grabbing snakes from his shelves and handing them to me. I looked at the titles and realized these were biographies of incredible men and women throughout history, as well as some early personal-growth books such as The Magic of Thinking Big, The Power of Positive Thinking, and Think and Grow Rich.
“Jim, I want you to read one of these books a week.”
My first thought was, Have you not been listening to anything I’ve been saying? I didn’t ask this out loud, but I did respond: “I don’t know how I could do that. You know, reading doesn’t come easily to me, and I have so much schoolwork to do.”
He held up a finger, saying, “Don’t let school interfere with your education.” I later learned he was paraphrasing a quote often attributed to Mark Twain.
“Look,” I said. “I understand how reading these books would be really helpful, but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.”
He paused and then reached into his pocket, pulled out my bucket list, and started reading each one out loud.
There was something about hearing my dreams in another person’s voice that messed with my mind and my soul something fierce. Truth be told, many of the things on the list were things I wanted to do for my family— things my parents could never afford or would never have done for themselves even if they could afford them. Hearing this read out loud moved me in ways I didn’t think possible. It deeply tapped me into my drive and purpose. (We will unleash your motivation together in Part 3.) When he was finished, I told him I would do exactly what he suggested, though secretly I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that feat.
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