As a professional coach, speaker and trainer, I've often been asked about the availability of my books, tapes or videos. "Don't have any," I say. "I've been too busy training, speaking and coaching to write but I do plan to get around to it someday."
Well someday arrived and I had to make good on that promise. I'd been making noises about writing something for so long someone (it could have been my wife) finally challenged me to do it. I think the exact words were something like "put-up or shut-up " And because I thought writing would be easier than not talking, I made my way to the keyboard, sketched out some ideas and began converting my thoughts to words.
This is not a book in the traditional sense. Rather it's a collection of essays on topics that inspired the greatest interest and/or response in my training or speaking sessions.
What are these about? Well, the unifying theme is best described by this quote from a speech Theodore Roosevelt gave at the Sorbonne in 1910:
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
Success is in that arena. My experience is thatmany people want to be there, but our latter-day culture of entitlement, victimhood and fear frustrates them. They would like to overcome those frustrations and take more personal responsibility for the events of their lives. It is those for whom I've written this collection. This book is about the relationship between success and the power of personal responsibility.