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Unbroken Man          

(The Story behind the Book)

 

Unbroken Man was the answer to lingering questions that continually haunted me through my life. I lived through a drug life, eventually lost most of the use of my eyes, my executive career vanished, and I received an indictment on federal fraud and conspiracy charges facing over thirty-six years in prison.  Through these tough times I believed I was the written definition of a broken man. My life came alive again after each failure, and I would transition from the feeling my life was broken to a new beginning. Eventually I found my final calling as a volunteer technology specialist, then an assistant professor, university director and national public speaker.

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From the days of my childhood, with lack of knowledge that I suffered from vision loss to extreme drug use in a Florida drug cartel in my youth, then that fateful day that the doctor told me I was going blind was, for me, what I called strike one. That was my first of three strikes that I would live through in life. I felt at each time my life was broken forever and I was every definition of a broken man. Then I found an unusual way out of the drug world and into a new world as an executive for national construction companies and I felt I had hit a massive homerun in life. Strike one was no longer even a memory, and I left the failures of my youth and my fear of the upcoming blindness far behind me. I was now an executive running companies and loving life. 

 

Years later I started feeling the effects of my blindness and could no longer hold my executive position. I felt then that this was strike two in my life and my life broke all over again. Little did I know that shortly after blindness had set in, strike three would hit just as I was just accepting my blindness and the loss of my executive career.  Strike three, was that fateful day my life broke for what I thought was the third and final time, the overwhelming day of my federal indictment facing thirty-six years in prison. At that point, I had no career, I was legally blind, and I was facing the rest of my life behind bars. The real meaning of my life was broken to the core, and I knew it. I felt I had struck out in life for the last and final time and again I was the definition of a broken man.

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Then, after pronouncing my life over after strike three, I hit the biggest home run of my life. That home run was the day I became a volunteer mentor to others, and I faced my deepest fears of blindness through their fears. I started repairing my broken life by listening to the broken lives of others. Those days of listening to other people’s problems while ignoring and masking my own became the cornerstone of my new life and what I believed was a final career in volunteerism. Unknowingly my work as a volunteer had repaired those deep thoughts that prevented me from succeeding again and I was on my way again to becoming what I now call an unbroken man. This was the beginning of new homeruns that would define me as a person and define a new life in an unexpected but glorious future.

 

My life had now changed, instead of strike four, I had hit another home run that would change my life forever. I was now a national motivational public speaker as a member of the National Speakers Association and Global Speakers Federation, a University Director, an Assistant Professor (without a degree) lecturing in three colleges, and a technology specialist in the largest adaptive technology center in California. Going to doctors as I had since my diagnosis was now not the focus of my life, I was now lecturing to future doctors about specialized technologies for the blind and giving lectures on depression that their future patients would often suffer from. Also, assisting patients daily in a medical clinic as an Adaptive Technology Specialist was a dream come true. I would have never thought that this life was ever possible, even in my wildest dreams. At the same time, I also had the pleasure of serving as the public face as a small college transitioned to a much larger university. I served as Director of Community Relations speaking for the university locally. I received top university and community awards and honorary doctorates.

 

Today, I am partially retired. I have lived an amazing life, a life that I would never change, a life now focused on my children and glorias grandchildren and a life that daily leaves me wondering what my next homerun will be…………

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