THE BOOK • AN EXCERPT

The Red Light

PROLOGUE

It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 1987. I was 24 years old, engaged to be married, and stopped at a red light at Allisonville Road and 82nd Street in Indianapolis. Lori was in the passenger seat.

On paper, I had the job everyone wanted. Procter & Gamble. A company car. A future. In reality, I was getting results. I just wasn't getting them the way my reports said I was.

A car pulled up next to us. A light-blue Plymouth Reliant, the same model of company car I was driving. I looked over. Behind the wheel was my boss.

"I hope he didn't see us," I said.

He had.

The next week, he sat in my apartment, told me I was done, and asked for my keys.

I didn't tell Lori. I didn't tell my parents. I didn't tell my roommate, or my best friends who lived right next door. I went across the street to a bar, drank alone to numb myself, and started building a story. Three weeks later, I had a new job at Clorox, better pay, and an explanation about an opportunity too good to pass up. Every word of it was true, except for the part I left out.

I kept that secret for 14 years.

In those 14 years, I married Lori and we raised three kids. I opened Clorox's first office in Bentonville, Arkansas, to sell to a fast-growing company called Walmart. I got fired a second time. And about 18 months later, the little company I'd bet everything on sold its battery-operated toothbrush to Procter & Gamble, the same company that had fired me, for $475 million.

You'd think that would have fixed it.

It didn't. I built the house I'd dreamed about since I was a teenager. I ran marathons, finished an Ironman, and set a Guinness World Record. I stood in front of Harvard business students and told them how I did it. And I still felt like the 10-year-old who dreaded school every morning, sure he was the dumbest kid in the room.

This book is about the thing that finally started to fix it. It wasn't money, or another win. It was the truth. I didn't learn that until I was 58, on a hiking trail in California, on September 12, 2021.

If you've ever looked like you had it all together on the outside while feeling like a fraud on the inside, this book is for you. Let me start where it really started, with a kid who was sure something was wrong with him, and terrified someone would find out.