Directions: How to Live a Full life and Leave a a Legacy - by Author James Attrell - Copywrite - Do Not duplicate

Description: "Start living a life full of love, joy and peace today as you follow James’s life story and learn how he is leaving a legacy while squeezing every ounce of juice out of his life and overcoming the many challenges that life presents. James has travelled all seven continents in his quest for knowledge and understanding and has conquered the impact of cancer, bankruptcy, divorce, death, and immigration; just to name a few. James built a successful construction and leasing business with over 100 employees and sold the business in 2009. Today he manages a successful real estate investment business, actively trades equities and serves and supports his church and several non-profit organizations. Married with five grown children, ten grand-children and seven great-grandchildren, James speaks from personal experience about family life in America."

Hometown: Edmonton, Canada

Contributor Bio: "Born in the Rocky Mountains of Canada in 1950, James has been in Texas for over 45 years. He retired (kind of) after selling the family construction and leasing business to spend more time with his wife Sherry, serving his church, traveling to visit family and the rest of the world, volunteering his skills wherever they might be needed, building a real estate investment company and a wildlife retreat ranch to serve the community, doing what he could to improve the community for future generations through non-profit service, and learning new technologies."

Book Category: SEL016000 - Self Help/Personal Growth/Happiness

Introduction: The Inevitable Guide You Didn't Know You Needed

Congratulations. You’ve broken the seal. Most people, upon encountering a text labeled "Directions," experience a sudden and overwhelming urge to immediately throw caution—and the instructions—to the wind, preferring instead to fumble their way through life/assembly/this book with blind, aggressive confidence. That’s okay; we expected it.

Directions, by their very nature, are often annoying, deeply patronizing, and usually printed in a font so tragically small it constitutes an optical felony. This is where we part ways with tradition.

Consider this not a mandate, but a highly opinionated travel guide for the messy, contradictory, and often absurd journey we call modern existence. We promise only two things:

1. We will never tell you to "insert tab A into slot B" unless it’s a brilliant, metaphorical analogy for existential dread.
2. When you fail (and you will—failure is, after all, excellent content), we’ll at least give you a clever quote to write on your resignation letter/divorce paperwork/failed soufflé.

Now, enough preamble. You have wasted approximately 47 seconds reading this introduction, which, in internet time, is equivalent to an entire season of television. Let us proceed before the existential panic sets in.

The Fine Print: Meet Your Pilot (And His Baggage)

Through the wisdom gleaned from these pages—a wisdom hard-earned through legal battles and minor natural disasters—I hope to inspire everyone from immediate family to my unknown friends (you, dear reader) and future generations to stop being quite so precious and start making a positive ruckus. Let's impact the world, shall we? You've already done the hardest part: reading this book.

As a seasoned globetrotter who has successfully ticked off all seven continents (yes, even that icy, penguin-infested one), I feel uniquely qualified to state the following: I have seen the world, and I have determined that I currently reside in the best darn country, and definitely the best state (Texas), bar none. This includes Canada (my glorious, syrup-loving homeland, which will always hold a special, politely-apologetic place in my heart). The culmination of a dozen years of legal paper shuffling led to the proud moment of becoming an American citizen on February 6, 1992, in Sherman, Texas, and I have never regretted trading snow for scorching humility.

If Life were a BINGO card, I’d have called "BINGO" approximately seventeen times and then demanded a bonus prize. I have participated in, survived, or personally witnessed every major plot twist, existential curveball, and minor inconvenience the universe could throw. Just scan the list of "qualifications":

• Personal Calamities: Marriage, divorce, adoption, the death of loved ones (including a parent and young sibling), cancer, arthritis, and the truly baffling ordeal of quitting smoking.
• Financial & Professional Misadventures: Bankruptcy, foreclosure, job loss, building a business to over 100 employees, and the subsequent, glorious act of selling it.
• The Acts of God (and other forces): Car wrecks, tornadoes, hurricanes, tropical storms, and earthquakes.
• The Absurd Resume Builders: Building a lake, flying small planes and drones, serving as a bank director, city councilman, boy scout leader, and a hockey coach.
• The True Tests of Character: Significant weight loss, fighting the urge to consume endless coffee (for a week), and surviving silent auctions.

These are not credentials; they are scars. But they are the scars that qualify me to tell you, with a smirk, how to actually live a full life, squeeze every last ounce of juice from it, and perhaps, accidentally leave a legacy while you're distracted by all the chaos.

Chapter 1: The First Direction: Choose Yourself

The Internal Budgeting Problem (Or: The Two Wolves)

Self-help gurus will often try to convince you that life is a gentle flow of positive energy. It isn't. Life is a battle—specifically, an incredibly tedious, internal budgetary battle fought by two very different personalities living rent-free in your head.

As one elderly Cherokee brave once told his grandson (a story that sounds suspiciously like the internal monologue of a man facing a poorly stocked fridge at 2 AM): The battle is between two wolves.

One wolf is Evil. He manifests as your Anger (the traffic), your Regret (that haircut in '98), and your Fear (the looming tax season). This wolf specializes in making your life miserable, but he's also really good at justifying procrastination.

The other wolf is Good. He promises Joy (that perfect cup of coffee), Peace (silence when the kids are finally asleep), and Hope (the delusion that you can still fit into those jeans). This wolf is your cheerleader, but often gets ignored because the Evil wolf has better snacks.

The grandson’s question was, of course, the critical one: Which one wins?

The ancient answer is also the most brutal application of personal responsibility: The one that you feed.

You don't need a spirit guide to tell you that scrolling social media for four hours feeds the Evil wolf (Regret). You don't need a therapist to confirm that working on that hard project for one hour feeds the Good wolf (Joy of completion). Every single decision you make is a budgetary choice. You are the CEO of your own internal zoo, and if your Good wolf starves, don't blame the economy; blame your purchasing habits. You chose the cheap, satisfying rush of fear over the hard-won peace.

The Four Stages of Being Clueless

While we're on the subject of ancient wisdom that perfectly maps onto modern office dynamics, let’s revisit a classic proverb about four types of people you will meet—and occasionally be—in your journey. If you remember nothing else, remember this:

• He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.
• The Modern Translation: This is the Dunning-Kruger poster child. They are loud, confidently incorrect, and usually found arguing politics in the comment section. Do not engage. Their ignorance is a fortress, and you are not an artillery shell.
• He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child; teach him.
• The Modern Translation: This is the ideal student. They admit their shortcomings, ask smart questions, and, crucially, understand that incompetence is a temporary state. Find these people and invest in them. They are the future.
• He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him.
• The Modern Translation: The competent person suffering from chronic self-doubt or imposter syndrome. They are sitting on a mountain of talent, convinced it’s just a molehill. Give them a swift, compassionate kick in the pants. They just need permission.
• He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise; follow him.
• The Modern Translation: The mentor, the reliable expert, the person who actually read the manual. They are rare, humble, and should be treated like a precious resource. Buy them coffee, take notes, and stand slightly behind them so their wisdom might rub off.

The lesson here is simple: Know your type. Most days, you bounce between the "Child" (eager to learn) and the "Asleep" (needs a jolt). If you find yourself drifting into "Fool" territory, put the phone down, apologize, and go back to basics.

On Keeping Your Existential Balance

Finally, we arrive at the physics of personal survival, courtesy of one of history’s greatest minds who was clearly channeling the inner turmoil of a man trying to balance his entire life (a wife, a Nobel Prize, and an impossible hairdo).

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To stay in balance you must keep moving." — Albert Einstein.

The core of choosing yourself isn't about finding a stationary, serene center. That's death. The core is recognizing that balance is achieved through continuous, imperfect motion.

If you stop pedaling, you fall over. If you coast for too long, you hit the curb. It is the active, often frantic, pedaling—through job loss, divorce, cancer, and trying to lead a Boy Scout troop—that actually maintains equilibrium. The directionis not important until you choose to move. And choosing yourself means mounting that ridiculous, wobbly bicycle every single morning.

Chapter 2: The Second Direction: Water, Freedom, and Why Your Government Should Worry Less About Your Life and More About Your Plumbing

The Tyranny of Thirst

If you want a truly universal rule about human existence, forget philosophy and look at hydration: Where there is clean water, you generally find peace and prosperity. Where water is difficult to find, you will often find strife and conflict. It turns out that when people aren't worried about dying of cholera, they have the mental bandwidth for things like, say, building an economy. Who knew?

Globally, the scale of this problem is obscene. Approximately 800 million people live without access to clean drinking water. Think about that the next time you leave the faucet running while brushing your teeth. Unsafe water causes more deaths annually than all forms of violence combined, including war. Children, with their comically small body mass, are especially vulnerable. In the developing world, the burden of water collection falls primarily on women and children. They walk miles—time that could be spent learning, working, or generally not developing debilitating back issues—only to fetch water that will likely make them sick. It's an absurdist, Sisyphean tragedy.

(And just to put things in perspective: over 90% of the planet's fresh water is currently locked up in the ice fields of Antarctica and Greenland. Which is just science's way of rubbing it in.)

A Tale of Two Islands (and a Texas Town)

To understand how critical infrastructure and policy are, let's look at two places surrounded by the same big, salty ocean:

1. Haiti: The Tragedy of Plenty. Two years after the 2010 earthquake, I was on a mission in Grand-Goâve. Haiti sits on an island, surrounded by water, with ample fresh groundwater just a few feet below the surface. Yet, due to a profound absence of functional governance and infrastructure, people were suffering and dying from Cholera. Seeing a new water well being drilled and immediately transforming a community's health is the most direct proof of concept the world offers. It’s the difference between dignity and desperation.
2. Singapore: The Triumph of Ingenuity. Singapore, one of the most modern and advanced nations in the world (and an absolute delight to visit, by the way), is also surrounded by salt water. But instead of shrugging and accepting their geographical fate, they decided to tell nature: "We'll manage." They are actively transitioning from relying on piped water from Malaysia to self-sufficiency through rainwater harvesting, desalination, and the pièce de résistance: converting gray water and sewage into potable drinking water.

Now, before that last thought makes you gag, understand that this system works brilliantly, including in places like Wichita Falls, Texas.

The Question of Leadership vs. Complacency

What is the fundamental difference between Haiti and Singapore? Why the vast gulf in the quality of life?

It isn't the water; they both have plenty. The difference lies entirely in leadership, ingenuity, and the cultural acceptance of freedom.

In Haiti, you see remnants of French colonial savagery—no street addresses, possession is ownership, dignity stripped, forests razed, and Voodoo sadly introduced. Next door, on the same Caribbean island, the Dominican Republic has the ninth-largest economy in Latin America, driven by trade, agriculture, and tourism.

Why? The Spanish, who controlled the Dominican Republic, eventually fostered an environment that encouraged trade and free markets. They liberated people to build, prosper, and create employment and wealth. They gave people a reason to care about the next day.

The Direction of Hope

This brings us to the core direction for this chapter: Free people become ingenious if left to their own devices (absent oppressive government intervention). Worry is the enemy of productivity, but hope is the greatest fuel. As the great naval hero John Paul Jones put it: "If fear is cultivated it will become stronger, if faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery."

A people reliant on their Government for anything beyond a safe and secure country with effective transportation systems will start to lose the ability to think for themselves. They stop seeking prosperity and start seeking subsidies.

In Haiti, safety and secure systems are virtually non-existent. But hope persists. Organizations like Haiti Arise are building orphanages, clinics, and schools, teaching communities that joy is found not by seeking it, but by learning how to deal with sorrow. It's a subtle but profound distinction.

The kindness of strangers in Haiti remains unforgettable. When our Mission Van's rear wheel plunged through a rotten road surface into an open sewage enclosure, a crowd of strangers immediately appeared, rocked us out, and vanished. They disappeared as quickly as they appeared because they were acting out of a fear of God and an understanding of the good the Mission sign on our van represented.

The message is clear and uncomplicated, whether you’re fixing a pothole or a life: Do no harm. Do only Good. Love and help others.

As Pastors Marc and Lisa Honorat understood, in order to catch a lot, you need to catch a few repeatedly. Set a target. Do a little every day. That's how you get out of the hole, that's how you build a well, and that’s how you eventually arrive at your destination.

Chapter 3: The Third Direction: Persistence, Or, How to Eat an Elephant (One Byte at a Time)

The Marathon of Memories

If you’ve ever undertaken a large-scale life project—like renovating a house, running a successful business, or simply trying to get everyone in the family to agree on dinner—you know that the hardest part isn't the skill required; it's the persistence. It is the daily, grinding commitment to a task that refuses to be done quickly.

Take, for example, the Herculean, multi-year, multi-format digital conversion of my family’s life history. Over the years, I managed to collect a massive library of home video on every conceivable medium invented since the 1960s: Super 8 film, the very first, bulky VHS tapes, and everything in between. This wasn't a small stack; we're talking about a history that could choke a small mountain goat.

The goal? To convert every last second of that analog history into a searchable, editable digital library.

The Art of the Slow Grind

A project this massive cannot be conquered by enthusiasm alone; it requires methodical, boring, relentless, and perfectly timed execution. It's the ultimate example of the "little bit every day" philosophy, disguised as a technologically mandated chore.

The entire process was structured around maximizing productivity during the one time of day nobody bothers you: while you sleep.

1. The Analog-to-DVD Phase (Year 1): Every night, a different video medium was set up to copy its contents onto a fresh DVD. The routine was sacred: load the tape, start the copy, and label the disc upon waking. This took a full year, but the effort was limited to five minutes of setup and five minutes of cleanup. The machine did the work; I just had to be the incredibly dedicated, slightly exhausted middle manager.
2. The DVD-to-Digital Phase (Year 2): Phase two was similar. Every night, one of those freshly created DVDs was installed into the Mac and converted into a massive MPEG file on a brand new, very large hard drive. This, too, took another year, consuming valuable processing time while I was, thankfully, unconscious.
3. The Legacy Building Phase (A Few Weeks): Finally, the hard, patient labor was done. Transferring the clean, dated movie files into my Mac Computer and organizing them took only a few weeks. The reward? The ability to scroll through 50 plus years of family history in moments and immediately use iMovie to craft edited video memories for events like a child's graduation.

The true, slightly sobering revelation here is that I really needed to write this book because future generations will, quite rightly, not want to sit through some 300 hours of "home movies." They want the highlight reel, the summary, the searchable anchor points.

Anchors in the Storm

Somewhere in all those endless, digitized hours of shaky camera work and questionable fashion choices, there are moments of profound truth—anchors that will help others during their stormy times.

This entire project—converting the physical history of a family into a legacy of easily accessible memories—is the physical embodiment of the book’s purpose. If this book helps you, the reader, hook onto those anchors of faith, perseverance, and practical wisdom, and helps you get to where you are going, then the journey will have been fulfilled. The point wasn't the 300 hours; the point was the two years of persistence that made the wisdom accessible.

Chapter 4: The Fourth Direction: The View from Everest (And Why You Should Ignore the Experts)

The Geopolitical Gold Standard

Let’s talk about power, not in terms of armies or GDP, but in terms of hydration. The Tibet plateau is the most vital real estate on the planet, supplying fresh water from its many glaciers to about half the world's population. Half. Is it any wonder that China wants to maintain absolute control of Tibet? This isn't just about territory; it’s about controlling the planet's collective faucet.

Unfortunately, China’s industrial strategy currently involves something called "The Great 20-Year Emissions Ramp-Up," which is their way of saying, "We'll worry about environmental impact later; right now, the numbers need to go up." They are converting coal plants—the major offenders—to cleaner natural gas piped in from Russia and building massive hydro-electric dams in Tibet. The dams are a double-edged sword: they power China, but while under construction, they restrict water flow to India and other downstream nations, creating drought conditions and, inevitably, diplomatic tension. Global politics, it turns out, is simply advanced plumbing.

A Village with No Trees, But Plenty of Yaks

My trip across Tibet to Mount Everest and Kathmandu was easily one of the most fascinating journeys of my life. (I was, thankfully, able to photograph many special temples before the devastating earthquake struck Kathmandu a few months later.)

In one ancient Tibetan village high on the plateau, we visited a home that exemplified a truly pragmatic, non-Western lifestyle. The household consisted of grandparents, a wife, and multiple husbands—yes, you read that correctly. It's an ancient custom where the family selects a woman to marry their sons (sometimes three or four), and she moves in and immediately takes charge of the household. The children born into this family are uncertain of the precise paternity, but they grow up with clear chores and duties.

Survival here is ingenious. Since there are no trees, they heat their home and cook their meals using dung from their Yak herd, which lives on the first floor during the night and cold spells. The mother, the undisputed boss, uses a solar-powered crockpot—a metal stand with reflective panels—to cook stew, carefully rotating it throughout the day to catch the sun. Water is piped in via gravity, surface-mounted plastic piping, leading to a communal washing area where the women gather daily. These systems are basic, brilliant, and maintained by the local leadership—a prime example of local ingenuity compensating for governmental apathy.

The Audacity of Hope at 16,931 Feet

We drove for hours in four-wheel-drive jeeps over terrain that felt more like the surface of the moon to reach the North Face Base Camp of Mount Everest. It was windy, brutally cold, and the landscape was alien.

The guides, excellent professionals who navigated new rivers and giant rocks, stated that cell phone communication was "not likely" at the base camp (16,931 feet).

My love of the absurd, and perhaps my natural tendency to disregard any statement that contains the phrase "not likely," kicked in. I set myself a truly idiotic, yet meaningful, goal: I was going to Facetime my daughter, Marissa, and granddaughter, Delilah, back in Texas.

Achieving this meant the following unnecessary, yet heroic, tasks:

1. Crawling under a large rock to escape the wind.
2. Removing warm gloves in a fierce, freezing gale.
3. Partially removing my winter parka to access a warm pocket.
4. Manipulating the small, frozen buttons on the phone.

And then, success. It was an incredibly exciting and special memory, proving that sometimes, the only difference between the impossible and the improbable is the willingness to try.

The Tyranny of the Unchallenging

My wife, Sherry (the love of my life, who generally prefers I stay warm and breathing), often suggests I slow down. But here’s the directional truth I live by: **Aim high because gravity will always impact your result when you least expect it. **

Had I followed the guide's low-expectation warning, I would have missed that moment. The good things we do—the really meaningful things—are always challenging. Life already offers ample opportunities to suffer and be miserable, so why should we choose to be anything other than hopeful?

The Bible tells us to be strong and courageous. And, sometimes, courage means risking cold hands to make a long-distance call.

The Difference Between Guidance and Control

I realized I didn't condemn the guides who brought me safely up those treacherous slopes. I simply listened to how they answered. The lead guide admitted he had once experienced cell phone usage there. The risk of trying? Cold hands. The potential reward? A special memory spanning continents and generations. Hope matters, and so does prayer.

This willingness to risk cold hands contrasts sharply with the other reality of Tibet: The Surveillance State.

Traveling through the country, we were required to pick up an armed policeman who rode with us. The bus had an alarm that alerted the driver and us if he was speeding. Our guide explained that all traffic and walkways are covered by video cameras with an advanced facial recognition system. In this regime, the police don't need to patrol; they just need to wait for the alarm. Second-offender speeders, we were told, would "disappear" for lengthy "training" sessions, with their families often unaware of their location.

Contrast this controlled, fearful environment with the free-market ingenuity of the Dominican Republic we discussed earlier. The message is clear: when a government removes fear and encourages hope, people innovate (Singapore). When a government cultivates fear and exerts total control, people stop daring (Tibet).

The road we took descending into Kathmandu—destroyed by an earthquake months earlier and rebuilt as a perilous, single-lane temporary path—was a perfect final metaphor. Life is full of treacherous, unbarricaded roads. The trick is to keep moving, keep a lookout for the truck hanging over the edge, and never let the experts define the limits of your hope.

Chapter 5: The Fifth Direction: The Dignity of Endurance

Small House, Big World

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of visiting my grandparents' small home on a farm in Carstairs, Alberta. That little house on the prairie somehow never felt small, even when Uncles, Aunts, and many cousins and friends would gather there regularly. I’m sure our parents found it crowded, but to us, it was a boundless universe of family and football games (Grandma Helen always mowed the field beforehand so we could play).

In that little house, I learned everything I needed to know about character, necessity, and the deep, uncomplicated loyalty of family. We certainly weren't wealthy—I remember having only two pairs of pants (one for dress, one for every day, necessitating Sunday washing), and there were times dinner alternated between spaghetti with cheese and spaghetti with tomatoes, and powdered milk was the standard drink. Yet, I never felt poor or lacking anything, because what we lacked in material goods, we more than made up for in connection.

The Heroes of Paschendael and Paint-by-Number

My grandfather, Steven Attrell, was a hero in the most visceral sense of the word. He served in the Canadian Armed Forces in the brutal, hand-to-hand battles of Paschendael and Vimy Ridge in France—a terrifying distance from his birthplace in Godstone, Surrey, England. He survived those fierce engagements and then, in a cruel twist of fate, survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was a First World War amputee, forever bearing the physical marks of his endurance.

Despite being wheelchair-bound and suffering from severe arthritis in his hands, Grandpa Steve never let go of the simple joys of life. He loved crib and card games, and though the shuffling and dealing must have been agony, he never passed on the opportunity. He also loved to paint, spending his latter years working tirelessly through the difficulty of managing a paintbrush to complete several beautiful paint-by-number works of art.

What I learned from him is that things are never as bad as they seem, and that endurance builds and supports character. Think about that: Beethoven’s best works resulted from his senior years when he was completely deaf. Imagine the silence—the expert advice telling him to stop—and yet, he pushed on, creating sound and music out of pure, internal will.

The Iron Will of Grandma Helen

Grandma Helen Attrell was the definition of strength—emotionally and physically. She managed Grandpa Steve’s care without outside help well into their senior life, embodying quiet self-sufficiency. She also had an amazing memory for kindness, always making me potatoes and gravy, even if everyone else was eating something different.

She also held the line when needed. When she caught my cousin John, Uncle Bob, and me smoking in the farm garage, her threat to take us to "family court" if we did it again was enough to send us scrambling. We didn't know what family court was, but we knew we didn't want to find out.

These two people, defined by resilience and duty, taught me the true dignity of endurance. It's not the grand victory that defines you; it's the daily decision to keep shuffling the cards, to keep moving the crockpot in the sun, and to keep painting, even when the hand holding the brush is aching.

The direction here is clear: Embrace the challenge of hardship, for it is the fire that forges character.

Chapter 6: The Sixth Direction: Mailbox Money and the Price of Hard Work

The Currency of Opportunity

I was encouraged to start working at an early age, and by the age of 12, I had landed a paper route for the Calgary Herald. This wasn't about necessity; it was about self-determination. The money I earned was designated for my camera and photo hobby and growing my coin collection.

This job taught me a crucial equation: Equality of opportunity meant I could replace relaxation and fun with hard work and earn money for what I wanted out of life.

While my lazy friends relied on what their parents could afford to dole out, I was managing a small enterprise. I always had money for my hobbies, but critically, I always made sure there was some left over for the future. The simple lesson became an ingrained philosophy: The harder you work, the more you earn, and the more likely it is that you can be a blessing to others. By the time I was 17, in 1968, I had saved enough to buy my first car outright. That purchase wasn't just metal and tires; it was a physical testament to years of frozen mornings and the conscious decision to choose work over leisure.

The Frozen Grind of Southwood

My life as a Calgary Herald newspaperboy is filled with sharply contrasting memories. I was technically underage when I applied, but being in the extreme Southern limits of Calgary in a new residential neighborhood called Southwood, I may have been the only applicant. My initial 30-home route quickly swelled to over 100, and over the four years I had the route, it was split several times.

The routine was relentless, including walking or riding the bus 100 blocks downtown to the Calgary Herald office every Saturday morning to pay my bill. My best days were Monday, when the small-quantity papers fit easily into one bag on my bicycle handlebars.

My worst days were Saturday, with the enormous paper quantity, delivered in forty-below-zero temperatures and three or four feet of snow. The cold was a physical barrier that had to be conquered in increments; I would deliver a few papers, return home to thaw out, and then head back out for another round. I froze my fingers, toes, and ears so often that they remain painfully sensitive to cold to this day. And while that sensitivity might just be "all in my head," that’s exactly where it counts.

I wasn’t always alone. My brother Kim took over the route until his tragic death in a car/train wreck in 1968, after which my youngest brother, Peter, took the reins. My sister Patsy and her friends would also help occasionally. In good weather, finding someone younger to "enslave for a short time" was always a priority. It was a family business forged in Canadian winter.

The Concept of Mailbox Money

Beyond the work ethic, the paper route was my first lesson in serious financial concepts. One of my earliest investing experiences was purchasing Canada Savings Bonds with my savings, putting them in a safe deposit box, and clipping the dividend coupons when they became due.

The concept of "mail box" money and recurring revenue—getting paid simply for owning an asset—hit home at an incredibly early age. I learned that just as you have to catch a little repeatedly to catch a lot (a theme we explored in Chapter 2), wealth is built the same way: Rome wasn't built overnight, and neither is any worthwhile endeavor.

This led directly to the critical habit of goal setting. The daily grind of the paper route taught me to set a goal and do a little to advance toward it every single day. But the goal has to be definitive:

• "I want to be a doctor" is not definitive.
• "I want to be a pediatrician" is closer.
• "I want to travel" is not definitive.
• "I want to visit London and Beijing" is closer.
• "I want children" is not definitive.
• "I want to marry and have two kids" is closer.

You must think it out and think it daily. You must consciously push that huge boulder towards the cliff just a little every day. You'll get there one day. But always remember that if you don't have goals that match your God-given reason for existence, you will be running for a finish line that doesn't exist.

Chapter 7: The Seventh Direction: The Engine of Responsibility

The Wealth Creators

As I traveled around the world I learned that almost all the capital that was used to create and build churches, parks, schools, museums and monuments came from the charitable donations of hard-working people who started successful businesses and created Wealth for themselves and others while creating jobs for many. These individuals discovered their God-given talents and they inspired others to join their organizations creating even more jobs. More importantly, they supported worthwhile causes to realize God's promise of prosperity to those who share and bless others by their actions.

These individuals often had to battle with the politics of envy and income inequality. While they strove to lift people up to higher ground, liberal politicians worked to knock them down and steal their hard-earned income through excessive taxation; not understanding that people of means create jobs and prosperity for all. These business owners also offer opportunity to all to realize the American Dream. Their children are usually raised to understand that equal opportunity is important but any attempt to get equal results will fail because that attempt will create and nurture a culture of dependance and entitlement. Victim-hood, mediocrity and anger result instead of ability and hope. The successful must not be denied the positive consequences of their choices. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Investing vs. Gambling

You won't meet these wealthy behind-the-scenes people on Wall Street. Wall Street represents relatively few businesses in America and represents only the largest of Corporations that are publicly traded. Wall Street is where pension funds invest the savings of retired citizens who worked hard all of their lives and who rely on the growth and dividends offered by such investments. Wall Street is for big business and for big banks and it is not a place for the inexperienced. I speak from experience and several years of intensive training in economics and the worldwide futures, forex, options and equities markets. I also have extensive training from personal experience in the US real estate market. Wall Street is a large casino where only the largest institutions can thrive given the impact of computer programs and automated methods of transferring wealth from retail customers (the sheep) to the big banks (the wolves) and other such investor institutions that prey on the unsuspecting. The day of Buying and Holding the stock of quality corporations seems to becoming a thing of the past. Manipulation of the price of currencies, commodities and equities by big banks and government seems to have become the new normal. So, enter the casino at your own risk. I'm not suggesting that you should not save your money and invest wisely. To the contrary, you absolutely should do so. Just make certain that you are investing and not gambling. There is a thin line between the two.

The vast majority of Americans do not work for Wall Street Corporations. On the contrary, most Americans work for privately held companies. These smaller corporations make a lot of their own rules and they are the real backbone of our country.

The Economics of Business Owners

Most of our politicians are lawyers who do not understand basic economics. If a business does not earn a profit for the owners then it must cut costs and that usually means job loss. On the other hand, these same businesses will utilize excess earnings to grow and create jobs. That action, however, is entirely the owners prerogative; as it should be. After all, they put their capital at risk to create and grow their business and therefore it is their right to manage excess cash flow in whatever way that they wish. In many cases that excess cash flow becomes a "rainy day" fund to protect the business and sustain the employment of people in the event of a catastrophe. If only all Governments acted in that way (the State of Texas does) along with businesses and built a "rainy day" fund. Such a fund ensures that you live within your means.

John Wesley said it best when he instructed us to earn, save, and give all that you can.

The Ant and the Grasshopper (A Modern Fable)

One of my favorite jokes that hits home to my message is about an ant. ....The ant worked hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thought that the ant was a fool and laughed and danced and played the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper called a press conference and demanded to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he was cold and starving. CNN and ABC showed up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. American's were stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appeared on MSNBC along with the grasshopper and everybody cried when they sung, 'It's Not Easy Being Green." People Against Poverty staged a demonstration in front of the ant's house while the left-wing news stations filmed the group singing, We Shall Overcome. Then President Obama declared a national day of mourning to be celebrated annually for the grasshopper's sake and so that Americans would have a day off to contemplate the plight of the grasshopper. Chuck Schumer condemned the ant and blamed the Republicans. Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton explained in an interview that the ant got rich off the back of the grasshopper and both called for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. Finally, the Democrats drafted the Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant was fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes; his home was confiscated by the Federal Governments Green Czar, and given to the grasshopper. The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he was in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbled around them because the grasshopper didn't maintain it. The ant disappeared in the snow never to be seen again. The grasshopper was found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, was taken over by a gang of Antifa-inspired spiders who terrorized and ram shackled the once prosperous and peaceful neighborhood. The end! Sounds like Detroit is just the beginning, doesn't it? And for those who don't know, this is pretty much the story of every big city managed by Liberals.

The American Balance

Just remember that Government's first priority is supposed to be to protect its citizens. Democracy is not giving away free stuff to get elected.

America is the freest and most dynamic society in history. Freedom and equality of outcome have never coexisted anywhere at anytime. The innovator, the first mover, the talented and most persistent win out producing large income inequality. The prizes are unequal because in our system consumers reward people for the value that they add. Some can and do add extraordinary value, others can't or don't and simply choose not to. Income is 24% less equally distributed in America compared to most of the modern world. But America has a 42% per capita higher income and household wealth that is 210% higher than those same countries.

Do you suppose that Americans would give up 42% of their own income in an effort to take from the wealthy? That is been the direction of the liberals who have controlled the White House and Congress for most of the last ten years and explains why as a percentage, there are far fewer Americans working today than there were ten years ago.

Chapter 8: The Eighth Direction: The Art of Traveling Alone (And the Logistics of a Relationship)

Many people ask why Sherry did not accompany me on my many world travels. And I respond that while she has physical issues that make travel painful and unpleasant, I really do not mind traveling alone. And on several occasions I have invited my brother Peter and my sister Patsy to join me.

As a male traveling alone chocolate is just another snack, I can wear a white t-shirt whenever I want, the world is my urinal, I'm always in the same mood (except when hungry or tired), conversations are 30 seconds flat, I travel with everything in a carry-on bag, one pair of shoes works fine, I can wear shorts anytime, I can trim my nails with a pocket knife, color of clothing is not important, I don't need to shave and shopping takes 5 minutes or less. And most importantly, I need just six items or less in the bathroom when I travel. Contrast that with travel with Sherry as she brings along stuff that I can't identify let alone spell or pronounce.

The True Lesson of Solitary Travel

The true direction here isn't about the size of a suitcase or the simplicity of a male packing list; it's about giving those you love the freedom to be comfortable and accepting the necessary distance that creates space for personal growth.My solo journeys allow me to focus entirely on the mission, the photography, and the deep immersion in a culture, knowing that Sherry is comfortable and well-cared for at home.

It turns out that one of the greatest acts of love is understanding when your presence is a burden, and when your absence is a gift of peace. We have learned to honor each other's needs—her need for stability and comfort, and my need for exploration and movement. The carry-on bag is small, but the trust we carry is immense.

The final direction is: Don't let your desire for joint experience trump your partner's need for personal well-being. A relationship thrives on both shared joy and respected independence.

Chapter 9: The Ninth Direction: The Currency of Chaos (Or, Why You Don't Bet on the Government)

The Storm in Buenos Aires

On my way to the Antarctic I spent a couple of days in Buenos Aries, Argentina for some guided sight-seeing and a river cruise. My guide told me the story of how her family was severely impacted by the depression and currency devaluation of the early 1990's. Her father had saved for his retirement and education of his children but held his savings in cash which was suddenly devalued by an Argentinian Socialist Government whose debt was unsustainable. The country was insolvent and defaulted on its debt which meant that her father ended up with next to nothing and could no longer support his family along with millions of others.

This story is a brutal, real-world lesson in financial physics. A family did everything right—they worked hard and saved diligently—but they chose the wrong store of value. In a country where the Government chooses to live outside its means (a theme we explored in Chapter 7), the currency itself becomes a tool for financial destruction. When the debt became unsustainable, the socialist government defaulted, and the paper wealth of millions evaporated. It’s the ultimate consequence of betting on a government that is not living within its means.

Paper vs. Brick

Her father's best friend went through the same process but rather than cash investments he held real estate that became extremely valuable making his net worth very large. This friend ended up supporting the family and other families through those terrible times. Life is full of such storms and chaos but ultimately it will be alright as evidenced by this instance of panic turning to peace.

The contrast between the two fathers is stark, and the direction is simple: Paper burns, but land endures.

Cash is merely a promise printed by the Government; it's a note that says "We owe you this much," and when the Government is bankrupt, that note is worth exactly what the ink cost. Real estate, however, is a tangible asset. It's the physical location on which civilization is built. When currency is devalued, real estate (and other tangible assets like gold, silver, and valuable commodities) often appreciates dramatically in the local currency because people are racing to convert their quickly-depreciating paper into something that retains intrinsic value.

This is a critical, advanced lesson in the Mailbox Money philosophy (Chapter 6). True financial resilience is not built on how much you have saved in dollars, but what you have saved it in. When the world descends into chaos, the guy who owns the farm, the apartment building, or the stable piece of land is the one who stabilizes the community.

The direction here is: Never trust your entire future to a single government's (usually empty) promise. Diversify your risk into tangible assets that maintain value when faith in the system fails.

Chapter 10: The Tenth Direction: The Power of Preparation (And The Price of Early Responsibility)

The Early Bird's Dilemma

Boy Scouts of the old days learn to be prepared, and though I mastered essential skills like tying knots, building campfires, and the fine art of snake-tail-grabbing (to avoid the bitey end), the most important thing I learned was how to prepare for the unexpected. A plane stays in the sky only as long as it has a pilot and fuel, and so it is with life. The old saying is true: the early bird gets the worm. The critical follow-up, however, is to make sure you are the early bird and not the early worm.

A Crash Course in Adulthood

My early adulthood was a masterclass in accelerated responsibility. Our family attended Kingsland Baptist Church in Calgary, Canada, and it was there that I married my high school sweetheart, Judy Sundell, at the age of 18, shortly after learning she was pregnant with our daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer's birth was one of the most special memories of my youth. She brought immediate joy and meaning to my life—at least until she became a teenager.

This sudden expansion of family life—from high school graduate to husband and father—mandated an immediate shift in focus. The need to provide for my family meant adopting an aggressive work schedule that often felt relentless.

The Weight of the World and the Scout Master's Burden

After Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts at the church, I was asked to return as a temporary Scout Master until the Group Committee could find a permanent replacement. I stepped up, and for a couple of years, I enjoyed leading the boys on camping and related outdoor scouting activities.

However, as my sons Chris and Tim entered the scene, my working life became even more demanding. I realized I needed to work full-time at Atco Leasing as well as part-time at Corbetts Wholesale and various gas stations just to pay the bills. I had to ask to be relieved of the Scout Master task, as the financial responsibility for my growing family simply had to take precedence over volunteering. The lesson here is that sometimes, true leadership is knowing when to step back from an external commitment to honor a greater, internal one.

The Miracle of Coincidence

Life is full of tragedy, often delivered without warning. My brother Kim was killed in a car/train collision in 1968. In his memory, my parents had a drinking fountain installed in the basement of our church, complete with a commemorative plaque.

Years later, the church underwent a major renovation, and, in a moment of thoughtless bureaucracy, the drinking fountain and the plaque were dumped in the trash. Thankfully, one of the construction superintendents rescued the plaque and, in a coincidence that only makes sense in hindsight, gave it to a news reporter.

That news reporter researched the name "Attrell" and called me long distance to see if I knew Kim. As I get older, I have come to see coincidence not as chance, but as a miracle. When this person from the newspaper called, Mom happened to be in Calgary visiting from Nanaimo, British Columbia. She consented to an interview, was given the plaque, and the entire incident made for a great family-interest story in the newspaper. It was a gentle, unexpected reminder that even in loss, the intentional marks we leave on the world often find their way back to us.

Chapter 11. Pumping Gas: An Education in Fuel and Folly

My early career trajectory began with a prestigious paper route, which I promptly handed over to my younger brother—a solid early lesson in delegation. By age sixteen, I had upgraded my credentials to "Gas-Jockey," a title that sounds far more glamorous than scraping ice off windshields at the Southwood Texaco (and later, Royalite).

My tenure at Texaco was, shall we say, accelerated. It peaked (and promptly cratered) one fateful Sunday afternoon when I was dispatched in the tow truck. The term "service trip" took on a whole new meaning, as I was conducting some critical, albeit illegal, field research into the efficacy of Sunday liquor delivery methods. A vigilant customer—who apparently preferred their tow services sober—reported the incident. My defense, delivered with the grave sincerity only a seventeen-year-old can muster, was that I was "grieving" (my brother had recently passed away). While the grief was real, the inebriation was strictly user error, possibly aided by my station partner, who was, let's generously call him, a dedicated connoisseur of the hard stuff.

The next day, George, the wonderfully forgiving owner who had fired me, called back to apologize for not recognizing my "complex grief reaction." He offered my job back. It was a lovely, generous gesture, but by then, I had already leveraged my brief, scandalous unemployment into a superior position: two blocks from home and staffed with entirely new friends who hadn't yet witnessed my high-speed, low-sobriety career management style.

It was at this new, closer-to-home post that my sister Patsy, in a rare act of sibling kindness, offered to bring me lunch. When she asked what I really liked, I, the sophisticated seventeen-year-old, confidently declared, "Blue cheese." The result was a culinary experiment I'll never forget: six slices of bread, each slathered edge-to-edge with nothing but aggressively pungent blue cheese. She delivered the masterpiece and then stayed to observe, like a scientist watching a lab rat. I ate every painful, dairy-forward bite. A valuable life lesson: clarity in communication prevents overwhelming doses of strong flavor.

Chapter 12. The Edmonton Escape: A Study in Understated Absence

At the tender age of fifteen, having clearly mastered the complexities of family dynamics, I decided to embark on a solo adventure: running away from home. My destination was Edmonton—a city I had once visited, which also happened to be the city of my birth. A perfect symbolic start to my grand, self-directed second life.

Under the cloak of night, I executed a flawless, highly dramatic escape through the basement window. I was fueled by an intense, yet ultimately unwarranted, sense of importance and a single Greyhound bus ticket. However, my sister Patsy, apparently possessing the hearing of a nocturnal cat and the radar of a seasoned surveillance expert, caught the tail end of my clandestine exit.

"Where are you going?" she whispered, witnessing the birth of my independence. "I'm leaving for a while," I declared with the weighty gravitas of a European monarch in exile. "But I'll be back one day."

A few short hours later, my big break was summarily thwarted. A policeman, who clearly had better things to do than babysit teenage existential crises, found me on a park bench in Edmonton. Rather than offering me a map to my new destiny, he offered me a free, one-way escort back to the Greyhound station, where he stood guard until I was safely loaded onto the four-hour return bus to Calgary.

The anticlimax was swift and brutal. I was back home much sooner than anticipated. In a house vibrating with the chaos of four children (I, the eldest and supposedly most missed), I slipped back into the basement. And here is the true measure of my dramatic exit: in the hustle and bustle of family life, no one noticed I had returned because, as it turned out, no one had noticed I was gone. Patsy and the policeman were the only witnesses to the entirety of my epic, four-hour journey into self-discovery. The lesson? Teenage angst rarely registers on the busy parent's radar.

Chapter 13. Australia: Penguins, Perfection, and Pragmatism

If I ever need a place to look longingly at a return ticket, it’s Sydney Harbour. It’s suspiciously perfect. There’s a distinct absence of visible heavy industry, which is deeply unsettling for someone raised near a thriving paper mill. Instead of grime, they offer a sophisticated boat-and-taxi commute system with frequent stops at housing, dining, and massive commercial offices. It proves that transportation doesn't always have to involve road rage. The perpetually pleasant weather means restaurants are largely ‘open-air’ with shutters they pull down at closing—a design choice that is really just an Australian way of saying, "We refuse to invest in a full wall because, frankly, why bother?"

I ventured into the Blue Mountains, where a guided tour was necessary to ensure I didn't mistake a shrub for a kangaroo. We successfully trailed various unique wildlife, proving that with enough effort and professional guidance, you can indeed spot an animal in its natural habitat.

Then came Phillip Island, home to the most emotionally punishing natural history lesson I’ve ever witnessed. Tourists gather in a grandstand to watch tiny, twelve-to-eighteen-inch penguins—which look like tiny, wet waiters—return from their fishing trip. The catch? They have to wait until sundown because the local seagulls are aquatic thugs who will literally peck their heads until they vomit up dinner for their family. Talk about high-stakes commuting. Watching them waddle past us in the dark, they looked less like short soldiers and more like tiny parents trying desperately to make it through the workday without losing their lunch to aggressive corporate rivals. They even take turns alternating days to make the long journey—a flawless 'equal yoking' system that puts most human co-parenting arrangements to shame. Clearly, if you want life lessons on shared labor, you must watch animals who fear airborne poultry.

On a more macro scale, Australia is geographically larger than the United States, yet only a tiny, sun-drenched fraction is populated. It's the equivalent of having an enormous mansion but only using the kitchen and the pool. Like its demographic cousin, Canada, Australia is highly dependent on commodity sales to China. Watching them abolish their carbon tax was a fascinating exercise in economic self-preservation, proving that sometimes, when you’re relying on a country that dwarfs you in both population and pollution, you prioritize the national wallet over the whale song.

Chapter 14. The Equatorial Crossing (And Why My Sink Lies)

Crossing the Equator by cruise ship was supposed to be a bucket-list adventure, a moment of profound geographical significance. The cruise director, however, was clearly working on a tropical, relaxed timeline, announcing that the official "crossing celebration" (i.e., staged dance party on the upper deck) would occur at 2:00 PM.

I, being a man who trusts technology more than theatrical timetables, had come prepared with a spy-level utility: an iPhone app called "My Altitude." This provided my precise GPS coordinates, essentially turning my phone into a very expensive sextant. A quick check of the app confirmed my suspicions: we were set to hit 0° 0' 0" latitude much earlier than the advertised party time. The ship was trying to cheat me out of my equatorial moment for the sake of a mid-afternoon buffet.

Refusing to be denied, I set my app to burst-photo mode, snapping GPS-stamped selfies as the latitude scrolled through zero. I was fortunate enough to capture the exact, unceremonious moment of crossing, complete with the pool deck loungers in the background—the ultimate proof that I was exactly where the Earth's bulge begins.

My immediate next step? I ran to my stateroom and started draining the sink. For years, I had heard the popular assertion that the Coriolis effect—the physics behind storms and global rotation—makes water swirl clockwise north of the equator and counter-clockwise south of it. I had to know. I stared intently. The water swirled clockwise down the drain. Stillclockwise. So much for that definitive scientific assertion. Perhaps I needed to wait for the ship to settle, or maybe cruise ship plumbing had effectively neutralized one of the planet's fundamental physical forces. I’m leaning towards the plumbing being too powerful for mere planetary spin.

The rest of the trip involved slightly higher stakes. We visited Bali for an elephant safari—an experience I highly recommend, if only to appreciate the sheer volume of material required to construct an access to the elephant.

The true highlight (or lowlight, depending on your desire for bodily integrity) was visiting the Indonesian islands where the legendary Komodo dragon exists. These creatures, I quickly learned, can chase down a grown man, and they hunt using a bite so venomous that smaller prey (like deer, or potentially tourists) simply drop dead from the poison later. Our guides approached them armed only with large, comically inadequate-looking forked sticks, meant to hold back reptiles that appear to be miniature T-Rexes.

Needless to say, I exercised extreme, almost paranoid, caution with my video and photography, channeling a business mantra I’d learned the hard way: "Trust but verify." In this case, I trusted the guide's sticks, but I verified the distance with my own two frantic legs. I find that when dealing with creatures whose primary hunting technique involves lethal bacteria, my innate fear of death takes over. Hence, you won't catch me trading a comfortable chair for a parachute anytime soon, unless I achieve an advanced age where death by ground impact is considered a reasonable way to exit a party.

Chapter 15. Close Calls: Proof That Angels Drive Big, Overweight Sedans

My early years seem to have been dedicated to a series of escalating challenges designed by the universe to test its own patience. I suspect the cosmos viewed me less as a person and more as a stress-test dummy.

My first official attempt to check out happened around age ten, attempting to swim in a river south of Calgary. The undercurrent, clearly sensing an amateur, decided to audition me for a role as a deep-sea anchor. Just as the lights were dimming and I was accepting my fate as river sludge, a true angel—disguised, bafflingly, as a big, overweight man—yanked me out. His profound post-rescue wisdom? "What's the matter kid? Forgot how to swim?" It was a fair question. I had momentarily forgotten the basic physics of not drowning, but the sheer casualness of my rescuer remains the most miraculous part of the story.

The next decade proved that if I wasn't being challenged by moving water, I was being challenged by moving vehicles. At 19, I drove my 1966 Chevelle into a rare Calgary traffic circle—a baffling piece of infrastructure clearly designed by someone who hated four-way stops. I was gently clipped in the rear. Minor damage. Clearly, the universe was just testing the Chevelle's legendary durability. A few years later, at 22, I was idling innocently at a red light in my 1966 Chevy Station Wagon when another driver decided to redesign my driver's side door, which then promptly showered me in glass. I emerged shaken, convinced that stoplights were actually magnetic beacons for chaos, and that the universe had a vendetta against mid-century American automotive design.

The grand finale of vehicular drama—the one that requires a full pause for dramatic effect—came around 1978, in my brand new Olds Station Wagon. I had the right-of-way at an intersection when I happened to glance right and saw a vehicle approaching the stop sign with the commitment level of a politician promising tax cuts. The driver was simply not stopping. My instinct slammed the brakes.

What followed was a physics-defying, guardian-angel-assisted miracle. I was traveling about 35 mph, hit the brakes hard, and was still moving forward when I managed to only clip the rear of the other vehicle as it blew through the intersection at an estimated 50 mph. The difference between that car hitting me broadside (instant obituary) and me hitting them had to be less than the blink of an eye. That single, rapid, peripheral-vision decision is why I’m here today; clearly, God looked down, saw my life, and said, "He's making too many bad decisions. I can't let him die now; I need to see how this plays out."

The impact launched the other car up and over, landing nose-down in the far corner’s grass landscaping like a drunk javelin thrower. It was a slow-motion catastrophe I can recall perfectly. My magnificent new Olds, however, folded up like a cheap paper fan. The steering wheel attempted to hug my chest, and my knees achieved an intimate, painful bond with the dashboard. Fortunately, my passenger and I were wearing seat belts—which, in the 70s, felt more like optional suggestions than life-saving devices—so we only suffered severe bruising. The other driver, bless his oblivion, sprinted over, asked if we were hurt, and offered the most profound apology in Canadian history: for missing the stop sign. Politeness, even after totaling two cars, still counts as a mitigating factor.

I also briefly enjoyed the two-wheeled life, which lasted precisely one full-body yard sale. My career as a moto-cross daredevil peaked at about age 25. My sister's husband, Dean, invited me through the wooded hills and instructed me to "follow him." I now understand that "follow" is not synonymous with "plagiarize his exact tire tracks and definitely don't miss that crucial downhill turn." Going downhill, I missed the crucial turn. The subsequent sequence was a highly technical, high-speed tumble that could only be narrated by a boxing commentator: bike, me, bike, me, bike, me... all the way to the bottom at 30 mph. Once the bike had kindly provided its final, oily, twenty-foot-long embrace, I took inventory, slowly wiggling fingers, then elbows, then shoulders. Nothing was irreversibly separated, but that moment marked the end of my relationship with any two-wheeled transportation that wasn't legally attached to a track or a Disney ride.

Finally, we arrive at the grand tradition of sheer teenage recklessness. At 15, I was a tall, lean athlete (6'2", 145 lbs), but my friend Barry Morris possessed true, ridiculous strength—he could hold himself parallel to the floor from a basement support column. This, I now realize, is the only prerequisite for extreme, midnight driving. One warm summer midnight, we jumped into his father’s brand new, massive Ford. We headed for Priddis Road to see what a powerful engine could achieve. The telephone poles dissolved into streaks as the speedometer hit 120 mph. Then, Highway 2—a major, non-stop thoroughfare—materialized out of the dark. We blew straight through the T intersection, across the ditch, and through a poor, unsuspecting barbed wire fence into a wheat field before finally stopping. I was bracing myself on the dashboard, having a rapid internal debate about my will, as seatbelts were clearly considered a nanny state intrusion back then. Had there been any traffic, this story would be much shorter. Barry, somehow, had to explain the Ford's new, aggressively agricultural front-end styling to his father; I was merely the structural ballast.

My final close call (so far) was an unexpected wake-up call in Houston shortly after I moved there in 1981. A sound like a freight train—the universal audio cue for 'imminent doom'—roused me from sleep. I bolted into the front yard, looked up, and quickly realized that standing in the open during a tornado was not scientifically sound, nor was it covered by my current life insurance. The twister kindly skipped over my roof and decided to redecorate the adjacent golf course, taking out a number of majestic trees instead of my newly rented home. A humbling reminder that sometimes, the universe just decides to roll a critical miss on your coordinates.

Chapter 16. US Citizenship: From Oath to Office (While Fishing)

In 1992, the ink on my US citizenship certificate was barely dry before I staged my own personal government takeover. After the truly moving ceremony, I bypassed the usual celebratory champagne and drove straight to the Denton County Courthouse to register to vote. From there, I marched into City Hall in Highland Village, ready to humbly volunteer for the most menial task.

I expected a spatula for the bake sale or perhaps a very long list of envelopes to lick. Instead, the clerk looked at me, shrugged, and offered the only immediate opening: City Council. And just like that, I pivoted from "newly minted citizen" to "local political candidate" in a single afternoon.

My campaign strategy was revolutionary: minimal presence and maximum fishing. I won the election while casting lines for trophy trout in Corpus Christi, proving that civic engagement is best measured in nautical miles and scale weight. Nothing screams "dedicated public servant" quite like being utterly unreachable, two hundred miles away, and holding a fish that's getting its picture taken when the election results come in. (I did catch a magnificent trout, which my guide immediately immortalized; one could argue I secured a trophy that day, regardless of the election outcome.)

My arrival in the States began in 1980, a testament to the pettiness of defeated capitalism and the generous Canadian government. I came courtesy of a temporary work visa, heading to the Williston Basin oilfield in North Dakota—a region so remote its national tree is, charmingly, the telephone pole. My employer, Spartan Drilling, had to attest that no qualified American wanted my "lowly oilfield position." My immigration attorney then wisely suggested a resident alien card, or the legendary green card, which was a stroke of genius when my work permit expired just as my immigration number was called.

Later, while I was General Manager, overseeing an operation that involved taking control of a bankrupt company (a move clearly not enjoyed by the former staff), the disgruntled ex-office manager decided to report me to the Border Patrol. He was convinced I was an illegal alien, mere miles from the border. When the agent showed up, I casually produced my pristine, up-to-date work visa, essentially proving I was too busy being a functional, tax-paying cog in the North American energy market to be a rogue alien. The man’s face must have crumpled like a discarded invoice.

(For the record, while marrying my American wife, Sherry, in 1987 offered a faster track, I opted to complete the full ten-year green card waiting period. It seemed like the right way to properly earn the right to complain about local government.)

This experience cemented my belief in a practical approach to immigration: Build the fence (we fence our yards, why not our country?), grant resident alien status to those working and contributing without criminal status, and then put them on that same ten-year path to citizenship and the vote. This is about creating a path to freedom and contribution, not trapping people as a reliable, oppressed voting bloc for those who crave political power.

Now, back to my political career. My victory meant I was on the front page of two newspapers on the same day. In Port Aransas, I was the proud outdoorsman with the trophy trout. In Lewisville, I was the newly minted City Council member. A glorious, highly contrasting double whammy of piscatorial achievement and civic responsibility.

However, I must confess to my first brush with newspaper fame. My Uncle Bob, two years my senior and prone to social enthusiasm, was celebrating a bit too hard at a local Calgary restaurant. A friend called me, explaining the police were on the way to remove him. Being the helpful, if highly reckless, nephew, I jumped in my car and sped down Elbow Drive to stage a rescue. Unfortunately, the police who were also headed to the restaurant clocked me traveling at a dangerous speed. I was arrested right outside the establishment, charged with dangerous driving, and bailed out by my utterly exasperated parents.

As I sat humiliated in the back of the cruiser, Uncle Bob stumbled over, looked me over, and asked, with drunken confusion, "What happened? Why are you arrested?" The following day, my picture adorned the front page of the Calgary Herald—the unwilling face of the police crackdown on young drivers. It was an involuntary, high-speed public service announcement. I can think of other, far more enjoyable, and significantly less criminal ways to become an example to the youth of today.

Chapter 17. The Baltics and Russia: In Search of DNA and Escape Artists

My brother Peter and I embarked on a cruise to the Baltics because our family DNA testing suggested that, somewhere in that glorious, chilly part of the world, our ancestors were standing around looking stoic. We decided to go confirm that heritage by hitting every country from Finland and Sweden down to Poland and Lithuania.

The highlight of the entire trip was taking the bullet train from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then, by some sheer force of political connection, managing to eat lunch on Red Square at the Kremlin. Our St. Petersburg guide—who would later prove to be an absolute master of logistics and self-determination—whisked us through an adjacent mall that was easily as shiny and consumer-friendly as any American shopping temple. From there, we were guided through a series of suspiciously private hallways and out onto an outdoor patio at a restaurant closed to the general public. There, Peter and I ate alone, enjoying a surprisingly lovely meal, all while being vigilantly watched by armed soldiers stationed around the Kremlin. Nothing complements a light lunch like the palpable assurance that any sudden move will be met with immediate, decisive, and constitutional force.

Moscow itself, outside of its surprisingly modern and efficient subway system, was largely an exercise in Soviet-era dreariness. The people we met were uniformly stoic and prone to rapid shifts toward irritation. It was an atmosphere I found slightly contagious. Both our St. Petersburg and Moscow guides made it explicitly clear that their greatest life aspiration was an immediate, successful defection.

My St. Petersburg guide was the true success story. We became Facebook friends, and within two years, she achieved her dream: marrying a gentleman from Germany and relocating to Singapore. When I traveled to Singapore later, she kindly played host, guiding me around the city with the energy of someone finally breathing free air. The capstone of her hospitality was the Marina Bay Sands hotel, with its colossal boat-shaped bar and pool spanning the three towers. She, the former captive of Russian stoicism, instructed me precisely how to bypass the various security chokepoints to gain access to the guests only rooftop at sunset. It was a photographic opportunity I’ll never forget, made sweeter by the fact that I was actively participating in a glorious, international act of light trespassing, aided by a literal escape artist.

In Stutthof, Poland, Peter and I visited a former Nazi concentration camp, an experience that immediately crushed the geopolitical flippancy inspired by the rest of the trip. Viewing the starvation menus and the crushing living conditions firsthand was a sobering reminder of the horrific ingenuity of man’s inhumanity. Our Polish guide shared a personal connection: her father, a tailor, was allowed to return home once a year to create custom German uniforms for the Nazis. She was, quite literally, the result of one of those agonizing annual leaves.

There are three things guaranteed in this life: death, taxes, and change. For the prisoners in Stutthof, death was a certainty, slow and painful via the six-month starvation diet. Taxes, thankfully, were the absolute least of their worries. That left change. Hope for change—an end to the war, an escape, or simply an improvement in their horrific circumstances—must have been their only currency. Even death, in many instances, would have been welcomed as a change of venue.

It’s easy to spout philosophical platitudes from the comfortable vantage point of hindsight and a full stomach. It makes you realize that, when placed against the backdrop of such misery, discovering joy is an act of defiance, peace is a fleeting second between beatings, and prosperity might only mean getting an extra, slightly less stale slice of bread. Contemplating the circumstances of those poor souls makes it exceptionally easy to recognize my own blessings and feel grateful to God for a life where my biggest challenge is usually how to bypass security for a better photo.

Chapter 18. Alaska: The Land of Mosquitoes and Miracles

I have now been to Alaska precisely two times, which means I am officially qualified to write this chapter and run the next Winter Olympics. The first visit, a family cruise up the British Columbia coast, could barely be called "Alaskan"—it was more of an extremely long ferry ride where Alaska appeared in the distance like a shy guest. The undisputed highlight was dog sledding on a glacier, which involved a thrilling, and slightly terrifying, helicopter trip up a mountain. Nothing says "vacation" like trusting a stranger with rotary wings to deposit you on an unstable, melting ice block to be dragged by nine hyperactive canines. A truly memorable way to interact with nature before it vanishes.

(A brief geographical interlude for the intellectually curious: The B.C. coast qualifies as a tropical forest, but only in the sense that a librarian might be called an Olympic sprinter. It's supported by warm ocean currents that kindly drift up from California before cooling off near Alaska and heading south past Japan. This is the same glorious heat exchange that keeps the UK from turning into a block of ice, before the current hits Greenland and decides to cool down and head past Newfoundland. It’s all very complicated and happens mostly without anyone appreciating the amount of effort required by the Pacific.)

My second trip to Alaska was a deliberate effort to fish, led by my friend Joe Smith and three buddies from Virginia. One of them, Charlie, was battling cancer, and frankly, the sight of him boarding the small seaplane for our flight into Clark Lake near Mount Redoubt (a volcano, naturally) was less "adventure tourism" and more "aggressive medical intervention."

What followed at Clark Lake was, impossibly, the single most perfect day of my life. Joe had the foresight to warn us we could never return with high expectations, as the alignment of the planets required for this perfection would likely not repeat. It was 70 degrees—in Alaska!—there was no wind, and the fish were lining up to be caught and then cooked immediately on the shore for lunch. Eagles and bears were everywhere, providing the kind of serene, postcard-perfect nature that immediately makes you forget about the terrifying seaplane ride.

I will always remember Charlie, lying face up on the bottom of the boat, arms folded, declaring with absolute certainty, "I am in heaven." If that isn't the ultimate five-star review for a fishing trip, I don't know what is.

We spent the rest of the week exploring the Kenai Peninsula, where we experienced nature like an exclusive, velvet-rope event. This involved long, mosquito-laden walks through the woods to find "hidden" streams and boat rides to remote, mountainous villages and glaciers populated by walruses and seals. It was unique, pristine, and the kind of rugged beauty that makes you appreciate air conditioning and the fact that you haven't seen a bear in at least fifteen minutes.

Chapter 19. Israel and Egypt: The Geopolitics of Salt and Camels

Israel truly is a special place, primarily because so much of it is geographically defiant. Take the fact that it sits way below the Mediterranean’s sea level, straddling the continental divide between Africa and Asia. If a proper earthquake decided to shake things up, most of Israel would likely be swallowed by the ocean, leaving King Herod’s magnificent fortress at Masada as little more than a slightly damp sandcastle on a brand new shoreline. Was this geographical setup an accident? I think not. God clearly enjoys dramatic topography.

This divide conveniently hosts two wildly different bodies of water, offering a powerful, if slightly on-the-nose, life lesson.

First, there is the thriving Sea of Galilee, where I had the privilege of sailing with my brother and thirty-odd fellow Christians. Our church service, conducted afloat on this vibrant, fish-filled body of water, was a treasured experience. This Sea receives water and generously lets it flow out into the Jordan River. It gives and it thrives, supporting a ridiculous amount of life.

Then, downstream, you hit the Dead Sea near Masada. This place is chemically and geologically magnificent but utterly toxic. It’s impossible to sink, thanks to its extreme, chemically induced buoyancy, turning swimming into an exercise in horizontal floating. Peter, naturally, took a full dip, then covered himself head-to-toe in the sea’s purported skin-wellness mud while I photographed and videotaped the whole transaction, primarily to ensure I had forensic evidence in case he immediately dissolved. I, being less inclined toward aggressive exfoliation, only waded in until the water’s greasy, tingling sensation convinced me I was doing permanent damage.

The Dead Sea only receives water from the Jordan River but gives nothing back, visually shrinking into two distinct, pathetic puddles joined by a stream. The lesson is clear: The Sea of Galilee flourishes because it receives and gives. The Dead Sea is a toxic, shrinking, salty metaphor for a life built on consumption without contribution. We flourish when we receive from others and give back in proportion; we die inside when we only take.

Originally, Peter and I planned to join a group tour to Egypt after Israel, but thanks to credible terror threats, that plan evaporated. After some quick deliberation, we decided we were already in the neighborhood and unlikely to return, so we bravely—or stupidly—decided to hire private guides and press on.

The flight from Tel Aviv to Cairo was a testament to the glorious efficiency of Middle Eastern aviation logistics. Since direct flights are apparently reserved for imaginary dignitaries, we flew out over the Mediterranean, then back into Jordan for an extensive and thrilling series of security checks, before finally heading to Cairo. Our arrival at Cairo airport was a chaotic, third-world version of a Black Friday sale, with everyone seemingly attempting to liberate our luggage. We were rescued by our guide, who established immediate, and highly necessary, dominance. The hotel was luxurious, and the next morning, we stepped outside after breakfast and found ourselves in the shade of the Great Pyramids. It was everything you’d expect, except for the mountains of uncollected garbage.

Seeking a quintessential tourist experience, I asked Peter to take a photo of me on a camel with the Pyramids in the background. Due to a severe visitor shortage, the competition among the camel herd owners was vicious. Upon dismounting, I checked the photo: the Pyramids were magnificent, but only half of me and the camel made the frame. Peter, the aesthete, explained he had deliberately cropped out the trash on the ground. He was entirely correct about the general ubiquity of garbage, as government services—including collection—had essentially entered early retirement. So, we returned to the camel entrepreneurs, paid for another ride, and I insisted on the full picture, plastic water bottles and all. Authenticity is often messy.

Our guide was a VIP, securing us a fantastic, private meal at an outdoor market restaurant where the owner actually chased off existing customers so we could dine in exclusive peace. Later, at the Cairo museum, a young Egyptian couple kept trying to get our attention. Our guide was about to shoo them away when I asked what they wanted. They simply wanted me to hold their baby for a photograph. I happily obliged—because nothing says "authentic American tourist" like awkwardly posing with a stranger's infant—and they were incredibly grateful for the picture.

The true highlight was a cruise down the Nile River toward Africa. The ship had space for 120, but only a dozen guests, so we were treated like minor pharaohs. The views were educational: a narrow strip of lush, vibrant green vegetation and homes lined the river, backed immediately by endless, desolate sand dunes. The Nile is clearly operating a very exclusive and strict property zoning policy.

We toured numerous temples and the Jewish synagogue where, according to our guide, Mary and Joseph hid with Jesus after their escape to Egypt. The only true disappointment of the trip was the train ride back to Cairo. I would not recommend it as a legitimate means of travel, unless you enjoy mystery meat and the deeply unpleasant perfume of an overused, under-maintained restroom.

Part of our tour was conducted by a fabulous, highly educated Muslim guide whose wife was a dermatologist. They were saving up to buy a house, which is a monumental feat since Muslims, according to our guide, are not permitted to borrow money. I asked him, given the religious conservatism, how they managed family planning. He replied with a curious grin, "Like Americans. We use birth control." This caught me completely off guard. I then asked if his wife covered her head for work. He explained that covering the body or head was a personal family decision, and that his wife "dressed like Americans." I saw this variance firsthand when three teenage girls passed us: one in a full head and body robe, one with only her head covered, and one dressed exactly like an American teenager. Our guide commented that many women chose to cover themselves to avoid the—how shall I put it delicately—wandering eyes of men. A fascinating insight into the complexities of modesty, faith, and the eternal vigilance required to walk through an Egyptian market.

Chapter 20. Equality and Your Gifts: Why It's Good I'm Not a Doctor

We start life as tiny, demanding dictators, transition to delusional self-sufficiency, and then, if the universe grants us sanity, we land on interdependence. It’s just a fancy word for admitting we need other people to open stubborn jars and occasionally protect us from cosmic doom. Speaking of necessary large objects, thank goodness for Jupiter, our solar system’s unpaid, oversized bouncer. It uses its immense gravitational pull to sweep up the space trash that would otherwise turn Earth into a cosmic smoothie. We rely on that gas giant to manage space debris so we can concentrate on more pressing issues, like whether to put pineapple on pizza. It confirms the primary rule: we are all utterly dependent on specialized talent, even if that talent is simply being huge and gaseous.

Striving for equality of opportunity is the noble foundation of a decent society. But chasing equality of outcome is the intellectual equivalent of asking every runner in a marathon to finish at the exact same time. It’s madness. My doctor and I started with the same chances. I chose a path involving fewer exams and more immediate income; he chose a path involving eight years of debt, the constant smell of latex, and the ability to say "scalpel." Was it fair he gets paid a king's ransom while I get paid a regular person's wage? Absolutely. He paid the price in misery and textbooks; he earned the right to his private island. If I generate more value than my peer, I deserve more. If my boss disagrees, I am free to take my superior talent elsewhere. Free. That is the key word. Freedom means people are unequal. Equality of outcome requires locking up freedom.

This brings us to unions, which are excellent if you enjoy having your productivity actively discouraged for the sake of group mediocrity. They are where individual ambition goes to politely die. As a union member, you become a time-stamped barcode. Your exceptional output isn't just ignored; it's practically a social offense, making poor Greg from accounting look bad for hitting only 75% of the target. We are blessed with varying gifts for a reason. If everyone wanted to be a tax consultant, who would bake the artisanal bread? The more you’re given, the more you should give back—like the Sea of Galilee, which avoids the tragic, salty fate of the Dead Sea by kindly passing its resources along.

Your mandate in this fleeting life is to strive to be the definitive, first-edition version of yourself—not a second-rate, poorly translated copy of someone else. Pining to be someone else is like wishing you had their bills, their crippling self-doubt, and their unfortunate haircut. Your God-given gifts are inherent. The trick is simply finding the instruction manual. My personal gift? My internal alarm system is set to "suspicious." If someone makes me instantly uncomfortable—a faint sense of ick or a low-volume siren—every single time, they prove to be a complete waste of time or, worse, one of the bad dudes. Conversely, if I’m studiously attracted to someone’s character, they invariably become a lifelong friend. That's discernment, and it's a hell of a lot faster than a background check. I stick to my duty: discern the sketchiness. I leave the judging to the Creator.

You are the singular result of your gifts, heart, abilities, personality, and life experiences. When you find yourself in an activity that brings you joy and peace, you are operating squarely within that unique purpose. If we all loved doing the same things, the world would be hopelessly stalled. The beautiful end result of this self-discovery is a behavioral shift: you become compassionate, humble, patient, and kind, because you've found a source of joy that isn't dependent on external validation. You’ll even start seeing life’s inevitable disappointments and tragedies in a different light. They stop being walls and become slightly awkward opportunities. As my friend Dale used to tell people, "If you dropped him in a barn full of manure, he wouldn't waste time complaining about the smell. He'd just start looking for the pony. And he’d find it."

Chapter 21. People, Leaders, and the Future: Finding Ponies in the Apocalypse

According to the brilliant (and heavily armed) mind behind American Sniper, the world is neatly divided into three groups: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. I concur. We need the sheep—loads of them. They are the folks doing the actual work, often the happiest, and generally excellent at barbecues. Unfortunately, they are also highly susceptible to the shiny distractions of any passing Pied Piper, which is either lovely or disastrous depending entirely on the piper’s moral compass.

Then you have the wolves. These are the misery connoisseurs. They enjoy the simple pleasures of sucking the joy out of life, persecuting others through exclusion, insult, and a bizarre fixation on your smallest flaws. They are toxic personalities, and they attract flocks of sheep who happily follow them off a metaphorical cliff, complaining the whole way. I treat these individuals the way I treat a sudden, unexplained draft: I run away as fast as possible.

Finally, the sheepdogs. They prefer to operate in stealth, dispensing quiet, anonymous protection. They are strong, silent, and can sniff out a wolf, even one draped in a highly unconvincing sheep costume, from a mile away. These are your natural, humble leaders—the ones who probably have a concealed carry permit and an immediate willingness to trade their life for a stranger's. If they have the gift of leadership, they use it to serve, not to posture.

Now, as I’ve educated myself and learned to think for myself (a process I highly recommend), I have encountered some politically baffling facts. We, a country of free people (for now, though freedom is eroding like a sandcastle in a tsunami), have a peculiar habit of electing and following those who seem determined to stay in power by promising free stuff and treating the national debt like an imaginary number. I suspect this will result in a financial reset that, while unpleasant, will certainly build character.

The good news? Our youth will be forced into a historical period that looks suspiciously like a retro survivalist video game. Get ready for vegetable gardens, walking to work, and trading that advanced electronic gadget for three chickens. Barter may be the new currency, and trust me, knowing how to change oil will suddenly become more valuable than a Master’s Degree in Renaissance Poetry. We will overcome, especially with the resilience of the younger generation, who are constantly amazing me. They'll probably figure out how to program a solar-powered loom to tweet.

Some things just don't compute, thanks to the constant narrative being fed to the aforementioned sheep. For example, some political leaders accuse America of being capitalistic and greedy, and yet, a very large chunk of the population relies on government subsidies to survive. The tipping point has been reached; we are a wheelbarrow front-loaded with promises, ready to tip over with a crash.

The very people living on government support are being told by their political shepherds that they are victims of capitalism. And that the solution is to join a union, riot in the streets (destroying the very small businesses that provide the jobs), and keep voting for the same people who designed the system? Their representatives have been running the show! Why would things suddenly get better? It's a marvelous, tragic, and entirely circular argument. The poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the only thing at a record high is the food stamp tally.

That said, our "poor" are wealthy by global standards. Our poverty level often includes reliable cars, smartphones, free medical care, and flat-screen TVs. I once met a family living in a one-room hut, sleeping on the dirt floor, eating once a day, and lucky to own a goat. This is a humbling perspective that suggests a return to basics isn't necessarily a tragedy—it's just a realignment of priorities. And, my guess is we won't have a choice when the reset finally drops the wheelbarrow.

Finally, we must address the crab mentality. A crab fisherman was once asked why he didn't put a lid on the bucket. He replied, with the profound wisdom only found on a dock, "The moment one of them climbs out, the others reach up and pull it back down again." We do the same thing, don't we? "How dare you succeed? Get back down here with the rest of us!"

The apostle Paul warned, "But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another!"(Galatians 5:15). That's excellent advice for surviving a crab-infested workplace or a particularly toxic family reunion.

You cannot lift up another soul unless you are standing on higher ground yourself. Seek equality of opportunity with the ferocity of a wolf, and run from those who promise equality of results with the speed of a sheep dog. This world desperately needs quiet, humble leaders who have found that peaceful, self-reliant place in life where they can help others without a trumpet or a selfie stick. Never stop hunting for that place. It is there if you seek first the Kingdom of God.

The Rich are not those who have the most. The Rich are those who need the least.

Chapter 22. Technology

I remember working for Spartan Drilling in Houston in 1984 and receiving my first cell phone mounted in the trunk of my Company Car (1983 Diesel Oldsmobile) with a handset on the front floor. It was so exciting to be one of the very first recipients of a cell phone. I loved that car and it was years later (1991) after I was promoted by Space Master (in Dallas) to the position of Vice President and General Manager that I was asked to upgrade to a newer car to be an example to other employees and my stature of a senior position within the company. Of course the large auto allowance did help and my new red convertible indicated that I was now older than 40 years of age and struggling with that fact.

In 1985, I purchased one of the very first Mac Computers (Apple iie) so that Sherry could continue her effort to complete her Psychology Thesis and spend more time with me rather than on her typewriter. That did not quite work out that way but it was the thought that counted. Right? Sherry was attending the University of Houston full time and getting ready for the Doctoral program. I was raising three teenagers alone after a recent divorce from Judy and so we had little time together as it was.

In 1986 I received one of the very first fax machines where I was working at Space Master in Houston. Each transmission of a single page took only six minutes. Wow, that was amazing and I felt relief as our business was now able to provide same day service.

In 1987 I bought an IBM computer to replace an aging memory typewriter and earned the distinction of being the first Space Master branch office that converted many menial tasks to the computer.

These remarkable advances in technology were just 30 years ago. Imagine where we would be now without computers and cell phones. Imagine where we could be in another 30 years if an oppressive Government would step out of the way of wealthy job-creators who would then liberate the creativity that is within all of us.

Think about this one. We are encouraged by our President to not judge Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics but he encourages us judge all gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. You don't protect the innocent by taking guns away from the innocent. A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don't have one, you'll probably never need one again. It's pretty basic common knowledge that he attempts to erase. And as I traveled around the world it was amazing to hear so many stories of past history where Governments unarmed its masses and then selectively massacred the population. We appear to be far from that happening but so did past citizens of these other countries.

We are constantly warned that Social Security is soon going to run out of money but these same politicians never warn us that we are running out of money for ever-increasing welfare and food stamp programs. Fact is, the first recipients all worked and contributed to Social Security but the second group of recipients contributed nothing.

The worst example of a country heading in the wrong direction is America paying its military poverty-level salaries and cutting benefits to its veterans while providing benefits to illegal immigrants and providing gender-neutral facilities in border holding cells for captured illegal immigrants.

Chapter 23. Entrepreneurship: How to Turn a Near-Fatal Car Crash into a Rental Empire

My first venture into the glorious world of self-employment was driven by the beautiful illusion that I could control my own time. What I failed to realize is that the only thing you control as an entrepreneur is the volume of your own screaming.

Working for A1 Camp Service in Edmonton, I spotted a market inefficiency. Two customers needed niche services: generators and, crucially, movie entertainment for remote drill camps. My boss said he wouldn't touch it, but I could. This was my corporate version of a "do not resuscitate" order, and I gleefully accepted.

Thus, JASS (James Attrell Sales and Service) was born. My first brilliant, marginally legal, venture involved the cutting edge of 1980s tech: the VCR. With Hollywood conveniently on strike, I became the Media Mogul of the North. I sourced heavy-duty plywood boxes containing a 19-inch color TV, a VCR (a device few yet owned), and a cooling fan. My product? Recorded TV movies, put on slow play to fit three features onto a single tape, commercials and all. Remote oilfield personnel were in no position to complain.

The true genius was the financing: I leased the boxes for four months at a rate that paid the equipment supplier in full. By the end of the season, I had zero debt and a basement full of gently used, fully paid-for rental equipment.

The only hiccup? The delivery run.

Volunteering to drive a load near Fort McMurray—a six-hour journey on an ice highway carved between four-foot snowbanks—I suddenly realized my glasses were broken. My prescription sunglasses were the only option. So, I was trucking along at 70 mph in the dead of a Northern Alberta winter night, essentially driving blind while wearing dark lenses, when the road, with zero warning, decided to take a sharp right turn.

I hit the snowbank like a cannonball, launching my station wagon over the berm and into the forest—nature’s steel rebar. My only thought was: Must. Not. Get. Stuck. So, I kept my foot on the gas and commenced a high-speed, 360-degree lumberjacking maneuver. After two unplanned crossings of the road, miraculously avoiding traffic and achieving surprisingly minor damage, I was back on the ice freeway, a deeply grateful man.

To fully appreciate a blessing, you must experience an unscheduled rendezvous with a frozen spruce forest at 70 mph. I was in the office the next morning, feeling truly blessed (and possibly needing a higher prescription). Deuteronomy 31:6 says, "Be strong and bold..." In my case, I suspect God was just curious to see if I’d finally wreck the car.

Then, disaster struck. The Federal Liberal Government announced they were nationalizing the oil industry. My entire business model evaporated, A-1 Camp Service moved to Texas, and I soon followed, proving that government policy is often the most effective form of market disruption.

The Corporate Carousel and the Value-Added Man

The next few years were a lesson in corporate fragility. In 1995, I tried the entrepreneurial merry-go-round again. Joining Advanced Modular Space quickly taught me the cardinal rule: Never do all the work for less than half the profit. I then formed Modular Space Corporation, which taught me the second cardinal rule: When you run out of money, your partner will inherit the debt.

I moved to MPA Modular, built a new leasing operation from scratch, only to discover the owner was trying to sell it behind my back. (Third Cardinal Rule: Get it in writing, even if you trust them, because their greed has no honor.)

I returned to Space Master for what I assumed was stability, only for the owner to inform me, "Jim, you're excellent value-added. The company is being sold." He gave me the confidential heads-up that my excellent performance was simply increasing the price of his exit. I was essentially a human stock option.

Nortex: Funded by the Mid-Life Crisis and a Credit Card

In 1998, Sherry and I faced the classic American career dilemma: unemployment, being relocated to California, or starting a new business. We chose the third option, which is the most expensive and anxiety-inducing way to avoid unpacking boxes.

We launched Nortex Modular Space from a small desk in our family room. We cut expenses and sold a car, proving that true capitalism often begins with desperation.

The banks, naturally, wanted zero part of this high-risk endeavor. I was saved by Jerrell, a friendly loan officer and fellow church member, who became my mentor. He helped me secure a $65,000 second mortgage on our home, explaining this was not for spending, but for collateral. Banks do not take risks; they take collateral.

The moment we won our first large lease contract, and with the $65,000 still safely untouchable in the bank, I performed a stroke of sheer entrepreneurial genius. I bought the building from a large competitor—and paid for it in cash from an advance on my MasterCard. Yes, the business was capitalized on a second mortgage and built its first major asset on a credit card. With that proven history and the original capital intact, Jerrell helped us get the SBA loan.

The rest is history. We grew to over 1,000 lease units, $30 million in annual revenue, and 100 employees at peak. When we sold the business to Black Diamond Group in 2009, I distinctly remember one moment of pure, financial bliss: paying off 100% of our debt and finally withdrawing that original $65,000 capital investment.

The IRS and Banking Absurdity

Following the sale, we launched Biz Owners Ed (BOE), a non-profit. Since teaching people how to be successful entrepreneurs might be dangerous to the election prospects of certain Liberal politicians, the IRS—under Lois Lerner—launched a year-long audit and denied our non-profit status.

Their assertion was that we could only be a non-profit if we educated only minorities. We eventually received our status, but the audit cost us $30,000 in legal fees and successfully neutralized any potential political effectiveness.

My advisory position on the United Community Bank Board, post-2008 financial collapse, was equally enlightening. It revealed the disaster was largely caused by politicians making it absurdly easy for people with no income or collateral to buy a home, in close collaboration with Wall Street.

The new bank regulations were the true job killers. We were suddenly prohibited from offering a proven, long-term business customer a preferred interest rate unless the exact same rate was offered to a business owned by a minority customer. It’s hilarious to hear politicians complain that banks won't lend when the government has created the very regulations that prevent flexible, risk-appropriate lending. Our community bank was eventually forced to sell to a larger bank because the regulatory burden was unsustainable.

The Final Exit Strategy

After retiring in 2011, I dipped into the real estate investment game with Marluc, LLC, acquiring two dozen homes using a simple, high-IQ investment strategy that quickly became a full-time property management challenge.

Then, disaster struck in the form of a major hailstorm that demolished the roofing of all two dozen properties. This crisis provided the perfect exit. With excellent insurance coverage and brand-new roofs, we listed the homes in a hot market, receiving ten or more offers within 24 hours.

When friends asked why we were selling in a hot market, I reminded myself of the painful truth I learned from the Black Diamond stock chart (which dropped from $70/share to less than $2/share): The time to sell is when it feels too early.

What I have learned through every close call, every financial panic, and every government audit is this: Fear is much stronger than greed. Greed drives people; fear drives cowards. And as Vince Lombardi said, "It is fear that makes cowards of us all."

Forget the noise. Focus on the only three things that truly matter:

“Clarity, Focus and Execution are the three stool legs of a life of success.” — Tony Jeary

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." — Winston Churchill

"The enemy of mastery is the belief that greatness already exists." — Tony Jeary

Chapter 24. The Antarctic: Where the Ice Has a Personal Grudge

As a professional photographer and videographer, you might assume my ideal office has palm trees and decent Wi-Fi. The Antarctic, however, decided to correct my life choices, thrusting me onto one of the world's largest icebreakers alongside some of the best National Geographic talent and world-renowned scientists. It was, shall we say, an eye-opener.

The first lesson: Two days on the Drake Passage with 30-foot waves taught me that the ocean's sense of humor is severely broken. I spent 48 hours contemplating the sheer, magnificent lunacy of historic explorers like Stapleton, who tackled this liquid mayhem in boats roughly the size of a modern SUV. I can only assume they had better seasickness remedies.

Upon arrival, we hit a slight scheduling snag: the usually navigable route on the south side of the western peninsula was, for the first time in modern history, entirely iced-in. This was in February, right in the middle of Antarctic summer. Even the ice was protesting working overtime.

The daytime temperatures, ranging from a surprisingly lukewarm 25 to 35 degrees Fahrenheit, convinced me the South Pole had turned into a lukewarm freezer. The sun, in a display of relentless dedication, never clocked out, providing 24/7 daylight perfect for confusing my circadian rhythm into oblivion.

Our daily routine was an exercise in controlled exposure: two four-hour shifts on shore, ferried by inflatable boats after breakfast (and sufficient coffee, naturally). The time between? Lunch and a brief, well-deserved period of relaxation, usually spent mentally preparing for the next round of frozen exploration. Every outing involved trips to inspect the various, bustling penguin populations, and one mandatory climb up a glacier, which, despite the cardio, offered a spectacular view of our frozen purgatory. We zipped through colorful, floating glaciers and encountered a constant stream of whales, stoic leopard seals, and every bird species that hadn’t filed a flight plan to anywhere warmer.

I was lining up a magnificent shot of our icebreaker nestled among the snow-capped mountains—the perfect, serene composition—when a humpback whale decided to "fluke" right in the foreground. It’s tough working with divas, even the marine kind. Every single trip to or from the continent required a thorough disinfection ritual, ensuring we didn't accidentally introduce an undesirable virus, plant life, or, heaven forbid, a stray American suburb, to the pristine environment.

In the evenings, our marine scientist would play the daily video footage captured by the ship’s small submarine, outlining the names and types of the sea life we’d encountered. He explained that while the air temperature was clearly trying to kill us, the water below the surface never dipped below about 29 degrees Fahrenheit. Relatively tropical, then.

Here are the fun facts from the world's largest, coldest landmass: it’s easily larger than the United States, holds over 80% of the world's fresh water (all locked up in the world's best freezer), and is the only place on Earth where the ice is actually gaining mass. Also, underneath all that frozen weight, the continent boasts the highest average altitude in the world. Unlike its slightly warmer cousin, the Arctic (which is mostly just frozen ocean), the Antarctic is proper real estate—a significant landmass that just happens to be the windiest and driest place on Earth. It’s a desert that somehow manages to stay frozen.

Chapter 25. Africa: Where the Predators Respect the Tour Guide

Before Africa, I thought the Antarctic was peak travel trauma. It turns out the only real trauma in Antarctica is the lack of proper mobile service. Africa, however, was a different kind of magnificent chaos.

My journey to the savanna began, logically, in a taxi in London. A pilgrimage to Godstone, Surrey, to find the birthplace of my grandfather, Stephen Attrell. I asked a local for the address. He scoffed, bless him, and informed me it wasn't a mere 'address,' but an actual home. Coincidence, or as I like to call it, 'The Universe is Narrating My Life,' dictated it was right across the street. Naturally, as I was committing architectural espionage with my camera, the owner (another minor miracle) pulled up, hopped out, and gave me the full, glorious history. It was here Grandpa lived until he was six, before the family wisely traded Surrey for the bracing winds of Alberta.

A quick hop to Johannesburg, then a respectful nod to the ‘Cradle of Humankind’ (for the Darwin devotees among us), and then I was off to Mala Mala Private Game Reserve, adjacent to Kruger. Three days. Three days of excitement so dense, it should have been illegal.

My accommodations were designed to make you feel both supremely pampered and mildly panicked. Luxurious, safe, but definitely close enough to watch elephants and antelope debate foreign policy from my patio door. We were ferried everywhere, waited on hand and foot—a stark contrast to our daily commute: an open jeep, off-roading, with a guide who carried a gun the size of a small cannon. He’d never used it. Why? Because the animals, it became quickly apparent, respected his presence more than they respected their own mothers.

Day one: we parked smack in the middle of a river sandbar where two hyena packs were staging a bloody corporate takeover of a carcass, while buzzards acted as the cleanup crew. Open jeep. Yards away. Standard Tuesday. Day two: The main event. A young Cape Buffalo fell victim to two male lions. We pulled up about thirty feet away—in the open jeep, naturally—and watched the drama unfold. When the Cape Buffalo herd decided to stage a rescue mission, the largest male lion decided discretion was the better part of a feast and bolted feet past me, kill clamped firmly in his jaws.

The 45-minute spectacle that followed—the charging buffalo, the abandonment, the desperate lionesses, the maternal rage of the mother buffalo, and the final, greedy return of the male lions to their picnic—was the best reality show I have ever filmed. I captured every meticulous, gruesome detail, along with close-ups of cheetahs, elephants, rhinos, snakes, and every other amazing creature this continent offers.

The next few stops, Mashuta in Botswana for a guided walking safari and Xakanaxa for tented river adventures, were essentially sequels to the main feature.

My final, thunderous stop was Victoria Falls, requiring a helicopter flight just to process the sheer volume of water—a sight that makes even the Drake Passage seem manageable. In a local Zambian village, I discovered a society where productivity and responsibility weren't buzzwords, but the core operating system. Everyone had a job. The local jail looked like an open-air bus stop with a barbed-wire door, currently hosting two youths who'd gotten a bit too festive in the next village. Their mother was giving them the public dressing-down they deserved. They also operate under a rule that requires ID at all times, governed by what they described as a Christian form of government. If you couldn't identify yourself, you were escorted to the border and kindly asked not to return. It’s certainly one way to handle border control.

Chapter 26. Japan: The Land of Calculated Flights and Compassionate Bureaucracy

I’ve had a complicated, two-part relationship with Japan. It started, as all great bucket-list achievements do, with a slightly panicked administrative gesture: buying a Japan Rail Pass while still safely on American soil, mostly because the concept of purchasing one later felt like tempting fate.

The goal of the first trip was Mount Fuji, the majestic, picture-perfect symbol of serenity. My friend Jim Sloan, an American Airlines Captain, was piloting the flight, which was a definite perk, allowing us a brief, enjoyable visit before he had to pilot himself back across the Pacific. Once in Japan, however, the real miracle began. My ability to navigate the labyrinthine trains and urban sprawl of Tokyo, and subsequently reach Mount Fuji, was purely because the Japanese people operate on a level of helpfulness that borders on telepathy. They didn't just point; they seemed personally offended if they couldn't ensure my safe passage.

This unparalleled service was essential, especially since when I finally arrived at the hallowed mountain retreat, Mount Fuji was practicing its invisibility act behind a thick curtain of cloud and rain. Undeterred, I employed the classic traveler's hack: I took photos of sunny postcards, sent them home via social media, and added a caption acknowledging that, yes, these particular images were sourced from someone who had clearly visited on a better day. Tokyo itself was undeniably modern, efficient, and clean—so much so that you could easily mistake it for any cutting-edge American metropolis, if you ignored the overwhelming politeness.

My second trip, however, was pure, unapologetic corporate espionage disguised as international travel. It wasn't about the destination; it was about the decimals. I needed Executive Platinum miles. My airline concierge, who clearly moonlights as a travel agent for the hyper-elite, suggested a simple fix: Fly first class to Narita, Japan, spend a comfortable three-hour layover in the Admiral Club, and fly right back. Thanks to a promotion, I'd get double the miles at a discounted fare. In exchange for this Trans-Pacific Lap of Luxury, I secured eight system-wide upgrades (the golden tickets of airline travel), Admiral Club membership, and all the usual Executive Platinum accouterments. It was the best deal I've ever made that required absolutely zero sight-seeing.

The journey to achieve this mileage coup provided what I call "The Ultimate Test of First-Class Status." I arrived at DFW for the long haul only to realize I had successfully brought my passport, but tragically failed to bring the rest of my life—my wallet, containing cash and credit cards, was happily relaxing back home.

I braced myself for the inevitable disaster. Instead, the American Airlines desk clerk looked at my first-class ticket, looked at my state of panic, and simply shrugged. His exact words were a minor miracle: "You have your passport, and you are traveling first class with an Admiral Club layover. You won't need cash, credit cards, or additional identification during your 28-hour absence from home."

It was a beautiful, distilled moment of truth. My First-Class status had officially transcended the need for currency.

Chapter 27. Hong Kong: Where the Social Security System Makes Sense and Starbucks Takes Apple Pay

Hong Kong was a strategic pause, a single night squeezed in between a lengthy China adventure and the final stretch home. I didn't have much time, but I had enough time to walk a downtown area and perform the ultimate geopolitical stress test.

This test is simple: can I use my iPhone app to pay for a latte at a Starbucks?

When the transaction went through instantly, I realized everything was fine. Any city where the high-tech payment infrastructure is seamless enough to fuel my caffeine habit is a place I can trust. Hong Kong, you passed the vibe check.

The real education, however, came from my driver. As we navigated the impressive architecture, he laid out their social security system—a concept that, frankly, sounded disturbingly logical, especially to an American accustomed to endless political debates over solvency.

He explained it as a mandatory investment program.

As long as he worked, a portion of his paycheck went straight into a government bond fund. This fund didn't just sit there; it paid his personal account a small amount of interest, while the principal capital was actively used to finance the construction of public projects throughout the city.

It's self-sustaining. The nation builds its infrastructure using its own citizens' retirement savings, and those citizens get a guaranteed return. It’s like a municipal bond that you are legally obliged to buy for your future self.

When he retired, he had two simple choices for his accumulated wealth: he could cash out his entire account—capital plus interest—and invest it as he pleased, or he could opt for an annuity, providing a steady, lifelong income based on the amount he had paid in over his career.

It was so clear, so transparent, and so focused on tangible results—you literally see your retirement money building bridges and tunnels. It makes our own system look like a complicated game of legislative Monopoly. In the brief hours I spent there, Hong Kong successfully established itself as a place where modern financial infrastructure and responsible government policies exist in the same postcode. A highly recommended layover.

Chapter 28. India: The Spiritual Journey with a Corporate Evangelist and the Ethics of Familial Theft

My trip to India was less a vacation and more a high-speed masterclass in international ministry, courtesy of my friend, the corporate evangelist and international speaker, Krish Dhanam. Traveling with Krish is like being strapped to a rocket powered by enthusiasm and sheer willpower. We visited his parents, saw the transcendent beauty of the Taj Mahal, and made countless stops for his extensive itinerary of preaching and speaking engagements.

I quickly became intimate with the sound of Krish’s morning routine: the rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of his flip-flops echoing across the hotel room floors at an hour of the morning that should legally be designated as "late night." This was the sound of preparation, the spiritual engine warming up for another day of far-reaching impact.

I witnessed his brilliance firsthand. Sitting in the front row of a packed Assembly of God Church in Chennai, I watched him preach to several thousand people—not to mention a massive television audience. But the real feat of endurance came later: watching him flawlessly tape four individual five-minute mini-sermons at a radio station, one right after the other, without a single break or flub. It was astonishing, the verbal equivalent of a marathon sprint.

Then came the business school presentation, where I was reminded that, sometimes, my advice is perfectly tailored for corporate America and completely useless everywhere else.

During a moral discussion, Krish, ever the graceful host, surprised me by inviting me onto the stage to field a question. A young college student stood up and, with heartbreaking earnestness, described a situation: an employee of her family business was stealing from the company. She asked me what she should do.

I pufffed up my chest, channeling my inner HR consultant, and responded with confident American pragmatism. The company, I pontificated, needed to review its written standards of employee conduct and immediately commence the process of firing the thief.

Her response landed with the force of an ethical sledgehammer: "But the thief is my brother."

I was rendered instantly, gloriously speechless. In that moment, the entire context of the problem shifted, and I remembered one of India's enduring commercial truths: almost every business is a small, closely held family affair. My simple solution was an organizational severance package, not a familial one.

Krish had pre-warned me, of course, that India was safe but that I should never leave anything of value lying around, because, as in many corners of our world, possession remains ninety percent of the law. It’s advice that applies to loose change as much as it applies to ethical quandaries involving your siblings.

Later, we visited a large Methodist Church, also in Chennai. The communion service was identical to the one we share back home at Trietsch Memorial Methodist in Flower Mound, Texas—except for one crucial detail. You take off your shoes and leave them neatly at your pew before walking up to the altar. It’s a beautiful cultural reminder that even in faith, you must always observe the local custom of clean feet and, apparently, keep a close watch on your flip-flops.

Chapter 29  Retirement: The Day I Paid Two Years of Future Money for One Night of Sleep

Fifteen months after selling Nortex, I woke up one night with a stomach ache. It was not indigestion; it was professional existential dread. The mere thought of going back to a business I no longer owned—a business that now existed only as a three-year earnings workout—was physically sickening.

The buyer's veiled promise of "no change" turned out to have the shelf life of a carton of milk in July. My responsibilities, once vast, were now significantly reduced, and my voice, once definitive, was now background noise, consulted only to be politely ignored. New, highly educated people were brought in to manage functions they clearly didn't understand, treating past success as an anomaly rather than a foundation. I protested, I grumbled, and then I did the only logical thing: I announced my retirement.

It cost me two years of hard-earned earn-out cash, a decision that boiled down to a single question: How much money is enough money to stomach being miserable? Given the new management’s trajectory, that earn-out was looking increasingly like a theoretical possibility anyway. David Hammer, my professional advisor and friend, had told me that a three-year earn-out rarely makes it to the finish line post-sale. I should have listened to the wise words of the experienced. I left on good terms, with the only checks that truly mattered being the ones on my side of the emotional ledger. Regret, after all, is the cancer of retirement.

My actual retirement party was glorious, a memory absolutely packed with all our employees, major vendors, suppliers, and friends. To stand in that room and feel that level of friendship was profoundly moving. I strive to repeat that experience daily, and thankfully, regular lunches, fishing trips, and general camaraderie keep the feeling alive.

Our twelve years at Nortex were jam-packed with good memories and positive impacts. I particularly wish Jeff McClain could have been there. Jeff, who sadly passed from a cancerous brain tumor, was instrumental in our shift to manufacturing our own buildings. Without his vision, we wouldn't have become the nation's leading manufacturer of energy-efficient green buildings. I am grateful that, thanks to our robust benefit package, his family was able to cover his medical expenses and purchase a new home. Thank you, Jeff.

I have only one real professional regret, and it involves the messy collision of business compliance and human decency. We used a third-party payroll service to ensure we operated legally and professionally, especially regarding employee benefits. However, when the skyrocketing cost of health insurance forced us to seek a new, competitive provider, we were required to re-verify all employee documentation under new, stricter employment laws.

We knew some documentation might be falsified, but we never imagined thirty-five factory workers—one-third of our beloved workforce—couldn't provide the necessary paperwork. These weren't just employees; they were friends. Looking back, I don't believe we would have changed agencies had we known the cost.

That being said, the factory is now closed (the new owners quickly shut it down), so perhaps it was "God's will" that these valued workers returned to Mexico, where the economy is reportedly much improved. My regret is that we didn't give them a bonus for their excellent service. They were asked for valid social security numbers within two weeks and simply vanished, shrinking our workforce overnight. At least when we later had to do legitimate work-shortage layoffs, I was able to shake every hand, thank them, and say goodbye.

That final work shortage, by the way, happened post-sale, driven by the new owners' public, Wall Street-driven entity that had zero interest in providing anything more than the legal minimum. Once again, and you will hear me say this often: Big is not better.

The most important lesson I learned at Nortex was this: when you leave things to go wrong, they will go wrong. My preferred remedy was "management by walking around." Talking to employees about their jobs kept me grounded and in touch with the people who mattered most. Crucially, I was careful not to provide direct supervision, which would violate our organization chart, but simply to reinforce our mission statement. I ensured every employee understood our core purpose and felt free to speak up anytime, anywhere, if they thought others were ignoring any element of it. The moral compass of the company resides with the people, not the P&L statement.

Chapter 30. Peru and the Amazon: My Seven-Minute Prep Time vs. Her Forty-Five-Minute Grand Entrance

Traveling to Peru and the Amazon with my sister, Patsy, was a true delight—a delight tempered only by the vast chasm between our respective morning routines. I am, by nature, a seven-minute man. From alarm to ready-to-go, I am a model of efficiency. Patsy, on the other hand, operates on a forty-five-minute cycle that involves achieving a level of sartorial and structural perfection suitable for an audience with royalty. We worked it out, though, through a series of subtle compromises where I mostly just waited patiently.

Our trip to Machu Picchu was a study in strategic luxury. We elected for the high-end train service up to the peaks, and let me tell you, that decision was genius. The journey itself—complete with five-star food and genuinely excellent entertainment—was so enjoyable that it almost made the two or three hours spent actually looking at the ancient, spectacular ruins feel like a bonus add-on. We basically paid for a floating party and got a UNESCO World Heritage site thrown in free.

For the Amazon leg, we boarded a sleek river ship with just twelve rooms, Patsy and I securing two of them (for maximum scheduling flexibility, naturally). Our daily routine was simple: by night, the ship was securely tied up on the shore; by day, we were nearly permanent fixtures on the open top deck, strategically situated beside the bar. This was serious scientific exploration, conducted largely through the lens of a perfectly mixed Pisco Sour.

Our guides, however, were absolutely top-tier—natives from the surrounding villages who had gone to college and were now hired by National Geographic to run these high-level scientific excursions. We were the well-funded passengers making their fieldwork possible. It was a fascinating juxtaposition: sophisticated intellect meets primal jungle, with a tourist holding a zoom lens somewhere in the middle.

We dedicated hours to jungle exploration and village visits, but the water truly brought the magic. Patsy got to realize a childhood dream by swimming with the pink river dolphins, which looked thrilled to be entertaining a Texan. Our motorized boat excursions were daily, thrilling affairs. One afternoon, we were racing up the waterways when we encountered a magnificent, near-Biblical sight: thousands of large, white-winged birds—resembling pelicans but grander—bursting up from the water ahead of us. They flew alongside our vessel, creating an exhilarating, feathered escort service as we sped further into the jungle.

The whole spectacular journey was capped off on the final night with an exquisite dinner. We found ourselves at a beautiful beachside seafood restaurant in Lima, Peru, watching the sun dip into the Pacific. It was the perfect, civilized conclusion to an otherwise wildly uncivilized, utterly fabulous adventure.

Chapter 31. Spain: When Your Luxury Flotilla Docks in a Recession

Of all the ships I’ve sailed on, the voyage to Spain and Lisbon, Portugal, remains a favorite. Not because of the buffet—though the unlimited shrimp was commendable—but because we sailed thirty-plus friends deep. Jay and Bettye Rodgers, who organize this annual floating festival, deserve some kind of sainthood for logistics. Thirty friends is less a cruise group and more a slightly inebriated, fully mobile village, and it makes every port of call feel like a family reunion.

Lisbon, Portugal, was everything a classic European city should be: stunningly beautiful, steeped in history, and perfectly arranged for maximum tourist photo opportunities. We walked until our feet begged for mercy, soaking up the ancient charm that makes you feel profoundly young.

Then we arrived in Spain. The sights were breathtaking, the cathedrals glorious, and the tapas transcendent. But it was impossible to ignore the underlying reality of the place. It’s a surreal experience to step off a floating palace, where your greatest daily decision is whether to have the chocolate lava cake or the crème brûlée, only to be confronted with a country undergoing serious economic duress.

It was genuinely heartbreaking to see beautiful Spain grappling with chronic, crushing unemployment, especially among the youth. The best and the brightest were leaving their homeland in droves, essentially outsourcing their careers to countries with better prospects. The whole thing felt like a paradox: here we were, injecting a few hours of cash into the tourist economy, while the foundational infrastructure was struggling. It’s hard to reconcile the endless champagne brunch of a cruise line with the sobering fact that a sizable chunk of the local youth is packing a suitcase and kissing their country goodbye.

Still, the trip was a valuable lesson in perspective. Travel is supposed to broaden your mind, and sometimes that means seeing the beautiful things that are broken. It also confirmed two unshakeable truths: first, Lisbon is a city you must visit; and second, the only thing better than sailing the Atlantic is sailing the Atlantic with thirty people who already know your best jokes. Thanks, Jay and Bettye, for organizing a history lesson, a feast, and a massive group hug all in one spectacular package.

Chapter 32. Turkey and the Danube: Gondolas, Apostles, and the High-Low of Munich

When Jay and Bettye decided to launch their annual cruise from Venice, it was a guaranteed winner. This trip, which included a brilliant mix of friends and sharp-as-tacks graduate students from our BOE classes, was arguably the grandest of all.

We kicked off in Venice, the only city where street navigation involves not walking, but paying a handsome man in stripes to row you around in a long, elegant canoe. It was my second time in a gondola, and the experience—that perfect blend of old-world charm, questionable structural integrity, and mild claustrophobia—was every bit as suburb as the first. (Wait, I mean superb. Auto-correct must be thinking about tract housing.)

Our Aegean cruise was essentially a floating history lesson, complete with sunblock. Besides the essential Greek stops, the real highlight was docking at Ephesus in Turkey. We wandered through what was once one of the largest cities in the world, imagining its hustle and bustle. To stand in the very spot, the massive coliseum, where the Apostle Paul preached and wrote letters in his audacious effort to convert ancient Jews to Christianity, was humbling. Even more poignant was visiting the place traditionally believed to be the final home of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It gives you pause, realizing that the people we read about in history were once just... locals.

After Istanbul, our jet stream took us straight to Budapest, Hungary, where we traded the ocean liner for a cozy riverboat to begin our glide down the Danube. This leg of the journey was pure European comfort, sailing through Austria and Slovakia, into Germany, and eventually culminating in Munich. We enjoyed daily land tours under what felt like a custom-ordered sunny sky. The scenery was consistently breathtaking, a continuous reel of perfect postcard moments—which, naturally, meant my camera roll filled up with more photo opportunities than I could possibly ever edit.

Munich was a study in profound contrasts. On one hand, there was the sheer, raucous joy of Oktoberfest, a celebration of beer and humanity where everyone forgets their troubles and learns to sing Ein Prosit in questionable German.

On the other, there was the necessary solemnity of history. I made a point to visit the Olympic Village where the 1972 massacre of the Israeli athletes took place. When I gave the address to my cab driver, he didn't need a map; his face immediately clouded with recognition. He remembered the terrorist attack vividly, proving that for some, history isn't just in the guidebooks—it's a memory etched into the local psyche. To experience the pure revelry of Oktoberfest and then immediately feel the weight of such a tragic moment was a powerful reminder that travel, at its best, should never let you get too comfortable.

Chapter 33. Italy: The Olympic Gold Rush, Two Minutes at Pisa, and a Very Fast Gamble

My first Italian excursion was nothing short of cinematic, largely thanks to my dear friend, David Tedesco, and the 2006 Winter Olympics. When you travel with an Italian-American, you don't just see the country; you get the VIP, family-discounted, back-channel experience.

Our tour began with a pilgrimage to his father's birthplace, a deeply personal and grounding start before we plunged into the organized chaos of Rome. We checked the required boxes—the Vatican, the Colosseum (which, even partially crumbled, still looks better than most modern architecture)—but the true Roman highlight was pure glamour. We met a friend of David's and somehow ended up having dinner on a City Hall rooftop. Dining with a panorama of ancient ruins and floodlit landmarks spread out beneath you is the only way to eat pasta, frankly.

The train was our preferred mode of transport, a marvelous way to watch the countryside zoom by. This led to my most efficient act of global tourism: the "Pisa Pitstop." As we approached the city, David arranged a lightning-fast taxi mission. It was just enough time for me to be whisked to the Leaning Tower, snap a photo (the obligatory, “Oh, look, I’m holding up a ridiculously heavy marble structure with my finger!” shot), and confirm that, yes, they had stopped allowing tourists to climb it. My two-minute, high-velocity visit was perfect. Why waste time on stairs when the view from the bottom is already tilting?

The Olympics themselves were centered near Turin, where a generous friend provided us with a home in Saviango for the week. We were joined there by Ted Meyer and David, and the true sporting highlight—far better than anything involving snow pants—was the Gold Medal Hockey game between Finland and Sweden. The atmosphere was electric; the air was thick with national pride and the smell of questionable arena hotdogs.

David and I made sure to take a few memorable side quests. We dipped down to Lake Como to visit his friends there, confirming that the rich and famous know exactly where to build their secondary homes. We also made a ridiculously brief appearance in Monte Carlo for some high-stakes gambling. It lasted precisely fifteen minutes. We walked in, lost what we were willing to lose, decided the buffet was a better return on investment, and left. A true masterclass in risk management.

Looking back, the entire trip was a whirlwind of culture, sport, friendship, and perfectly timed sightseeing. It was, unfortunately, one of our last great adventures. David recently passed away after a battle with a cancerous brain tumor, and the void he left behind is immense. He was a brilliant travel companion, effortlessly mixing historical reverence with practical humor, and he is terribly missed.

Chapter 34. The Synchronicity of 111: When the Universe Won't Stop Texting You

For the past decade or so, I’ve been getting pinged by the numbers 11 and 111. It’s not an everyday occurrence, but when it starts, it's an absolute blitz—a digital swarm of synchronicity that feels less like coincidence and more like an aggressively persistent telemarketer from the cosmos. The numbers appear everywhere, and then, as abruptly as they started, they vanish for months.

My first big hint that the Universe was possibly trying to slide into my DMs came about ten years ago while visiting my son, Tim, in Columbus, Ohio. The messages started subtle: my hotel room was 111. Okay, fine. Then, I asked Tim the address of the restaurant where we were meeting: 111. Hmmm. Later that night, I glanced at the clock as I turned in, and there it was: 11:11. This was no longer random chance; this was clearly a sign that I needed to check out earlier than planned.

Convinced that I’d either found a glitch in the Matrix or was starring in The Truman Show, I hit the internet. Naturally, I discovered I was not alone. It turns out "The 11:11 Phenomenon" is a whole subculture. The self-appointed experts (and by experts, I mean people on forums who use lots of glittery GIFs) suggest that "The Universe" (which I suspect is just a polite way of saying "God") is attempting to communicate, or that Guardian Angels are flashing a billboard that says, “Relax, you’re doing great!”

I have enough examples now to write a very boring pamphlet on the subject. My favorite incident happened when I was watching CNBC. I paused the TV to take a phone call, and after hanging up, I looked back at the screen: the Dow Jones was frozen at 11,111.11. What are the statistical odds of hitting the remote’s pause button at the precise microsecond those seven digits align? You could probably win the lottery three times before that happened. Other classics include waking up at 1:11 am, or getting a restaurant bill for exactly $11.11. These numerical invasions go on for a day or two, and then silence. Though I wouldn't call myself superstitious, the sheer volume of this pattern is compelling enough for me to officially endorse the Guardian Angel theory.

In a related, yet contradictory, note, I should mention my brief foray into the world of psychics. I’m fundamentally skeptical—I believe that only God holds the blueprints for the future—but I consulted a psychic named Sammy twice over a couple of years. The first call was baffling: she saw me coaching a young son at soccer. My sons were fully grown men at the time, and the idea of a new child was ludicrous. Then, March 1993 rolled around, and along came Luke.

Intrigued by this stunning, delayed-action hit, I called her back for a second round (which I recorded, naturally). Unfortunately, since then, she has been wildly off-the-mark in her predictions. Given that my psychic success rate is currently hovering at 50% (one bullseye, one dozen misses), I've concluded that the universe is far better at sending subtle numerical affirmations than it is at giving me stock tips via expensive phone calls. I think I'll be saving my money and relying on the angels, who, at least, text me for free.

Chapter 35. Envy: The Great American Divide Between the Dos and the Don’ts

It’s often said that America is divided between the haves and the have-nots, but that’s far too pedestrian for the national drama we’re currently starring in. The real cleavage in the American psyche isn’t about wealth; it’s about effort. It’s not the haves and the have-nots; it is, quite simply, the Dos and the Don’ts.

There is the America that contributes, the one that obeys the law, shows up on time, pays its own bills, and generally understands that society functions better when you throw a rope rather than cut it. And then there is the America that, well, doesn’t. That’s the true fault line, the gap created by civic irresponsibility and the loud, persistent hum of victimhood that has replaced the once-popular anthem of self-reliance. It’s not income inequality that divides us; it's the love of power overriding the simple love of country.

This leads us to the grand, toxic theater known as the Politics of Envy.

The rationale is deceptively simple: some people have more money than others. This is declared "unjust," and thus, the logical solution is thievery, rebranded. The other guy has it, you want it, and we will take it for you. This philosophy is less of a political platform and more of a terrible, foundational operating system that produced tragic results—namely, entire cities rendered inert, like a once-luxury yacht run aground on a sandbar of poor policy. It is an electoral strategy that, for all its rhetoric about justice, ends up being a profound betrayal of the very people who subscribe to it.

Liberal leadership, through this calculated political engine, hasn't empowered followers; it has, with a terrifying competence, enslaved them. The chains are forged from a culture of dependence and entitlement, fueled by anger and the intoxicating narrative of victimhood, rather than the old-fashioned concepts of ability and hope.

You simply cannot balance a ledger by debasing the successful while simultaneously trying to protect the unsuccessful from the consequences of their choices. Because—and let’s state this loudly for the people in the back—income variations in society are primarily the result of different choices leading to different consequences.

Life is a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and the pages you turn largely determine the ending. Choose to drop out of high school or skip purposeful education, and you are apt to receive a dramatically different financial outcome than the person who diligently pushed on. Choose to parent children outside of a stable, two-person unit, and life is apt to become a radically different, and often harder, course than if you stay married. Our destination in life is, most of the time, dictated by the course we choose.

It is a fundamentally false, and frankly lazy, philosophy to argue that one person’s success is an unavoidable, linear result of another person’s victimization. This philosophy does nothing but foment division, pitting one set of Americans against another for political gain. We are creating two Americas, inching closer every day to proving the wisdom of Lincoln’s maxim. And at the heart of the whole messy affair is that single, corrosive emotion: envy.

Chapter 36. Health: A Series of Unfortunate Events and the Perks of Rat Poison

"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died." — Erma Bombeck

Erma Bombeck was a genius. If a medical professional can't keep a simple houseplant alive, how can I trust them with my complex, aging infrastructure? That single, universal truth guides me, alongside the more serious advice we all receive: stay connected, stay active, eat well, and for heaven’s sake, take care of your soul. Yet, as I age, time seems less like a river and more like a high-speed train, making all that "stay active" advice feel increasingly urgent.

I realized this speeding train was hitting a wall of poor choices back in October 2010 when I made my first iPhone notes entry: 251 pounds. I felt fat, unhealthy, and like a man who needed an intervention. My longtime chiropractor, Dr. Martz (whom I still see monthly—because I value my structural integrity), introduced me to the Blood Type Diet. Based on my Type O status, I went on a quest to find out what strange foods I was supposed to eat. This, in itself, was a ridiculous medical journey: because of my Leiden Factor V blood disorder, I couldn't simply donate blood to find my type; I had to pay for a test. Once armed with this vital, costly information, I followed the diet religiously and, over the next 28 months, dropped 53 pounds. That’s a slow-motion victory. I was so proud that I achieved this feat primarily by walking during my travels, proving once and for all that international airports are the world's most effective gyms. My weight has since fluctuated, thanks largely to relative inactivity, which is why I recently bought a stationary bike. Walking in the Texas summer heat feels less like exercise and more like voluntary self-combustion.

Speaking of blood, my aforementioned Leiden Factor V is an inherited disorder that makes my blood clot like a concrete mixer dropped into water. As a kid, this was a superpower: a vicious football hit resulted in a quick nosebleed, and a deep accidental cut would stop bleeding in seconds. Forty years later, this superpower became a serious liability when a long car trip followed by a long plane ride resulted in clots in both legs. The doctors diagnosed the disorder, and now, for the rest of my life, I take warfarin daily. Warfarin, for the uninitiated, is a potent blood thinner commonly used to poison rats. It’s comforting to know that every morning I consume a tiny bit of rodenticide to ensure I don’t spontaneously solidify. I received this medical gift from my mother and passed it on to at least my daughter, Marissa. The good news is, my internal plumbing is now guaranteed to remain unclogged.

My other serious detour into medical drama was a bout of Polymyalgia Rheumatica, a painful condition that impacted my hips and shoulders so badly I needed assistance just to get dressed. It felt like my skeleton was staging a hostile protest. We never determined the cause, but my chiropractor suspects my immune system was overwhelmed by all the travel shots I took to ensure I didn’t return home with a tropical fungus or a rare disease. The irony is delicious: I was poisoned in advance to prevent being poisoned later. It started right after a trip to Argentina and the Antarctic. The pain was excruciating until I was referred to a Rheumatologist who prescribed Prednisone. The cure was immediate, like a magic trick. Unfortunately, when he tried to taper me off the drug over 18 months, the disease returned with a vengeance. I was forced to start all over again, proving that my body has a deep, personal attachment to steroids.

The scar on my right shin is a testament to my 12-year-old self’s questionable athletic ambition. There was a wavy steel fence near my home in Calgary, and it presented a compelling tightrope challenge near the Texaco station where I’d eventually work. The result was a wicked gash. Knowing that Doc Medlicott, the local stitching wizard, was the likely destination, I hid the injury from my mother. By the time she noticed my blood-soaked pants, it was too late for stitches—a small victory for 12-year-old me. Forty years later, the scar returned to haunt me when I was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma (skin cancer) right on the old injury site. I was subjected to MOHS surgery, a systematic skin removal process where they shave off layers, test them while you sit in a waiting room with numerous other skin cancer veterans, and then repeat until they find clean margins. I asked the surgeon what would happen if they kept going until they hit bone. "Don't think about that," he advised. Thanks a lot. After a full day of surgical triage, they confirmed success. My tiny childhood scar is now a massive, successful medical monument.

This skin drama brings me back to Doc Medlicott. When I was ten, I ran full-tilt into the wooden framework of a fence and donated twelve stitches to my right eyebrow. In those days, there was no such thing as a painkiller. Doc met us at his office, told me I’d be a big boy if I held still, and stitched me up in seconds. My father paid him $10.00. Ten dollars! A decent monthly paycheck then was $250.00. The $10 wasn't even tax-deductible. You can see why, years later, I was hesitant to report a simple shin injury.

My relationship with healthcare shifted completely in 1974 when I was a young father in Canada. Earning $350.00 a month, the introduction of national healthcare was a welcome blanket. The tiny monthly deduction was nothing compared to the cost of having three kids over the next three years. Free hospital visits were the norm. I gratefully assumed the Government was paying for it—I thought they just printed the money, like Monopoly cash, which I realize now is a deeply flawed economic theory. I was later privileged to be seated with the British Columbia Minister of Health in 2010, who was retiring feeling like a failure. He watched healthcare balloon from under 10% to 35% of the BC budget, bloated by entitlement and legal protections. It seemed everyone was "on the take" and liked things just as they were.

The hazards of Canadian life followed me into hockey. In 1976, I took a slap shot to the ankle. Defensemen are trained to face the puck head-on (where the padding is), but I, thinking I was invincible, failed to follow instructions. Six weeks in a cast. A month later, during a blizzard, I got a flat tire. I wrapped my legs around the tire to jack up the car, forgot the parking brake, and the vehicle rolled, crushing my cast into my shin. As my toes went numb, I used a hacksaw to amputate the cast. The relief was instantaneous. Feeling truly indestructible, I played hockey that night, reasoning that my tightly laced skate would serve as a structural replacement. A month later, the doctor’s office called, wondering why I hadn’t returned to have the cast removed. Bless their hearts.

My hockey career ended less dramatically but with lasting consequences: a hip check tore my knee cartilage. Surgery and rehab followed. Years later, wrestling with my son Tim, I tore the cartilage in the other knee. That surgery was quicker, thanks to the scope, but I foolishly skipped the rehab. To this day, I can't bend my heel to my buttocks—a constant reminder that shortcuts in life, especially medical ones, have enduring penalties.

In my forties, I joined the universal club of those who need glasses to read. After a decade of relying on glasses, and then big, clunky contact lenses, I had surgery to correct my shortsightedness. But the closeup vision remained a problem. In 2010, I was one of the first guinea pigs for HD lens replacement. It corrected my vision, but the new lenses caused small hemorrhages, resulting in giant, distracting floaters. This led to two separate surgeries to remove and replace the fluid in my eyes. The good news? My vision is now almost perfect. I can feel, smell, see, hear, and taste. We should be eternally grateful for all five senses. If you could only choose one, which would it be? Think about that for a moment.

My final physical sagas involve the gut and the skin. Actinic Keratosis, a pre-cancerous skin condition, has required treatments on my left cheekbone twice. It is a quick fix that everyone should ask their dermatologist about (and yes, you should be visiting a dermatologist regularly). I also spent years dealing with a chronically restricted esophagus caused by acid reflux, which even surgery for a hiatus hernia couldn't fully fix. I once rushed myself to the hospital, unable to swallow food stuck in my throat, only to have a doctor teach me how to relax and loosen my belt to get it down. The relief was profound. It took years to discover the actual culprit: gluten intolerance. Wheat products were the source of the acid reflux.

I have been seeing my chiropractor, Michelle Martz, regularly since 2002. My first visit was for hip pain. She performed a thorough examination and pointed to the X-ray: my left leg was 3/4 of an inch shorter than my right, causing my spine to lock and my hip to tip. I was a defenseman who preferred skating left, and my tie always hung to the left. It all made perfect sense. After several months of treatment and heel lifts, I remember bending over at work and actually feeling my spine move. I called Michelle, who casually assured me that it was, in fact, supposed to move freely. Imagine that! Now, the visits are just maintenance. Medicare, of course, won't cover maintenance because I can't report pain—and while some might suggest lying, I simply can't live with that kind of moral compromise, even for a few bucks. Michelle also quickly corrected a perpetually subluxated shoulder and gave me full range of motion in my neck. You truly don't know what physical capability you're missing until you discover what you are capable of doing. Stretch yourself into unknown territories on a regular basis. Amaze yourself. How you leave this world has everything to do with how you treat your health. Squeeze that juice out of life.

Chapter 37. Bankruptcy: When the Road Bump Becomes a Mountain

They say that challenges are just "natural bumps in the road." If that’s true, my biggest bump was less of a speed bump and more of a geologic event: personal bankruptcy.

My saga began when I moved my family from Sydney, Montana, to Houston in 1982 to work for Spartan Drilling, Inc. I was the Vice President of Marketing, a grandiose title that translated into "The guy who has to sell oil-well drilling services in an economy where nobody is drilling and everyone is hoarding cash." The oil industry was suffering a downturn so severe that oilmen were selling their yachts to buy two-stroke scooters. My mission was simple: land contracts with the Shells and Exxons of the world at "survival rates." I actually did it. I brought in quality contracts that would have kept the lights on.

But in the wild west of the energy sector, one bad apple can spoil the entire corporate barrel. We drilled a very expensive dry-hole for a small operator who promptly decided that bankruptcy was an easier option than payment. The result for us? A trip down the same financial drain.

By 1984, I was given a choice: return to Calgary and take a diminished contracts role with Spartan, or remain unemployed in Houston. My personal life was just as messy as my corporate one; I was separated from my wife, newly primary caregiver for three teenagers (Jennifer, Chris, and Tim), and soon navigating a divorce. But Houston had one powerful magnetic pull: Sherry. We met through a new dating service—a testament to either desperation or the relentless optimism of the newly single—and I fell completely and thoroughly in love. I was not leaving Houston.

Unfortunately, the financial fallout was a brutal hardship on my children. My daughter, Jennifer, went into a severe depression and battled drug addiction. The one stroke of genuine luck was that my insurance from Spartan was still active and covered her intensive hospital treatment for about a year. When the insurance finally ran dry, I was informed that the hospital, having seemingly "milked" the insurance company for every last drop of equity, suddenly declared Jennifer "cured" and discharged her. They then handed me a final bill for a quarter of a million dollars in medical expenses that the insurance decided was optional. It was clear that the high-stakes game of medical billing had become my problem now.

Following a series of spectacularly failed, commissioned sales jobs in an economy featuring 12% unemployment—a grim statistic that meant every job interview was a gladiatorial event—I finally landed a job and a fresh start with Space Master Buildings. My permanent resident alien (green card) status had also been approved, allowing me to fully commit to life south of the border.

The problem? I had a few too many lingering creditors who were keen to join the party. The debt calls were relentless, and the second they discovered I had a job, they started calling the office. The most embarrassing moment of my adult life came when I was at work and my car was repossessed. Having your primary mode of transportation towed away mid-shift is the ultimate public declaration of financial failure. Thankfully, Sherry, a graduate student at the University of Houston, came to the rescue. She borrowed against a CD to fund the purchase and necessary repairs of a worn-out 1983 Oldsmobile that smelled faintly of desperation and had been parked for far too long.

It was obvious I could not, in any foreseeable century, repay these monstrous obligations. So, in 1986, with the help of a lawyer-friend of Sherry's, I declared personal bankruptcy. I recently "celebrated" the 30th anniversary of that truly discouraging event—a milestone that should probably only be marked with a single, lukewarm beer.

There is a darkly comedic postscript to this saga: American Express. Twenty years later, they forgave the debt (as is required by bankruptcy law) and issued me a new credit card showing me as a continuous customer since 1978. Because nothing says "stable, valued customer" like a three-decade relationship punctuated by a Chapter 7 filing.

Looking back, bankruptcy in Houston during the early 1980s oil bust was as common as humidity. My preference would have been to just be left alone with my promise to pay when I could; I most certainly would have settled those debts five or six years later. But the hospital and doctor bills—inflated and weaponized—were a different beast entirely. When the institution stopped getting paid by the insurance company, they simply transferred the catastrophic financial burden to the primary caregiver. It's a marvelous system, provided you're not the one standing in the ruins.

Chapter 38. The Great Flood: Or, How I Learned to Renovate a Home with a Hacksaw and a Pregnant Wife

In 1988, Sherry and I purchased a lovely home in the Houston community of Inverness Forest. It was just south of Spring Creek, outside the official 100-year flood plain, and had only a minor history of minor flooding. We were poor, so flood insurance was technically optional—but thankfully, a flicker of divine paranoia (or perhaps common sense) convinced us to spring for it. Our new life was perfectly mapped out: the house was close to my office, close to Sherry’s new job as a psychologist, and close to the due date of our first child, Marissa. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the answer came in the middle of the night, a few short weeks after I had an Achilles heel operation and was sporting a beautiful, yet highly restrictive, cast. A tropical storm, feeling competitive, dropped 15 inches of rain on our community in one go. Sherry woke me up, and I promptly stepped out of bed and into six inches of cold, unwelcome water. A man with a newly operated ankle and a large plaster cast wading through a biblical flood is not a picture of domestic tranquility.

Sherry, bless her pregnant heart, was less worried about the structural integrity of the home and more concerned about her maternity clothing. In a flash of true brilliance, she suggested tossing them onto my oldest son Chris’s water bed. Water beds, as it turns out, are excellent flotation devices, and her wardrobe was secured atop a private, slightly swaying island. Crisis averted, we each grabbed a dog and waded up the flooded street to a friend's house. Thank goodness we had anticipated potential watery drama and parked our vehicles on high ground. A professional disaster planning team, we were not. But we got the dogs out, and that's what truly matters.

The next day, we walked back down to survey the damage. The water marking confirmed it: 44 inches. Nearly four feet of standing water had turned our beautiful, new, slightly-used home into a giant, expensive fish tank. It took three days for the water to subside, giving me plenty of time to mentally plan the demolition and reconstruction.

Fortunately, my day job at Space Master included project management of construction, meaning I had access to a stable of subcontractors and an extremely large dumpster—the 40-yard kind that could swallow a pickup truck whole. Friends arrived, and the Great Purge began. Most of our worldly possessions went straight into the dumpster, including a gigantic, circular bedroom mirror I’d won in a sales contest. Its particle board frame had swollen two or three times its normal size, leaving a permanent, ridiculous watermark right across the center. It was the physical embodiment of the phrase "water damage."

With the help of my friend Dale Wheeler of Dal-Bar Construction, who was an absolute God-Send, we turned the destruction into a high-speed renovation project, completing the rebuild in just six weeks. This was record time; most of the 100-plus homes in the subdivision hadn't even started. The insurance company inspected the flawless repair, the city inspector approved it, and the mortgage company released the final check. We were done.

Sherry, however, had a bad feeling. A second tropical storm was arriving, and she insisted we stay one more night at our temporary home. This friend, a flight attendant, was gone often, so we had the place to ourselves. Unbelievably, that very night, we found ourselves in the middle of another severe flooding event. Sherry, attempting to drive her Ford Taurus into the garage of our temporary place, found herself in about three feet of water. A heroic neighbor had to rescue her and push the newly flooded car up the driveway.

Meanwhile, our just-repaired, immaculate home was sitting under two feet of water. We had somehow managed to be the only home in the entire subdivision to book a totally separate, totally clean second flood claim. You might say my enthusiasm for the second rebuild wasn't quite the same.

I immediately called my employer and expressed a keen, unwavering interest in moving to any city that required a manager and possessed higher elevation. Dallas had an opening for a new Branch Manager. I quickly agreed.

We moved into a townhouse near our now-twice-damaged home, preparing for Marissa’s arrival while I completed the second round of repairs. Again, I completed the work in a few weeks, and my father, a Houston real estate agent, sold the house the very day it was listed.

The quick sale enabled us to buy a new home in Highland Village in December 1989, just weeks after Marissa was born. We arrived with all our worldly possessions in a pull-behind U-Haul trailer: a bed, a fridge, and a few boxes of photos. A new house, a new job, and a new baby. God is indeed good, but apparently, He also thought it was hilarious to test our commitment to Texas real estate, twice.

Chapter 39. Flying Lessons: How I Discovered My Inner Coward and My Outer Executive Platinum Status

My early career at Atco Structures in Calgary, specifically in Contract Administration, was essentially a masterclass in project coordination. I was the hub of every wheel, coordinating projects from "Hello, let's build something" to "It’s built, here’s the bill." It was a fantastic foundation, but in 1977, the job led me to a few months in Houston to assist with international projects.

This stint put me in a corporate apartment with another Atco employee—a Project Manager and, crucially, a Vietnam war veteran. The man was clearly forged from a stronger, less easily-frightened metal than I was. This became abundantly clear one evening when a sequence of events unfolded by the apartment pool that confirmed my basic, fundamental fear of dying.

I heard gunfire. I raced down the stairwell, peeked around the corner, and saw a man with a gun pointed at a woman in the pool. Before my brain could even register the full scope of the emergency (mostly, run), my roommate, the veteran, rocketed past me toward the attacker. I, meanwhile, executed a flawless 180-degree turn and sprinted back to the relative safety of our apartment, demonstrating an admirable, if less than heroic, instinct for self-preservation.

My roommate returned shortly thereafter, eyes wide and fired up, muttering only, "Wow." From his fragmented description, he had wrestled the firearm away just as the police arrived. He had served on a cleanup crew in the war zone, an experience that had terribly scarred him but, apparently, left his fight-or-flight response permanently stuck on "Fight." I was deeply impressed—and equally terrified that he was my new roommate.

After six months of international excitement, living in the same office as my father (Doug, a Senior Salesman for Atco) and surviving near-death experiences by the pool, I requested a return to full-time duty back in Calgary. My Houston boss, a pilot who loved gliders, wanted me to transfer permanently, but I was aggressively homesick, and, more importantly, the hockey season was starting. Priorities.

Before leaving, I took one flight with my boss in a glider, and that single, silent experience prompted me to take flying lessons upon my return to Calgary at Springbank Airport. My newfound hobby was almost immediately grounded by two predictable obstacles: pneumonia (which landed me in the hospital on the weekend I was supposed to solo) and a chronic lack of money.

But before the money ran out, I had some truly exhilarating (and terrifying) sessions. Nothing says "trust in your instructor" like practicing "touch-and-goes" in a Cessna 150 over the schizophrenic landscape of a Calgary winter. The approach fields alternated between bright white, snow-covered farmers' fields (which guaranteed cold, aggressive downdrafts) and black, plowed loam fields (which reliably generated sudden updrafts).

During one particular approach, requiring maximum use of the runway, I hit a downdraft that felt like the bottom of the plane falling out. Had my instructor not slammed the throttle wide open the instant he did, I wouldn't be recounting this story today. It rattled my teeth so hard I thought I’d chipped a molar and came perilously close to undercarriage damage.

Even more harrowing was the practice of "incipient spins." The instructor, with a mischievous grin, would take us up to a safe altitude, have me close my eyes, and then put the plane into a nose-dive, followed by a full spin. The first time, the G-force pressure was so intense it literally broke my wristwatch. My face felt contorted, thinking was difficult, and panic was attempting to set up permanent residence in my chest.

However, from that terror came a profound life lesson. Recovering a plane from a nose-dive and spin is a perfect metaphor for curing a life that's headed for disaster:

1. Eliminate the Power: Turn the throttle to minimum. In life, this means ignoring all the noise, stopping the activity that caused the problem, and achieving stillness.
2. Eliminate the Spin: Turn the wheel just enough to stabilize. In life, this is shedding bad influences and regaining your directional focus.
3. Level Up: Pull gradually back on the wheel to level the nose with the horizon. This is looking forward, seeing your destination, and making final preparations for the journey.
4. Full Throttle: Hit the gas and turn toward your destination. This is the exhilarating moment of overcoming, of squeezing the juice out of life, as Deuteronomy 31:6 suggests: Be strong and courageous.

Though I gained wisdom, I lost my taste for personal aviation quickly. The Cessna incident was followed by two more close calls. First, a helicopter flight in northern British Columbia during an unexpected snowstorm forced the pilot into a rapid descent into a deep river valley to gain visibility, navigating between rocky cliffs. Relief only came when we broke out into sunshine above a winding, white-water river.

The third and final strike came while flying in a small chartered plane in Northern Alberta for A-1 Camp Service. The pilot, unfamiliar with the area, flew straight into a massive snowstorm, lost visibility, and after an hour or two of veryrocky flying, decided his best option was to turn 180 degrees and fly back the way we came. We broke out of the storm with minimum fuel, and I promised myself I would never willingly put myself at that risk again. My basic fear of death, I decided, was a survival instinct worth honoring.

Since then, I’ve only flown on commercial airlines, a strategy that has—with satisfying irony—earned me Executive Platinum status on American Airlines. I'm now a connoisseur of large, stable jets. The only exceptions have been a tame King Air twin-engine flight and a single, safe helicopter trip with my family to an Alaskan glacier for dog-sledding, where the only danger was being outpaced by Sherry’s enthusiasm as she led a sled ride, or the cuteness of Marissa holding the puppies. It seems I prefer my high-speed travel to be managed by a major corporation, not a determined enthusiast in a Cessna.

Chapter 40. Hockey Season: A Canadian Religion, a Texan Anomaly, and the Case of the Deceased Hawk

If there is a Canadian national religion, it is hockey, and Saturday night at 6:00 p.m. was the holy hour. Hockey Night in Canada wasn't a television program; it was a cessation of all national activity for three uninterrupted hours. As a boy, I was so dedicated, I captained my Boy Scout hockey team in Calgary—a source of pride documented by a truly magnificent, slightly embarrassing photo of me and Coach Bill Buzan that still hangs in my office today.

Back then, the NHL was the "Original Six," which meant Canada had two teams, Montreal and Toronto. Since French Canadians were mostly absent from Western Canada, cheering for the Canadiens felt treasonous, so most of us hitched our hopes to the Leafs. My personal rebellion, however, was for Guy Lafleur, affectionately known as "The Flower," who played for Montreal. Every morning, I skipped right past the world news to see how many points Guy and his line-mates had scored. In those glorious, simpler days, every position on every team, even the four American ones, was manned by a Canadian. It was the natural order of things, only beginning to unravel in the late 1960s when players from "elsewhere" started to compete for ice time.

The world truly fractured when the great Bobby Hull, having jumped to the rival WHA, was subsequently denied a spot on the Canadian All-Star team. His response? He took out American citizenship and played for the US team in the World Championships. The audacity! The fans were outraged, the hockey world was set aflame, and soon enough, the WHA collapsed, leading to the necessary expansion that brought the NHL into the modern era.

My team of choice, however, was 200 miles North of Calgary: the Edmonton Oilers. As a season-ticket holder, my devotion was absolute. I remember one particular Saturday night game that required my father-in-law, Gus, and I to talk our way past the RCMP, who had closed the Calgary-to-Edmonton highway due to a province-wide snowstorm. We successfully convinced them that our front-wheel drive and chains constituted a legitimate national emergency, and we proceeded to carve through snowdrifts several feet deep to arrive just in time for the puck drop. A few weeks later, my manager at Atco Structures finally relented to my weeks of pleading and transferred me to Spruce Grove, Alberta. Why? So I could be close to my team. That’s not a job relocation; that’s a spiritual pilgrimage.

During this time, I coached my own kids, leaving behind my volunteer role as Community Sports Director in Calgary’s Fairview, where I managed 32 youth hockey teams and a beautiful new arena. We lived across the street from the rink, meaning I or one of my kids was on the ice nearly every day. One of my proudest bureaucratic achievements was merging our declining youth program with three other communities to form the Heritage Sports Association. They had the cash, we had the ice; the solution was elegantly simple, despite the inevitable, competitive accusations of "team loading" from rival communities.

The real perk of community service was Old-Timers Hockey, played late at night. The rule was: if you wanted to play, you had to volunteer. My chosen duty? Driving the Zamboni. There is a quiet, meditative joy to scraping away the flaws of the old ice and laying down a perfect, hot-water-infused new surface. I became quite adept at building an outdoor rink that would last well into April, long after others had melted. And there was nothing better than watching parents, period after period, spontaneously climb over the boards with shovels and scrape the ice clean in a silent, beautiful ballet of selfless community effort. No one asked; everyone did.

Leaving that life was hard, but the lure of a job change, better earning potential, and the chance to watch the Edmonton Oilers in my hometown was irresistible. I’ll never forget standing in the player’s concourse with an armful of my players' sticks, waiting for Wayne Gretzky. He stopped and autographed every single one. Besides being the best player in the entire world, he was genuinely kind. It was he who advised us to "skate to where the puck is going," and wisely noted, "you will miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take." Truer words for hockey or life have never been spoken.

Years later, I moved to Texas and found myself coaching a "tiny mite" team in Houston. In a city of millions, there were perhaps 30 kids aged nine or ten playing, half of whom were still figuring out which end of the stick to hold. The nearest competition was in Dallas, Austin, and Oklahoma City. In true dedicated Canadian fashion, the parents raised money to fly these tiny warriors to weekend tournaments.

I later moved to Dallas, just in time for the Stars to win the Stanley Cup in 1999, which cemented hockey’s place in Texas sports culture. Alongside a cadre of like-minded enthusiasts—Randy Guttery, Dave and Dennis Casey, Howie Wright, and Dave Meyer—I discovered the annual NCAA College Hockey Championship, the "Frozen Four." This became our yearly pilgrimage, a four-day ritual that reunites us with the same college alumni fans who are just as nuts as we are.

These trips are legendary, not just for the hockey, but for the logistics. One year in Milwaukee, I was late to book, and the only spot left was a foldaway bed shared with two of the guys. I arrived after hours, found the foldaway was terminally broken, and spent the entire night curled in a structural “V.”

Randy, in particular, thought this was apt punishment for my practical jokes. My personal highlight reel includes finding a perfectly preserved, deceased hawk in a field and gently laying it with wings fully spread on his front doorstep, knowing he had a second viewing scheduled for his house that afternoon. He called me later, completely aghast, believing the majestic bird had suicidally slammed into his home. My confession earned me the swift retribution of a massive gay pride sticker affixed to my truck's license plate, which I drove with for weeks, oblivious, until the unusual frequency of approving waves and knowing smiles from other drivers finally tipped me off.

To settle the score, I booked Randy’s next airline seat to the Frozen Four right next to the jet engine. Just the engine.

Despite the travel trauma, the collection continues. I am now the proud owner of 30 NHL pucks, one from every single rink in Canada and the United States. Dave Meyer and I even took our obsession international, traveling to the Winter Olympics in Italy and Vancouver, with the Gold Medal game between Sweden and Finland in Turin, 2006, being the absolute highlight. From scraping ice with shovels to sitting in the nosebleeds in Italy, hockey is, without question, the most entertaining of all sports. Game on, indeed.

Chapter 41. Smoking: Nicotine, Numb Limbs, and the Shocking Discovery That Broccoli Tastes Like Something

My earliest attempts at establishing a sophisticated personal brand began around age 14, in the clandestine luxury of my grandparents' farmhouse garage. There, alongside my slightly older co-conspirators—Uncle Bob (only two years my senior, but a critical authority figure nonetheless) and my cousin John—I took my first, fateful drag. It was a glorious, immediate rush, and I became addicted with the speed and dedication usually reserved for advanced mathematics or a lifelong commitment to the Oilers.

I quickly bypassed the pretentious filter cigarettes, preferring the raw, unfiltered kick of plain smokes and cigarillos. Why dilute a good addiction? Between the heavy daily dose of nicotine, and the liters of Pepsi I consumed, my body weight remained laughably low for years—hovering south of 150 pounds for my almost 6'3" frame. I was essentially a human chimney powered by sugar and caffeine, surviving purely on jitters and a cloud of blue smoke. The first thing I did every morning was light a cigarette; the last thing I did every night was light another. At work, I became an efficiency expert, using the glowing ember of the cigarette I’d just finished to light the next one, thus eliminating the unnecessary expense and effort of fetching a match.

This highly effective life strategy continued until age 28, when a bout of pneumonia led to a review of my chest X-ray. My physician, with the solemnity of a judge passing sentence, pointed to the film and informed me that I had achieved a true medical anomaly: the lungs of a very old man.

He added, perhaps to soften the blow, that the intense craving I felt when trying to quit wasn't psychological; it was my lungs, finally black and tired, attempting to heal themselves. That was my rock bottom, a moment of stark, terrifying clarity. The party was over.

My wife, Judy, and I booked a week-long vacation to the Bahamas. The goal was simple: relax and commit career suicide to my addiction. The strategy, however, was aggressive and unhinged. I chewed on Bic plastic pens full-time until the plastic cracked, and I drank vodka straight-up, which proved an excellent way to kill the desire for a smoke, primarily by killing all other cognitive functions. When the craving became unbearable, I adopted the most effective non-chemical solution known to man: I simply went to bed and slept through the crisis.

I was free for about a year. Then came the fateful night out with the adult baseball league friends. "One won't hurt," I thought. That one cigarette hooked me for another miserable six months. Quitting the second time was exponentially harder, but this time, Judy became my co-conspirator in health. She agreed to make our home and car entirely smoke-free, which meant she had to brave a Calgary snowstorm to stand outside and have a smoke. That level of dedication, coupled with the sheer shame of watching her suffer in sub-zero temperatures because of my weakness, finally did the trick.

It took a few years, but the long-term benefits have been nothing short of miraculous. My sense of smell has returned so completely that I now detect odors I’m fairly certain I never registered in childhood. This has made my love of nature much more enjoyable, though it does mean I have to actively avoid places like Hereford, Texas, the site of the largest stockyards in the world. Trying to enjoy a nice steak there is complicated when all you can smell is the steak’s extended family.

Another relief was the cessation of circulatory problems; my arms and legs, especially during sleep, used to go regularly numb. That is now, thankfully, a problem solved. For years, the craving would hit hardest right after a meal or when having a beer. I’ve since found the smell of cigarettes utterly disgusting, and, since turning 60, I’ve traded the beer for red wine—a far more civilized choice. My favorites are always the most expensive ones, naturally, with Caymus Cabernet leading the charge. It’s hard to beat a glass of $100 Cab when the alternative used to be a cheap cigarette and a mouthful of Pepsi.

Chapter 42. Wabasca Fishing: A Tale of Thieving Neighbors, Errant Slugs, and the Icy Retreat

When I transferred to Spruce Grove, just west of Edmonton, with Atco Structures in 1979, I thought I was joining a construction team. What I actually joined was a highly specialized, covert fishing operation. Bob Boisvert, for instance, worked full-time at Atco in the same way that a moose works full-time as a lawn ornament; his true calling was aquatic domination. Wayne Johannson, the shop superintendent, suffered from the same chronic case of hook-and-line fever.

When these fine colleagues discovered I owned a winterized motor home, I immediately went from being the new guy to being their new, best friend—a title that came with a mandatory and non-negotiable set of weekend obligations. Friday mornings became a ritual: Bob would arrive at the office with his boat hitched, a truck bed overflowing with fishing gear, and a substantial supply of Kielbasa (Polish sausage) and beer. His presence was a silent, meaty beacon, signaling that I was expected to drive home immediately and collect the RV.

Our destination was Lake Wabasca in Northern Alberta. The road there was less a municipal thoroughfare and more a "trail" that had occasionally been driven on by trucks and perhaps bears. We were deep in Native territory, where a unique and alarming security paradox governed the campgrounds: The rule was that if you locked the motor home, it would be broken into by locals looking for booze. If you left it unlocked, nothing but the alcohol would be stolen. It was a bizarre, honour-among-thieves contract enforced by necessity, and it meant we spent every trip hiding beer in the most ridiculous, non-obvious places imaginable.

Wabasca offered a perfect dichotomy for angling: a deep lake promising gargantuan Lake Trout, and a shallow one teeming with Walleye, Perch, and Jackfish—the local term for Northern Pike, which were the size of small, terrifying logs. The Pike were so big and their teeth so impressively sharp that landing one was considered a structural failure. The proper technique was not to retrieve the hook but to simply cut the line and sacrifice the tackle to the monster, then quickly drop a new line to the bottom where the desirable, non-lethal fish lived.

On one particularly memorable trip, our dedication to Kielbasa and cheese—our sole provisions, as we usually "lived off the land"—met with catastrophic failure. The fishing was impossible due to dreadful weather. Time to hunt! Bob pulled out the shotgun, full of confident swagger, only to realize he had brought the wrong ammunition: slugs. For those unfamiliar with ballistics, a slug is essentially a massive, solid piece of lead designed to stop a charging bull. The target? Ruffled grouse, delicate birds whose entire bodies were scarcely larger than the slugs themselves. Shooting them was out of the question; we would have simply vaporized them and the nearby forest.

But Bob, being a character, was also resourceful. We discovered that the deafening, concussive noise of a slug ripping through the air near a grouse was enough to briefly stun the poor bird, causing it to fall to the ground where we could run over and retrieve it. We survived the weekend on three stunned grouse, a combined portion roughly equivalent to a quarter of a small chicken. With the remaining slugs, we performed an act of public service on a lonely outhouse along the route, administering several rounds of aggressive aeration to improve the ventilation situation inside.

On another occasion in early spring, we were fishing the open water of the lake when the ice was half melted, yielding giant, hungry lake trout. My fishing prowess reached its peak when a trout jumped clean out of the water and hit my lure so hard it managed to wrap the line tightly around my rod. The celebratory moment was short-lived.

The wind suddenly turned violent as the sun set, and we watched in horror as the giant, half-melted ice sheet that covered the center of the lake was blown rapidly toward shore, sealing off our exit route. Now we were stranded, quickly freezing, and facing a long walk through heavy woods and muskeg back to the truck.

I have decades of winter camping experience, and yet, carrying a boat on my head while trudging through 12 to 18 inches of cold, wet, slippery muskeg—all while relying on the moss on the north side of the trees for our GPS—was easily the low point of the week. No cell phone, no flashlight, just three exhausted idiots and a boat acting as a ridiculously inefficient hat. Just as I was about to suggest we use the boat for a remarkably cold shelter, we burst out onto the blessed gravel road.

I have never been so physically exhausted and relieved in my life. We dropped the boat, bolted for the truck, and the freezing cold retreat back to our warm motor home felt like a victory lap. Worry was a luxury we couldn't afford; survival required all-out, full-speed charging. Endurance builds character, and boy, did we become some kind of characters that weekend. It’s a valuable lesson: check the score sheet and make sure you’re not sprinting toward a finish line that doesn't exist. Our finish line was clear—the road. Yours should be too. Don’t float aimlessly through life, letting things happen to you. Channel your inner lion or gazelle: go full speed at whatever you undertake and squeeze every drop of juice out of life.

Chapter 43. Friends: Drinking, Drag Racing, and the Debt of Good Advice

The old adage insists you are judged by the company you keep, a terrifying thought considering some of my early affiliations. Choose your friends carefully, because they are either going to pull you out of the red-wine-and-vomit-stained shag carpet, or they're going to hand you another bottle of the good stuff.

My high school best friend in Calgary was Danny Byrne, a co-conspirator of the highest caliber. Our afternoons were usually spent locked in cerebral combat over a chessboard. But when his parents jetted off to visit their homeland in Ireland, the scene changed instantly from polite strategy to Dionysian anarchy. We hosted a party for our fellow 15-year-olds in his basement, and the star attraction was his parents' proudly stocked collection of homemade red wine.

Having arrived late due to the demanding schedule of my newspaper route, I discovered I was catastrophically behind in the night’s revelry. In a panic to "catch up," I committed an act of legendary stupidity: I chugged an entire bottle of the stuff. Hours later, I awoke on the thick, luxurious white shag carpet, having achieved the perfect, tragic diorama of adolescence: a pool of crimson-soaked puke and wine. It was a singular, stomach-lurching experience that successfully inoculated me against wine for the next four decades. It’s funny how life works—you can't buy that kind of visceral aversion. Despite attending different schools (he was Catholic), Danny remained a loyal friend, even after his much older girlfriend delivered his parents a surprise grandchild, which, naturally, immediately ceased all parental disapproval. That’s how you solve awkward relationship dynamics. Years later, in 1987, Danny drove from Calgary to Houston just to attend my wedding to Sherry, proving that a true friend will travel far, even if you still owe him for a carpet cleaning bill from 1974.

The next great character entered my life around 1977 at Atco Structures: Dale Gates. Dale hailed from an oilfield dynasty—his father started a new drilling company in Calgary around that time, a company I would eventually work for in North Dakota. Dale was the kind of guy who believed in working hard and playing much harder. He was obsessed with speed. I vividly recall him demonstrating the terrifying acceleration of his new drag-racing car. He proudly bragged about how quickly it could hit 100 mph—a fact he unfortunately proved by discovering how quickly it could also hit the curb at the end of his street. The repair bill for the front end and realignment must have been astronomical, but the memory remains priceless.

In 1987, Dale showed up in Texas needing a job. I recommended him to Space Master in Houston, where I was working, and he quickly became one of our top salespeople. The only hitch? His work permit expired. Like many people who enjoy hitting curbs at triple-digit speeds, paperwork wasn't his strong suit. The issue came to a head when he went home to Calgary to introduce his fiancée to his family and was subsequently denied re-entry into the US by Immigration. It took months for him to get married to his American bride in Calgary and apply for a marriage-based entry. Space Master, sensing his unique blend of sales talent and bureaucratic incompetence, held the position open. Unfortunately, the marriage didn't stick, and for a period, he ended up crashing with Sherry and me.

Then there was David Tedesco, a man whose talents stretched from political discussions (which we both loved) to musical virtuosity; he could seemingly play every instrument he picked up. His knowledge of history was encyclopedic. We traveled Italy together during the 2006 Winter Olympics, sharing a taste for fine red wine, cheese, and chocolate. More importantly, he became my financial advisor and taught me crucial, adult lessons about debt, investing, and the cold hard mathematics of business.

David was a man who understood leverage. When our business needed a large term insurance policy to secure essential working capital from the bank, David looked at my lifestyle and stated, in clear and unequivocal terms, that I had two weeks to lose eight pounds or the policy—and the loan—was dead. I accomplished the task, fully aware that the failure to do so meant the business simply couldn't grow. David made me face the consequences of my own existence.

David, who had recently started exercising, lost weight, and gone back to school for his MBA, died last year after a brief and cruel struggle with a brain tumor. The first sign of the cancer's insidious presence was going to work and not remembering where his own office was. He was a brilliant, grounded force of nature, and I miss his political debates, his history lessons, and his unflinching financial honesty. He proved that sometimes, the greatest friend is the one who forces you to be better.

Chapter 44. Politics: From Free Goodies to the Genius of 'BISK'

Politics, I’ve discovered, is where good intentions go to die, usually strangled by bureaucracy or buried under the sheer weight of a national debt visualized in minivans. One need only look at the cultural landscape to sense the long, gentle cultural slide: a national consensus that has decided things like human life, marriage, and parental authority are charmingly antiquated ideas that needed replacement. Our Founders, bless their imperfect hearts, at least acknowledged their reliance on something larger than themselves. We, apparently, do not.

My own political education began with a flash of youthful, selfish brilliance. The moment Pierre Trudeau and the Canadian Liberal Party lowered the voting age to 18 and promised to take from the rich to give to the poor, I was all in. As a young man with a burgeoning family and a thin wallet, "take from the rich" was all the platform I needed to hear. I voted Liberal, believing I had secured a lifetime supply of government-issued happiness.

I discovered almost immediately that nothing is, in fact, free. Trudeau’s "goodies" were simply a down payment on a massive debt of regulation and excessive taxation. Suddenly, I found myself unemployed and staring down a mortgage I couldn't pay. This painful experience taught me the first great lesson of governance: freebies are not charity; they are entitlement anchors. Government cannot successfully bear the weight of those it claims to lift up; it merely creates dependency. You can only truly help someone by offering a stable hand from higher ground, not by lying down in the mud and carrying their burden. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to the water, but if it's expecting the Government to pay a professional team to administer the water via an artisanal copper straw, it’s not going to drink.

After becoming an American citizen in 1993, I decided to give back to my new country by running for city council in Highland Village, Texas. This was immediately made easier when my opponent, at the televised candidates forum, was hilariously accused of being a "Peeping Tom." That’s the kind of electoral head start money can't buy. Naturally, I won in a landslide, so confidently that I spent election day fishing with a vendor friend, Gene Hammond, down at Port Aransas.

My first council meeting demonstrated the difference between simple solutions and government processes. Residents complained that children had to walk on the roadway near McAuliffe Elementary due to a missing sidewalk block. I quickly determined the cost was a whopping $3,000. I stuck up my hand and moved to spend the money and start the construction. The Mayor and City Manager shared a knowing, pitying smile before patiently walking me through the bureaucratic marathon that would be required. It took a full year to construct a thirty-foot sidewalk.

After two years, and with my son Luke on the way, I realized my time was better spent supporting candidates who understood that sometimes, you have to be clever to bypass the system. Four council members needed replacing, primarily because they voted against selling advertising space to local merchants at the ballpark—a decision that was financially daft.

The candidates I supported were Fred Busche, Bill Irwin, Jim Sloan, and Gary Kloepper. I realized their last initials spelled BISK, a stroke of marketing genius. I ordered countless signs saying only "BISK" and blanketed the town weeks before the election. The resulting confusion was magnificent. People talked about nothing else. Then, on the day before the election, I unveiled the key: new signs revealing the candidates' full names. We followed up with an organized tent campaign at City Hall on election day, and our landslide victory proved that the easiest name to remember wins.

Later, while working for MPA Modular in Arlington, we won the contract to construct a relocatable security building for the entrance gates of the White House. The delivery had to be precisely timed for when President Clinton was out of the residence—a testament to the power of a finely calibrated Presidential schedule. I became friends with the Secret Service Supervisor, who gave me a personal tour of the White House. He pointed out a private room where, shall we say, certain recreational activities had taken place. When I asked him about respecting the President, he stated, quite clearly, that his job was to defend, not to respect. The same agent noted that the First Lady was less than cordial, sharing an amusing anecdote about her setting an unofficial—and apparently difficult to beat—record for four-letter words in a single sentence.

By 2014, my conservative leanings had solidified into a concrete pillar. I volunteered security at the State Republican Convention and later served as a delegate. Can you imagine 3,500 non-politicians in one giant hall, all praying out loud and in unison for the country? It was a truly moving experience.

What I'll never comprehend is the internal wiring of the modern progressive mind. It’s a baffling series of contradictions: that executing the unborn is fine, but executing a mass murderer is not. That climate predictions are more urgent than border security. That when an intoxicated driver kills someone, it's the driver's fault, but when a terrorist kills someone, it is the gun's fault. That government, not business, creates jobs. These are political paradoxes that seem to defy all logic, driven by a philosophy that dismisses our founding principles and assumes the wealthy are merely a giant piggy bank for the rest of society.

For example, why can’t we let new Social Security recipients, who may not need the benefit, take a one-time cash advance to fund a donor-assisted education trust for their grandchildren? It’s a way to turn a generational obligation into an enduring legacy.

I have my own blueprint for fixing things. We could have a representative for every 30,000 people, as originally intended, and have them convene Congress over the internet, forcing the lobbyists to rack up massive travel expenses to influence them. Term limits would be one four-year term, with 25% of the body replaced yearly. No one should enter Congress without owning a business or holding an economics degree.

Then we get to the debt, the ultimate manifestation of financial irresponsibility. President Obama’s eight years of policies, golf, white-glove parties, and extensive taxpayer-funded travel, while displaying an open disdain for conservatives and small business, left us in deep economic danger. His focus, in my opinion, was on political gain and power, not fiscal stability.

Just to put the $19+ Trillion national debt in perspective: if you could fill a large briefcase with $100 bills, it would contain $1 Million. If you filled a minivan with those $1 million briefcases, you would have $1 Billion. To reach the current national debt, you would need to fill nineteen football fields with those minivans, each packed with a billion dollars in cold, hard cash. Most of that debt was accrued in those eight years. That, more than any cultural issue, is the true anchor on our society. It’s a finish line we are sprinting toward, and it's the wrong one.

Chapter 45. My Parents: Whiskey, Shotguns, and the Perils of Being a Grandma

Parenting is essentially a performance art where the audience (your children) absorbs every accidental line and off-key note. We often hear our own words repeated back to us and realize, with a sinking horror, that we should have invested more in an external audio filtering system. I still vividly recall my genuinely happy father singing, "I don't care if the sun don't shine, I get my loving in the evening time." I was clearly very young, because my main confusion was why he was so worried about the weather.

Dad was the quintessential mid-century man: always building, always volunteering. He was a Boy Scoutmaster who believed in making things himself, right down to the leather bag I still own, complete with his stenciled initials. Our house on 7th Street in Calgary was marked by his sheer ambition, including a four-foot concrete retaining wall he built in the backyard, backfilled with enough dirt to level a small mountain. I still remember riding in the back of his National Supply Company car, clinging to a massive 7 7/8" drill bit, as he made an emergency delivery to a drilling rig—the kind of corporate travel one simply doesn't experience anymore.

On one of these field trips, he gave me my first lesson in marksmanship with a .22 caliber rifle. A seagull flew by in the distance, and Dad, trying to demonstrate the trajectory of a shotgun (and certainly not expecting a hit), aimed high. To his absolute horror, he dropped the bird. The subsequent lecture on the illegality of shooting seagulls was instantly more effective than any sermon on responsibility.

When I misbehaved, Dad offered a choice: the brief, sharp pain of his belt, or the psychological torment of a 'time out' in my room. I always chose the belt. It was the preferred path for a young man who understood short-term suffering for long-term emotional stability.

Dad was instrumental in the practicalities of my early life, helping me secure my first car and my first "real" job. He was also the first person I told when Judy and I realized, at the tender age of 18, that we were expecting.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Get married?" I suggested, offering the only available response in 1960s Calgary.

"That is correct," he affirmed. The crisis was solved within minutes. I can still hear him addressing my mother, who was in bed: "Doreen, you're going to be a Grandma." He then called the pastor, and we were scheduled to be married that very weekend at Kingsland Baptist Church. Jennifer was born six months later, right on time for the grand scheme of things.

Mom, meanwhile, was the anchor of safety. She was always home when we were young, a constant presence that shielded me from the apparent chaos of the outside world. I remember coming home from school for lunch when I was 13, and her wide-eyed, trembling announcement that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. That event cemented my childhood fear of the United States—a place where the 1960s seemed to unleash a perpetual onslaught of tornadoes, hurricanes, campus shootings, nuclear threats, and general mayhem. Calgary, with its familiar kitchen and steady parents, felt like the only safe place on earth.

Mom was fierce when necessary. When a judge decided I came in second place in the school high-jump championship (a ribbon I was perfectly happy with), she immediately challenged the official, demonstrating a passion for my athletic (and moral) victory that I hadn’t even realized I possessed. However, that fierce spirit made my brother Kim’s death in a car-train collision utterly devastating for her; the grief was a mountain she climbed for a long, long time.

Mom, the youngest child of a strict English couple, suffered through her own rigorous upbringing. Visiting Grandpa and Grandma Upton in Victoria, B.C., meant adhering to the ancient British rule: children were to be seen and not heard. Grandpa, wearing an apron, would silently carve the roast beef, and the meal was consumed in respectful, near-total silence. It was less a dinner and more a meditative exercise in anxiety.

When I was in high school, Mom started working and bought a used 1959 pink and white Ford Station Wagon—a glorious land yacht perfect for teenage exploits. After meeting Judy, I did the only logical thing a new boyfriend could do: I carved our initials into the dashboard. Mom was, predictably, unimpressed. But she was also a soft touch, letting me load up about ten friends to go to the drive-in theater.

One night, after a drive-in trip, she was driving me home when an empty whiskey bottle rolled out from beneath her seat.

"Mom," I asked, with all the innocence I could muster, "did you take up drinking?"

I received the look. The look that transcends language, culture, and time. The "I am your mother and you are testing my patience with your ridiculous innuendo" look. The subject was dropped immediately.

Mealtime was scheduled chaos, complete with the obligatory grace ("God is great, God is good..."). I despised washing or drying dishes, so I became a master negotiator, trading my duties for the far superior roles of setting or clearing the table. Mom, bless her, had the schedule posted but didn't care who did what, as long as the entire system didn’t collapse.

Dad passed away from prostate cancer at 67. Mom left Houston a few years later and moved to Nanaimo, B.C., near my brother Peter. At the time of this writing, she has just celebrated her 89th birthday. I have no medical explanation for this longevity, given her complete disregard for healthy food or exercise. Dad, the model citizen who exercised regularly and watched his health, died decades younger. I can only conclude that Dad swam against the gene pool, and Mom, wisely, simply floated in it. I do miss him.

Chapter 46. Marriage: A Study in Irreconcilable Change

It’s an eternal truth, often learned the hard way: a woman has the final word in any argument. Anything a man says after that is not a comment, but merely the enthusiastic beginning of a new argument. The universe of matrimonial worry follows similar rules: a woman worries about the future until she secures a husband; a man never worries about the future until he secures a wife. The core conflict, however, is beautifully simple: a woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he won't. A man marries a woman expecting she won't change, but she will.

The journey often begins with the blissful ignorance of young love, which is when "no one is perfect until you fall in love with them." I was sixteen when I first laid eyes on Judy Sundell at Henry Wise Wood High School. She and her friend Margo Williams held court at the K Restaurant, and Margo, realizing I was a moth drawn to Judy’s flame, was quick to facilitate our doomed-to-be-brief romance.

Judy lived in the apartments across the street. Her mother, Margaret, was warm and welcoming. Her father, Gus, was less so—he had the unique parental skill of disappearing into his bedroom the exact moment I arrived, which saved us both the awkwardness of conversation. Except for one brief, dramatic period where we were "on the outs" (and she dated another fellow, an event I have long since deleted from my personal archives), we were inseparable.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we found ourselves in the Southwood Library, using books not for pleasure but for desperately trying to figure out the implications of a surprise pregnancy. By age twenty-three, we had Jennifer, Chris, and Tim. Judy was a quiet, bookish introvert who didn't learn to drive until she was thirty. I, conversely, was working three jobs and playing or coaching hockey the rest of the time. Our shared interests were strictly limited to the children; our Venn diagram of hobbies was two separate circles.

The end was a slow, geographic fade. When I moved from North Dakota to Montana for a job with Spartan Drilling, Jennifer and Tim came with me. Judy and Chris stayed behind in Stony Plain. Our house went into foreclosure, and rather than join us, she moved in with a friend and took a job at a hotel bar. I tried to bridge the gap by buying her a new Volkswagen Station Wagon, hoping a new set of wheels would drive her back to Montana and her family. She eventually came, only to find I was being transferred to the chaotic concrete sprawl of Houston. Shortly after we moved, she found a connection with a local bartender and we divorced.

I was awarded custody, which immediately introduced me to the humbling reality of solo fatherhood. Between poor parenting skills, working for a failing oil patch employer, and dealing with depressed teenagers, life was a masterclass in survival. I did, however, achieve mastery in one specific area of domestic arts: I could prepare a massive variety of Hamburger Helper meals.

It was against this culinary and emotional backdrop (1984) that the universe finally smiled on me. I met Sherry Stewart at Houston's, a restaurant on Gessner. I fell in love immediately—a fact I believe she suspected, given her full-time immersion in Psychology studies at the University of Houston. She lived near downtown, and with her studies and my children, time together was a luxury. My solution was to buy her an Apple 2e computer, apparently under the impression that we could "spend more time together" watching her calculate regression analyses.

We finally managed to schedule a wedding, which took place in a Methodist Church on June 6th, 1987—D-Day. Just as the service began, and perhaps as a highly symbolic cleansing of our past lives, the heavens opened and it rained with a violent, hard noise. The noise stopped the exact moment we were pronounced man and wife. We took my company-paid trip to Bermuda for a honeymoon, adding on a few days, only to return home and find our rented house had been ram-sacked. Sherry lost all her jewelry, including her class rings, a robbery that was perhaps the final sacrificial offering to the Gods of Bad Luck.

Life, however, was determined to improve. We bought a beautiful home in Inverness Forest north of Houston, only to have it flood twice. This inconvenience, fortunately, allowed me to transfer to the Space Master Dallas Branch just after our daughter Marissa was born in 1989.

Our new town, Highland Village, Texas, was exactly where we needed to be. Luke was born in 1993, and we quickly settled into the Trietsch Memorial United Methodist Church in Flower Mound. We've been in the same Sunday School class since 1990, demonstrating a level of commitment and stability I couldn't have imagined in my younger, whiskey-bottle-under-the-seat days. After waiting a year for the perfect spot, we moved about half a mile (in 1999) to a two-story home on Remington Terrace, buying it the very day it was listed. It backs up to a green belt and is at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was a long wait, but God is good—especially when you are patient enough to let him open the door to a perfect home addition, complete with a pool and a new game room.

Chapter 47. Children: The Vague Awareness of Short People Living in the House

"Having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world." This is true. It is also true that this moment is typically preceded by eight hours of frantic activity, three near-fatal sibling injuries, and the complete obliteration of the concept of personal space. In short, it’s the reward for surviving the day.

The parental information divide is real: a mother knows everything about her children—dentist appointments, secret fears, romantic entanglements, and the names of their imaginary friends. A father, by comparison, is generally and vaguely aware that there are some short people living in the house who occasionally need money or rides.

My education into fatherhood began in March 1970 when the nurse put Jennifer in my arms. At seven-and-a-half pounds, she was instantly a celebrity, being the first grandchild and great-grandchild in the family. My sister practically started a physical training regimen, pushing Jen to take her first step so she could stop pushing Dad's wheeled orange footrest around the living room. Her giggle was contagious, a sound that briefly masked the noise of my three jobs.

Christopher arrived twenty months later, an eight-and-a-half-pound anchor. We tried to get him a puppy for his birthday. When asked for a name, he offered "Bowser," demonstrating a concerning lack of imagination for a boy who would later study engineering. We gently negotiated the name down to "Goldie."

Timothy was the grand finale, arriving twenty-six months after Chris and clocking in at nine-and-a-half pounds. Judy clearly recognized the upward trend in baby weight (and the downward trend in available time) and immediately requested a decisive, medical end to our reproductive Olympic run. Tim, God bless him, was an outgoing, fearless soul who established the "taxation without representation" principle early: as a toddler, if you had food, he considered half of it to be his share. Other children learned quickly to either guard their cookies or simply avoid him altogether.

All three played hockey and enjoyed our camping trips, which were the only constant in a life defined by constant motion. We moved house, city, and province so often that the kids' childhoods resembled a permanent training montage. Looking back, the regret of that nomadic lifestyle centers on the difficulty they had forming long-term friendships—a consequence of always chasing the next paycheck.

The complexity of our family tree only grew. Jennifer and her husband Cephas now have five children: Kerry, Dominyc, Devonne, Devereaux, and Michaela. Tim and Renee have two: Connor and Chloe. I look at that roster and marvel at the efficiency.

With Sherry, we started anew. Marissa (seven pounds) arrived in 1989, and Lucas (close to eight pounds) followed in 1993. They were constant companions; Marissa did most of the talking, and Luke, thankfully, did most of the listening. Unlike their half-siblings, they enjoyed the stability of staying in the same community and attending the same schools their entire lives—a decision that has proven remarkably positive. Both were excellent students, with Marissa now chasing her Doctoral degree in Psychology (while somehow managing to care for her own two daughters, Delilah and Eloise) and Luke using his Mechanical Engineering degree with a firm in Irving.

The history analogy is perhaps too perfect. D-Day's lead airplane, filled with modern tech, lost for seventy years, only to be found in a weed-choked wrecker yard and started up. In many ways, that airplane is me. I was so busy as a young man earning a living, navigating life's sudden transfers, and trying to keep the fuselage intact that I forgot to "squeeze the juice" out of my relationship with my children. They went from toddlers to borrowing the car keys in what felt like one long, blurry evening.

Now, as a grandfather (and great-grandfather to ten, soon to be eleven, miracles), the past is found. I now have the time to patiently engage, to sit with Delilah after school for the sacred ritual of crackers and cheese. We then enter the repetitive, yet joyful, loop of her favorite kids' movies. She has mastered the profound theological truth of "God is bigger than the Boogie Man," and hearing her sing that Veggie Tale inspiration is far better than a paycheck.

Teaching her the taken-for-granted things—why the sky is blue, how a zipper works, or the correct way to fold laundry (okay, maybe not that one)—is fascinating. The simple joy of watching her succeed and accomplish helps to fill that void of my life as a young and often absent father. The second chance with these small miracles is proving to be the best chapter of all.

Chapter 48. Siblings: The Enduring Trauma of the Saturday Night Stocking

A sibling is that rare person who knows exactly how annoying you are, yet is contractually obligated to spend 90% of their childhood within three feet of you. We were four children, each a perfectly unique blend of genetics and chaos. I was the first, born in Edmonton in December 1950. Kimberly (Kim) followed in Calgary in 1952. Peter arrived in 1954, and then, marking the end of the boy-heavy era, came Patricia (Patsy, now Tricia preferred) in April 1957, having the good sense to choose April Fool’s Day for her grand entrance. The joke, as it turned out, was on the rest of us.

Like most families of the day, we were closely knit, which is a polite way of saying we lacked the necessary square footage to avoid each other. We played board games, listened to the radio (which was basically the internet of the 1950s), and performed our designated household chores.

This is where the great gender divide manifested itself. As the two elder boys, Peter and I were forced to subscribe to a form of shared, often lukewarm, bathwater. Patsy, however, the sole female sovereign, received a fresh supply of hot water, all to herself. It was the first, most profound lesson in familial hierarchy.

But the true, shared psychological trauma of our childhood revolved around Saturday night grooming. For us boys, in preparation for Sunday church, Dad would take one of Mom's old nylon stockings, stretch it over our heads, and secure it to flatten our hair—a necessary step, he believed, to achieve a state of Sunday-morning piety. It was less a grooming technique and more a gentle form of cranial compression. Patsy, naturally, was exempt from this public humiliation, proving once again that she truly was born on April Fool's Day, and the fool was me.

Sadly, the closely-knit group was fractured when Kim died in a car-train wreck at the age of fifteen. The loss was a permanent shadow over the family, yet life, stubbornly, continued forward.

Patsy was the first to fly the coop, marrying young, divorcing shortly thereafter, and then marrying Kim Kindopp. They had Ashley (1983) and Jason (1984). Life took her to Penticton, B.C., where she raised her children before eventually moving back to Calgary with her now-adult kids. Peter, meanwhile, took a path of law and order, joining the RCMP and moving to Vancouver Island. He married Christine Lucas, had two sons, Brian (1981) and Kevin (1983), divorced, and then married Heather, with whom he had two more boys, Daniel (1999) and Stephen (2000). He now lives in Nanaimo, B.C.

We eventually scattered across the continent, trading shared bedrooms for separate zip codes, only to realize the family gravitational pull is stronger than any map. We now manage to get together as often as possible, often with our Mother, who also resides in Nanaimo. It’s a wonderful kind of bookend: starting out sharing bathwater, and ending up sharing grand-parenting stories.

Chapter 49. Famous People: The Unpredictable Airport Ecosystem

The modern airport terminal is less a place of transportation and more a bizarre ecosystem where celebrities, politicians, and ordinary travelers are crammed together, all united by a shared fear of losing luggage. Over the years, this ecosystem has allowed me to cross paths with a surprisingly diverse group of famous people.

My proximity to athletic royalty, especially hockey players, is high—a predictable perk of life in Canada and my professional endeavors. I’ve met the greatest of the Great Ones, Wayne Gretzky, along with the legendary workhorses like Guy Carbonneau and Bob Gainey.

In fact, the closest quarters I’ve shared with fame have usually been in the friendly skies. There’s nothing quite like being strapped next to someone famous for several hours. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Bob Gainey on a flight to Calgary, and on another occasion, shared airspace with the famous Texas Rangers Catcher, Pudge Rodriguez. I can confirm that Pudge was, contrary to his fierce game-day demeanor, the absolute nicest person you could hope to chat with at 30,000 feet.

The airport truly is the great equalizer. I once met Troy Aikman during his rookie season. He was just another fresh-faced, six-foot-four-inch guy walking through the concourse, moments before he became the immovable star of Dallas football.

Moving from the grass field to the political fundraising circuit, the environment shifted but the caliber of celebrity didn't diminish. At a Republican fundraiser in Houston, I met Nolan Ryan, the Texas Express himself, who was gracious enough to sign a baseball for me. That’s the kind of autograph that feels like holding a piece of Texas history.

My political encounters extended to the intellectual and outspoken: I crossed paths with Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz at various events. It’s always fascinating to see these figures—who define the landscape of the news cycle—up close.

In retrospect, my celebrity encounters perfectly trace the arc of my life, moving from the frozen rinks of Canada to the sunny, politically charged state of Texas. You might not run into a movie star, but if you hang around long enough, you’re guaranteed to bump into a Hall-of-Famer or a Senator. Just remember to pack your pen.

Chapter 50. Jobs and Careers: The Unfolding Comedy of Capitalism

My first taste of employment was as a paperboy, which taught me a valuable lesson: a "payday" is simply the moment you transform your physical labor into the socially awkward task of demanding small sums of money from your neighbors. Responsibility, I learned quickly, is the fear of being short one paper and having to explain to a customer why their morning news is currently living with another family.

At sixteen, I upgraded to the high-octane excitement of the local Texaco station. For a grand total of $1.25 an hour, I became proficient at pumping gas, cleaning windows, and doing the mandatory dirty work, which invariably involved the triple indignity of cleaning the restrooms, checking the oil, and mopping every square inch of linoleum at closing. Predictably, my career at Texaco came to an abrupt end when I was fired for making an emergency battery boost trip in the wrecker while intoxicated. The universe, however, decreed that my talents were still needed, as I simply walked across the street to the Royalite Gas Station.

The pay was the same, but the company was better—younger friends rather than "old guys." We bordered the Sarcee Indian Reserve, where cash was scarce. It was common to be offered a spare tire or a car radio for enough gas to get home, or to watch someone carefully measure out twenty-seven cents worth of fuel, because that truly was the last of their funds.

Perhaps the most comical government mandate of the era involved vehicle safety. Since no one wore seat belts, children flying forward in a crash often hit the dashboard and were tragically injured by the protruding radio knobs. The government’s brilliant solution? Eliminate the radio knobs. Clearly, requiring people to buckle up was too complex, so we eliminated the most dangerous feature of the dashboard: listening to the radio.

The Banking Era: When Math Was a Weapon

From the smell of petrol and tire rubber, I made a sharp pivot to the stately environment of the Bank of Nova Scotia. This was a time before computers, where calculating interest was less a financial task and more an act of ancient ritual torture. We’d use an adding machine, punch in the daily account balance, pull a handle for every single day of the month, total the resulting paper tape, then take that figure, manually divide it by the number of days, multiply it by 365, multiply that by the annual interest rate, and finally divide it by twelve to get the monthly interest due. This was all done by hand, and then double-checked by a terrified accountant. It was a mathematical spectacle that made me realize boredom truly is the heaviest currency.

The only relief from this tedious arithmetic was the monthly Gun Test. We would meet on a Saturday, enter the bank vault, pile up old IBM cards, and fire the branch gun into the boxes. We were never allowed to actually carry the gun while transporting large amounts of cash—because priorities—but we certainly knew it worked when aimed at recycled punch cards in a concrete room.

My manager, proving that banking was the wild west, also ran a weekly poker game in the break room, and on occasion, employed me as a loss leader, giving me $50 to ensure I lost it all to our valued customers. This escalated into an official horse-betting enterprise, complete with telex tapes from a bank in Saskatchewan. On one fateful trip to the racetrack, after missing the first (non-winning) race due to a flat tire, I placed my entire stake on a powerful gray mare. I watched in horror as she rounded the final stretch, tripped, and fell. They loaded the poor creature into a van on the track, and the next sound we heard was the merciful final gunshot. That, appropriately, was the end of my career as a professional bank-sponsored gambler.

Corporate Climb and North Dakota Jokes

After a detour as the "snitch" who audited pricing employees at Corbett's Wholesale (a job that paid nothing in money and everything in social debt), I landed at Atco Structures. The $350 a month salary in 1970 felt huge until inflation turned it into a cruel joke, forcing me to transfer departments and take a part-time gas station job again. The company was full of opportunity, led by a wizened, ancient 27-year-old president, and our profit margins were "gigantic."

After learning the business from travel trailers to Arctic camps, I parlayed my product knowledge into sales—the only logical step after working with a telex-based gambling ring is professional marketing. I left Atco to help start A-1 Camp Service, grew it quickly, only to have the Canadian government nationalize the oil industry, essentially telling all our customers to go home. We packed up and moved to Bryan, Texas.

This led to my bizarre excursion into the thriving metropolis of Tioga, North Dakota, as the Williston Basin Contracts Manager for Spartan Drilling. I moved up the ranks to General Manager, transferring to Sidney, Montana, which was a visual improvement, considering the state tree of North Dakota is, apparently, a telephone pole. Tioga, meanwhile, boasted two restaurants—one for breakfast/lunch, one for supper—staffed by the same two waitresses, but crucially, at least five bars.

The Redemption Arc and the Art of Revenge

After a stint in Houston and an ill-timed venture into real estate, I finally found the perfect job via the newspaper—proof that divine intervention works through classified ads. Doug Alexander, the Senior VP of Space Master Buildings, hired me on the spot. I showed up the following Monday to an office with no furniture and a receptionist who had never heard of me. A few months later, the plan made sense: Doug fired the other salesperson, and I was promoted to Branch Manager. The lesson? Chaos is just a ladder.

Space Master was a rocket ship. I flew around the world for top-performer awards (Bermuda, Acapulco), built a great team, and was eventually promoted to VP/GM of the Southwest Region. After two floods at home, however, I moved to Dallas.

My final act in the modular building industry was the most satisfying. After being royally shafted by MPA Modular over promised ownership papers, and sensing the quiet sale of Space Master, I landed a million-dollar contract with Conoco. The new owner of Space Master, Williams Scotsman (our biggest competitor), promptly terminated my employment with seven days' pay.

My revenge was beautiful and immediate. When my Conoco buyer called, I informed him I had started Nortex Modular Space and offered my services to him as Conoco’s representative to ensure Williams Scotsman performed to standard. My competitor, backed into a corner by their own greed, called back and, to avoid Conoco’s wrath, offered to hire Nortex to manage their own project for $2,000 a week plus expenses. My first sale at Nortex was to the company that had just fired me. The second sale was terminating a Williams Scotsman lease and selling the customer a bigger, better building. That’s the kind of poetic justice that makes the entire career struggle worthwhile.

Nortex grew wildly for twelve successful years, even thriving during the 2008 downturn by focusing on quality and government contracts. Eventually, staring down my 60th birthday, I sold the business to Black Diamond Group of Calgary—a full-circle return to my Canadian roots, though the stock market eventually took a severe downturn. The final truth I learned: everything decays, all great civilizations disappear, and the only thing you take with you are the relationships.

My retirement plans were immediately derailed when my pastor asked me to take over as the Director of Operations for the church’s construction project. Six months became eighteen, and I learned that behind the velvet curtains of the church, people are people—human failure and high levels of caring exist in equal measure. Today, I focus on Marluc, LLC (named for Marissa and Lucas), our real estate investment company, and building a family retreat near Possum Kingdom, where the only thing I have to worry about is whether the new lake is deep enough for the trophy trout to spawn.

Chapter 51. Pets: The Companions Who Judge Your Life Choices

If jobs were chaotic, pets were the emotional anchors—or, in some cases, the four-legged tyrants who simply preferred a higher standard of living than we could provide.

What would life be without pets? Probably more predictable, which is exactly why my first pet, a majestic gray Persian named Betsy, ensured predictability was banished. Betsy operated under the belief that I was some kind of highly mobile sheep, and she was my devoted, low-to-the-ground herder. She followed me to school, running an elaborate stealth operation beneath neighborhood hedges and trees, and would often be waiting, sitting politely outside the classroom doors when the final bell rang. She was my silent, fluffy stalker.

Betsy also introduced me to my first true panic. When she disappeared one evening, my worried search ended in the basement of a new home under construction. I found her, miraculously, but her fur was dangling from her back by a thread—a battle scar from some unknown conflict in the sub-flooring. She healed up, of course, becoming tough enough to take camping with us. This proved to be a mistake.

During one hasty packing attempt, we tried to hold Betsy while disassembling the tent. She bolted. My parents were ready to abandon the lost cause, but I stood my ground: I was staying until Betsy returned. My father, in a spectacular display of reluctant parental devotion, unpacked the entire campsite, drove home to work, and left my mother and me alone in the wilderness. Betsy, thankfully, returned to the campfire late that evening, proving that loyalty, like the return trip, is often delayed. She lived to be almost 20, a testament to the fact that nine lives are helpful when camping with amateurs.

Our next great family dog was Chris’s birthday Lab mix, Goldie. She was a quintessential "best friend" dog, all tail wags and boundless affection, and made the cross-continental journey with us from Spruce Grove to Montana and finally to Houston. Her life ended sadly when she escaped our yard in her old age and poor health, shortly after we’d moved into a temporary townhouse following a flood. I’m convinced she was simply trying to navigate her way back to the original house, utterly confused by the temporary housing situation.

Then came Mandy, a Lab mix we rescued, who came with a severe distrust of men due to prior abuse. When we first brought her home, she ran straight to the farthest corner of the yard and cowered. It took years for her to trust me enough to approach when called, but she was a steadfast, loving companion to Marissa and Luke. She also formed a deep, cross-species bond with our tabbycat, Zerbert.

This duo was tested when we moved less than a mile away to a new home in Highland Village. Zerbert, having scoped out the options, disappeared only to be adopted by a neighbor. Why? Apparently, the food was better. Zerbert proved that sometimes, a cat will abandon years of loyalty for a superior kibble. Mandy, who never left, eventually succumbed to old age, losing the use of her legs—one of the hardest goodbyes in pet ownership.

Our pool, meanwhile, seemed to hold a tragic fascination for our smaller, less aquatic friends. After Sherry’s toy poodle, Bijou, passed of old age, I brought home a new poodle named Penny. She was cute, the kids adored her, but she tragically drowned in the pool in a sudden accident. The pool claimed another victim in Ashley, a sweet Dachshund mix we adopted after Sherry’s parents passed. It was a terrible coincidence that made that backyard a source of both summer joy and profound sadness.

Today, the household is managed by Toby, a Beagle with some "issues" (he must be penned when guests arrive, presumably to protect them from excessive Beagle enthusiasm), and Bogy, a large male cat. They are now well-behaved senior citizens, proving that given enough time and patience, even the most chaotic pets settle down and simply begin to judge you silently from the furniture.

Chapter 52. Friends: The Supporting Cast of a Well-Lived Life

If a career is a ladder, friendship is the safety net that occasionally pours you a drink and tells you to try a backflip. Over the years, I’ve been blessed with a diverse and highly entertaining supporting cast.

My childhood friendships started with a simple truth: proximity equals destiny. There was Cameron Moore, who lived a few houses down and, by the virtue of being eleven years old and Mormon, became my primary, unsolicited theological instructor. I learned all about the life a Mormon family enjoyed, simply by spending time with him. It was a wonderful, educational experience, proving that sometimes, the best religious education is just neighborhood osmosis.

Then there was Danny Byrne, who was Irish Catholic and my dedicated after-school chess opponent, right after I finished my paper route. Danny holds a special place in my history as the catalyst for my first truly epic inebriation. When his parents left him home alone for two weeks while they traveled to Ireland, the resulting significant, and entirely unintentional, depletion of their homemade wine stock resulted in my fifteen-year-old self experiencing the worst kind of hangover. Years later, Danny drove all the way from Calgary to Houston for my wedding to Sherry, a clear sign that a friend who has helped you survive your own youthful idiocy is a friend for life.

I have Margo Williams to thank for the introduction to my wife, Judy. Margo was Judy’s best friend and a guaranteed good time. She stuttered, always had high drama with boyfriends and parents, and was, shall we say, a necessary chaotic element in the social scene. Hanging out with Margo was like watching a captivating, slightly stressful reality show where the star occasionally paused for dramatic effect. It was never, ever boring.

The Inescapable Sidekick and The Man Who Died

Life has a way of pairing you with certain people, and for me, that person was Dale Gates. Though younger, our paths became inextricably linked in the most hilariously co-dependent business fashion. We met in Spruce Grove, and from there, Dale became my constant, inescapable business companion. He was my best man when I married Sherry, and I was his best man when he married his wife. Their trust in me clearly ran deep, as it was his father, President of Spartan Drilling, who hired me on Dale's reference to become the General Manager of the North Dakota operation. Later, I returned the favor by referring Dale to Space Master Buildings. He is the ultimate reference—a true friend and a reminder that no matter how many times you change jobs, there’s always a Gates waiting for you in the next office.

Then there’s Dale Wheeler, a construction contractor for Space Master in Houston, who took "recovering" to a spiritual level. Dale was a recovering addict who, during a medical crisis, actually died on a hospital stretcher. He was revived, but not before he recalled vivid memories of waking up in heaven and being told, unequivocally, that he was being sent back to fulfill a higher purpose. From that day on, he followed God’s word and became a Prison Minister. I learned a ton about construction from him, but more importantly, he taught me that some people literally have to visit the afterlife before they settle on a career path.

The Business of Brotherhood

Today, my friendships are a healthy mix of shared history, adrenaline, and business—often all at once. Randy Guttery, Dave Meyer, and Dave Casey are my hockey buddies. Our bond is cemented by a shared willingness to travel vast distances across Canada and America to watch other people exert themselves on ice, be it the Dallas Stars, the NCAA Frozen Four, or the Olympics. True friendship, after all, is a shared commitment to winter travel.

In a perfect display of friendship maturing into tax-deductible fellowship, many of my strongest relationships are with former business partners, including David Hammer and Jay and Bettye Rodgers. We’re the founders of a nonprofit mentoring and training organization called Biz Owners Ed. We proved that friends can navigate financial disclosures, board meetings, and the sheer volume of nonprofit paperwork without killing each other.

And finally, my friends at the Rotary Club, who gather weekly to support the community (and each other's businesses). Steve Cox, the current President, is a true Christian Business Friend who demonstrated that friendship is most valuable when it’s transactional in the best possible way: he was the one who helped me sell our commercial property and acquire the ranch property. Because what is friendship, if not a trustworthy connection to someone who knows how to close a deal on 188 acres? It is the relationships that truly matter, and occasionally, they even result in excellent real estate transactions.

Chapter 53. Lake Godstone: When a Hobby Becomes an Epic Construction Project

In early 2016, I decided I needed a ranch. My son-in-law Josh liked hunting, so the mission began: find a simple piece of land, preferably within an hour or two of Highland Village, with some kind of existing cabin. A place where the family—especially the extended, perpetually-in-need-of-a-getaway family—could gather. We also wanted it to be a long-term investment under our LLC, Marluc. Simple, right?

We started the search, and for a few months, it was all small disappointments. Our friends, the residential real estate agents Lisa Healy and Charlotte Wilcox, even found a beautiful, small, modern home with a lake nearby. It was lovely. It was also completely useless for hunting. It was a gem, but we were looking for granite.

Then, in April 2016, my commercial real estate guru, Steve Cox, unearthed the real prize: 188 acres of raw potential between Jacksboro and Possum Kingdom, about 100 miles away. It had just been listed and included the magical word: barnaminium—a sturdy metal building with a two-bedroom apartment, garage, and covered parking. A place to sleep! The owners were clearly sensible people.

Steve wisely informed me that this hot listing had two more viewing appointments scheduled for the very next day. This, of course, necessitated an immediate, full-price, cash offer. Because when you find your destiny, you don't wait for a bidding war. The sellers accepted, throwing in a near-new tractor, complete with implements, and the apartment furniture. The investment goal was met, and the need for a place to sleep was covered, complete with heavy machinery. We were in business.

The barnaminium was impressively simple and durable. Upon meeting the contractor, Duane Norvill of Jacksboro, my perfectly reasonable plan immediately escalated. Instead of enjoying the barnaminium as-is, I found myself signing a cost-plus contract for a new two-story Lodge to be built on a pad cut directly into the massive limestone rock wall on the south side. And because a ranch needs water, we decided on a new 1-to-2-acre fishing pond off the north side of the future lodge porch, right where a dense forest and an annoyingly swift creek currently existed.

My May 2016 pilgrimage with Duane—working through the thicket and poison ivy, in a heavy rain, down to where the creek became a full-on river—was less a scouting mission and more a religious experience. We carefully placed a painted steel stake five feet above the river, marking the desired foundation pad. That little stake held the future of 188 acres.

Enter Wade Lake and his bulldozer in August 2016. What began as a plan for a simple pond quickly succumbed to the glorious disease known as Scale Creep. Over the next eight months, Wade and his family convinced me to enlarge and deepen that “pond” into a 40-foot-deep Lake. They discovered a bed of perfect dam clay and then, even better, blue shale clay for the spillway and lake bottom. It was as if the earth itself was begging us to build a super-structure dam.

I became obsessed with building the best bass lake possible. I consulted experts and eventually trucked in some 15,000 fingerlings—largemouth bass, channel catfish, redear, bluegill, and fathead minnows—from an Arkansas supplier. It was an exciting, if slightly bizarre, day in March 2017 when a truck filled with tiny fish arrived. By November, those three-inch bass were thirteen inches long. The catfish went from five to eighteen inches. Apparently, our new lake was a fish-growth hormone laboratory.

Naming the body of water proved trickier than building the dam. After several failed attempts, my youngest daughter, Marissa, asked me to recall where my grandfather Stephen was born. “Godstone, England,” I replied. She just stared at me until the lights went on. And thus, Lake Godstone was christened—a name that sounds like divine intervention but was actually the result of an exhausted conversation with my kids.

While Wade was building the lake, dam, and bludgeoning new trails into the perimeter, Duane and his crew were transforming that single, five-foot-high stake into a fortress. Standing on the newly constructed second floor, looking out through the skeletal steel structure at the gaping hole that was soon to be a lake, I realized the view wasn't long enough. Duane, completely unfazed by my last-minute vision, suggested a 20-foot dormer. The rest, as they say, is expensive history.

Other elements were simply "nudged in the night" by my maker. I decided the Lodge needed to be much more than a home; it needed to be a survival bunker. The final result: a giant steel storm shelter that happens to be highly insulated with foam (like a giant fridge) and protected by motorized steel shutters. The solar tube lighting, essentials power panel, and remote A/C control all ensure that should the world end, we’ll be safe, comfortable, and able to make coffee. The greenhouse, complete with an aquaponics garden, was a natural—God gave the vision, and I called Josh's friend Michael Rosenberger to figure out the plumbing.

The ranch has also been granted a wildlife tax exemption, which means we now get to actively manage the balance of life and death, encouraging the quail and deer while controlling the bobcats and coyotes. Most importantly, we eliminated the feral hog population by building a hog fence around the entire perimeter, ensuring our investment portfolio is safe from invasive swine.

Our family Thanksgiving retreat of 2017 ncluded dedicating Lake Godstone. I planned to toss my collection of lifetime coins and small rocks into the lake to commemorate the event. This small gesture was met with universal opposition, led by Sherry (the expert hoarder of family memories) and strongly seconded by three-year-old Delilah. When they vehemently demanded I keep my silly rocks, I replied that I would do what I was led to do and that Delilah could scuba dive when she was older to retrieve them.

After a minute of negotiating, she simply asked, "Can I help you throw them in?”

A few years later Ric and Susan Tolhurst moved on to our street and when Ric found that I had room at the Lake for his beer making equipment (his garage was to small) we immediately became best friends and from that time forward Ric became the "leader of the pack" in terms of assisting with the many chores required by the rapid growth of our facilities. His friendship and generosity is greatly cherished.

And there it is. The ranch, the lake, the lodge—it was all intended to be. While I sometimes claim credit for the blood, sweat, and limestone dust, I realize I was simply the man in the arena—the slightly neurotic project manager following a plan that was always bigger than I was. As Teddy Roosevelt said: "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena... who does actually try to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion and spends himself in a worthy cause."

And in this case, the worthy cause resulted in an awesome fishing lake, a wildlife retreat,  and a granddaughter who now has a vested interest in learning to scuba dive.

Chapter 54. The Entrepreneurial Dilemma: Why Retirement is Just a Pivot to a Harder Job

After spending a year immersed in the "Master Mind" trading rooms, learning to outwit the institutional predators that stalk the stock market—a process that felt less like education and more like joining a secret society dedicated to understanding global panic—I walked away with far more than a certificate. I walked away with an inconvenient truth.

That truth is simple: if you are a builder, a doer, a creator, or a relentless tinkerer, the phrase "uninvested cash" doesn’t just apply to your bank account. It applies to your free time, your physical energy, and, most terrifyingly, your brain cells. That cash freed me from the need to work, but it failed to free me from the compulsion to work.

I quickly discovered that retirement, as defined by glossy travel brochures and people who only talk about their golf game, is not a destination. For the entrepreneur, it’s a terrifying, empty field. It turns out that after decades of operating at the intersection of "Paid For" and "Good At," the sudden removal of the "Paid For" variable leaves a vacuum the size of a Texas ranch.

My twelve months in the trading room weren't just about financial literacy; they were about optimizing my inability to relax.

Why did I dedicate a year to mastering futures and options? Was it strictly to grow the capital? Of course not. It was because the market offered the ultimate intellectual obstacle course—a 24-hour global, zero-sum game powered by human greed and terror, where the rules change every time someone sneezes in Singapore. It was complex, demanding, and required the absolute devotion of that logical, protective side I talked about in the last chapter. It was, in short, a marvelous way to occupy a brain that would otherwise be wondering if the fence needed painting.

I learned that the highest state of human endeavor, the coveted 'Mission' at the center of the Ikigai diagram (Love + World Needs), is not a passive pursuit. You don't stumble upon it during a nap. You work toward it.

The real challenge of that "uninvested cash" was figuring out how to funnel the restless energy that built Nortex into something that wouldn't simply start another corporation. It had to be a mission that felt like work, but whose primary dividend was joy, not revenue. It had to fill that crucial, missing quadrant: What the World Needs.

This explains why my search for a simple deer lease morphed into the construction of the Marluc Bella Vita Ranch—a project that involved digging a 40-foot-deep lake and building a steel-reinforced, solar-powered bunker on a bedrock cliff. I didn’t want a weekend retreat; I wanted a multi-year, multi-million dollar civil engineering problem. I didn't want a pond; I wanted a self-sustaining fish ecosystem. I didn't want a cabin; I wanted a fortress capable of surviving the zombie apocalypse while simultaneously running an aquaponics garden.

My 'Mission,' it turned out, was to use my skills to build a functional, beautiful gathering place for others, where the only currency accepted was goodwill and memorable moments.

The hardest part of being an entrepreneur isn’t the work itself; it’s the quiet realization that you are fundamentally unable to achieve the traditional definition of relaxation. You can't just 'stop.' You simply re-engineer your passion from chasing profits to chasing purpose. You pivot from managing employees to managing fish populations. You trade the stress of the quarterly report for the stress of a massive dam construction project.

It’s an inconvenient truth, but one I’ve accepted: My life’s work is simply to find the most challenging, most meaningful pivot possible, and then attack it with the same rigorous logic I apply to day trading, always ensuring that the protective side of my nature is building the dam strong enough to withstand the next metaphorical flood.

And that, fellow travelers, is why I spend my mornings fighting algorithms and my afternoons checking on the 18-inch catfish. Both are deeply serious work, but only one promises a reward that truly matters.

And that, fellow travelers, is why I spend my mornings fighting algorithms and my afternoons checking on the 18-inch catfish. Both are deeply serious work, but only one promises a reward that truly matters.

Chapter 55. Non-Profit Service: The Compulsion to Fix What Isn't Broken (Yet)

For certain personality types—the kind that thrive on a spreadsheet and panic at the sight of an idle weekend—retirement isn’t a vacation, it’s a terrifying lack of structure. The only cure is to immediately volunteer for several full-time, unpaid jobs. I call this the "Compulsion to Serve," which is really just an elaborate strategy to find new, exciting problems to solve.

My life of civic meddling began innocently enough. As a young man, I was a Boy Scout leader. Camping was fun back then, primarily because my spine was still pliable. You wouldn't catch me sleeping on the ground now; my back requires a credit rating of at least 750 just to consider reclining.

I quickly moved into minor hockey league coaching at age 23 in Calgary. My first volunteer gig involved accepting the "easy" assignment of building our three outdoor hockey rinks. I soon learned that creating a pristine, glass-smooth ice surface is less a sport and more a precise form of geo-engineering. The secret? You have to saturate the ground long before the frost line drops, starting the late-night flooding in early November. It was an art, a nightly vigil dedicated to creating the only perfect, frozen thing in the universe. I loved it.

Managing the Tiny Mite "C" team (ages 9 and 10) was also a pleasure; they hadn't learned enough competitive spirit to be truly miserable yet. But the real reward came in my second year with the traveling "B" team, where we conquered larger, wealthier communities. Nothing beats the excitement of a nine-year-old Captain Timmy Perizollo scoring the overtime winner. That single, exhilarating victory paid for approximately 5,000 hours of volunteer work.

The volunteering escalated quickly. I joined the Lions Club and ran a skate-a-thon—the brilliant fundraising scheme where a child skates 500 laps for a penny-per-lap sponsorship. That’s $5.00 raised in the rain, snow, or sub-zero chill. We didn't measure in Celsius back then; we measured in "will-to-live."

A transfer moved us to a new community, and after the elected Sports Director sadly died of a heart attack, the Community Association President asked if anyone was interested in the vacant, unpaid, evening-consuming position. I was the only fool with my hand in the air. This, I discovered, is how most volunteer leadership careers begin: in the silence after a rhetorical question.

After moving my family 13 times between 1970 and 1987, making and losing hundreds of friends in the process (a heavy price for constant relocation), I attempted to bring the frozen gospel of hockey to Sidney, Montana. I secured city land and ordered the boards. Then I waited for the volunteers. Not a single one materialized. I learned a profound lesson: Good deeds do not go unpunished, and they certainly don't go unassisted unless you get a firm commitment.

The Perils of Doing Good (and the Milk Police)

The Texas chapter of my volunteer career introduced me to the beautiful absurdity of the political world. After becoming an American citizen, I ran for Highland Village City Council in 1992 and won. I found myself battling the NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) who fiercely opposed a lakeside trail and parkland annexation. Apparently, the sight of a neighbor walking too close to a lake constitutes a threat to the Republic.

Then there was the war over the new performing arts venue. We had citizens so dedicated to opposition that they tried to frame the building as environmentally dangerous because it had once manufactured ball bearings. Yes, a building that was once used to make tiny metal spheres was deemed a clear and present danger to artistic expression. We overcame the propaganda and helped form "Studio B," where our kids and many others built self-confidence and launched careers.

But the true baptism by fire came when I joined the Board of Christian Community Action (CCA), focusing on housing construction for the poor. Building homes with volunteers and donated materials is a noble, maddening, and slow process. It’s hard to fire a volunteer worker who shows up late or endangers others, but when it's necessary, you learn a special kind of diplomacy I call, "Thanks so much for the effort, we’ve decided to let God take the wheel on this one."

The high-water mark of bureaucratic chaos came with federal regulation. Our founder, Tom Duffy, wisely refused federal funding because of the "strings." When a tenant filed a lawsuit under the Federal Housing Act (after deceiving us about his situation), Duffy immediately closed down an unoccupied home just to drop us below the federal housing unit threshold. His fury was magnificent; he preferred fighting poverty with local Texan grit and donations, not with Washington’s paperwork.

We tried one federal grant for a "kids eat free" summer program, and that's when I met the Milk Police. The strings demanded that we could no longer prepare food in a church kitchen, we had to measure and record the temperature of the milk to ensure compliance, and—worst of all—if a child only ate half their meal, the leftovers had to be immediately sent to the garbage. We were discouraged from religious teachings, but highly encouraged to enforce the mandatory waste of perfectly good food.

Despite the Sisyphean struggle against bureaucracy and bizarre local opposition, the mission always prevails. Whether it was fighting bed bugs at Dorothy Moore’s Reconciliation Outreach (which earned me the possibly inflated "Devine Servant" award), drafting expansion plans for the Children’s Advocacy Center, or finding donors for the Special Abilities adult day care, the core work is the same: applying logic to help those in need.

And now, I share a buffet lunch with 30 friends at the Lewisville Noon Rotary, where we talk community, eliminate polio, and pick up trash on FM407. The friendships and shared purpose of Rotary are the real dividend of all this unpaid labor. It proves that the compulsion to serve isn't just about fixing things; it’s about ensuring that the most valuable investment you make—your time—is fully utilized until the day you’re called away to the great audit in the sky.

Chapter 56. Persistence: The Glamorous Art of Refusing to Die in a Ditch

Calvin Coolidge—a man whose personality was so bland his nickname could have been "Refrigerator Setting"—once said, "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence... Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

And for once, an elected official was absolutely correct.

Let’s be honest: Persistence is not a sexy attribute. It doesn't get the same glamour as 'Talent' (which usually just results in a talented person who is broke) or 'Genius' (which, as the man noted, is often unrewarded, perhaps because geniuses spend too much time calculating the optimal trajectory of an ice cube and not enough time paying their electric bill). Education? The world is absolutely littered with highly credentialed derelicts who couldn't organize a sock drawer.

Persistence, however, is the blue-collar superhero of character traits. It’s the stubborn refusal to accept the universe’s initial, very firm 'No.' It is, in my estimation, the single most beneficial attribute one can possess, outranking even a solid 401(k) balance.

When you look at any major accomplishment—whether it’s building a business, constructing a massive, complicated ice rink in the dead of winter, or simply surviving a bad Tuesday—persistence wasn’t just a key element; it was the entire engine block. If you combine it with a decent education and life experience, you stop being merely productive and start becoming inevitable.

The View from the Hole

My commitment to this philosophy was stress-tested in the aftermath of divorce, unemployment, and the humiliating financial nosedive known as bankruptcy. Bankruptcy isn't just an unfortunate legal status; it's the universe telling you, loudly and clearly, that you have just unlocked "Hard Mode" in the game of life.

The tempting path is to curl up into the fetal position and let the hopelessness consume you. I found this to be profoundly inefficient. Instead of wasting time feeling sorry for myself (a highly unproductive and non-billable activity), I decided to treat emotional despair like a dusty piece of furniture: I shoved it into the back room of my being and slammed the door.

My entire awareness became dedicated to one thing: crawling out of the hole.

The strategy was simple: celebrate the minimum viable victory.

• The job I found? The salary was miniscule, but I celebrated landing it with more glee than if I had received a seven-figure bonus. Why? Because it was a forward step. It wasn’t park, and it certainly wasn’t reverse.
• When the car was repossessed, I didn't dwell on the injustice; I focused entirely on restoring my old wreck to running condition. When the engine turned over, I truly celebrated it as if I had just won the lottery.

It’s amazing how you can dramatically shorten the shelf life of undesirable and unproductive feelings by manufacturing these small, strategically important mini-achievements. It turns out that focusing your attention on fixing a carburetor or acing a job interview is a much cheaper and more effective form of therapy than anything else.

I am not suggesting that you ignore your feelings. You should absolutely acknowledge sadness and despair—give them a proper nod. But I firmly believe you can redirect that emotion with practice. Think of emotional management like driving a stick shift: you can express sadness and despair, but lingering there is unforgivable.

Moving from reverse to first gear is good. But I highly recommend moving immediately into overdrive—in a pre-planned, desirable direction, one tiny, persistent step at a time. After all, if you’re going to be stubborn, you might as well be stubborn about going forward.

Conclusion: The Final Reckoning and the Audit of the Soul

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve survived political battles over ball-bearing factories, dodged federal regulators who insist on measuring milk temperature, and witnessed the glamorous, yet back-breaking, birth of perfect outdoor hockey rinks.

The common thread weaving through all these adventures isn't luck, or genius, or even a degree. It's that unglamorous, stubborn attribute called Persistence. As we established, persistence is the ugly duckling of character traits; it’s not flashy, but it’s the only one that guarantees you won't end up an "educated derelict." Life hands you bankruptcy, unemployment, and repossessed cars, and the only appropriate response is to stubbornly put one foot in front of the other and celebrate every tiny, glorious step forward. It’s the ultimate high-ROI mental trade: swapping unproductive despair for productive, focused action.

The Vocation, the Mission, and the Great Balance

This brings us to the inevitable question of purpose. When I started this book, I presented a few questions, revolving around the great civil war we all fight internally:

1. Is logic and protection superior to creativity and compassion?
2. Should thoughts or feelings lead?

We acknowledge that the attributes are genetically assigned—you have your logical, protective types (often characterized as men/conservatives) and your creative, compassionate types (often characterized as women/liberals). Both are necessary, yet both have their flaws: the careless creative and the fearful protector. The key is to achieve that paramount balance where one doesn't cancel out the other.

To determine which should lead, you must first figure out what you’re even leading toward. You must find your center point—the ultimate job description—by analyzing the intersections of four simple concepts: what you Love doing, what you are Good at doing, what you can be Paid for doing, and what the World Needs you to do.

When you combine what you love and what you’re good at, you find Passion. When you combine skill and pay, you find a Profession. But the true sweet spot—the intersection of pay and need—is your Vocation. This is where you are actively being compensated to solve a problem the world actually has.

The grand prize, the Mission, arrives when you finally unite what you love with what the world needs. It is often a late-life discovery, a retirement gift where your unique skills and compensating experiences allow you to focus entirely on lifting others up. When you get to the point where your passion serves the collective, well, that’s when you’ve fully utilized your gifts. Teachers, for example, often land squarely in the Vocation category—but even the most credentialed professional who dreads the bell needs to realize they’re in the wrong lane. You can't serve well if you’re secretly wishing for an early weekend.

Travel, too, is a critical component of finding your place. As Anthony Bourdain wisely noted, travel leaves marks on you. Those indelible lessons—that kindness needs no translator, that you can get through hard things, and that beneath the cultural veneer, people are fundamentally the same—cement your global view.

So, here’s the final word, the summary judgment, the philosophy I’ve found to be the key to a successful, happy life: Always allow logic and protective behavior to rule your decisions, while creating ample space to ignite creativity and compassion for others. This combination ensures you stay safe while still building something meaningful.

Now that I’ve finished rambling about my own adventures and the universal quest for purpose, I challenge you. You are the only person who sees the world the way you do. You have your own collection of stories, your own stubborn acts of persistence, and your own milk-temperature regulations you’ve had to overcome.

How will you capture it for the world? What marks will you leave on your legacy? Better yet, what marks will the world leave on your documented story? The answer is out there, waiting for you to persistently find it. Get writing.

James Attrell