I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, where my dad worked in a florist’s shop, where he made $8,000 a year. My mother as an alcoholic and my father was a workaholic. I worked during the summers to make ends meet (as a lifeguard at a pool and at the same florist’s shop as my father). I went to college on a scholarship and held a job serving breakfast in one of the dorms to pay for books, clothes, and dates. Nobody handed me anything on a silver platter. During my last year of graduate school, I had a part-time teaching job that paid me $120 every two weeks. My rent was $79 a month, so that left $161 to cover all of my other expenses. Toward the end of the month, I ate what became known as my 21-cent dinners—a 10-cent can of tomato paste, garlic salt, and water over an 11-cent bag of spaghetti noodles. I know what it is like to be scraping by on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

After graduate school I started my career as a high school history teacher in an all-black school on the south side of Chicago. And then I met my mentor, W. Clement Stone. Stone was a self-made multimillionaire who hired me to work in his foundation, where he trained me in the fundamental success principles that I still operate from today. My job was to teach these same principles to others. Over the years, I have gone on from my time with Stone to interview hundreds of successful people—Olympic and professional athletes, celebrated entertainers, best-selling authors, business leaders, political leaders, successful entrepreneurs, and top salespeople. I have read literally thousands of books (I average one every two days), attended hundreds of seminars, and listened to thousands of hours of audio programs to uncover the universal principles for creating success and happiness. I then applied those principles to my own life. The ones that worked I have taught in my speeches, seminars, and workshops to well over one million people in all 50 US states…and in 20 countries around the world.

These principles and techniques have not only worked for me, but they have also helped hundreds of thousands of my students achieved breakthrough success in their careers, greater wealth in their finances, greater aliveness and joy in their relationships, and greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives. My students have started successful businesses, become self-made millionaires, achieve athletic stardom, received lucrative recording contracts, starred in movie and television roles, won political offices, had huge impact in their communities, written best-selling books, been named teacher of the year in their school districts, broken all the sales records in their companies, written award-winning screenplays, become presidents of their corporations, been recognized for their outstanding philanthropic contributions, created highly successful relationships, and raised unusually happy and successful children.