Power Of 100! PREFACE


I smelled smoke. I tasted my blood and could feel the skin falling off my face. I strained to move my mouth and realized that it was full of glass. Jagged, large chunks of my teeth were missing. I thought I was going to die.

Just moments earlier everything on my checklist for a perfect life seemed to be in place:

New car? Check.

A good credit score? Yes.

Brand-new house? Check that one, too.

A fulfilling job that paid the bills? Check.

A church we loved? Definitely.

Some pocket money? Check.

A happy wife? Check.

A healthy baby? Yes indeed.

Seriously? What more could I ask for?

As I drove down the Kentucky interstate with my wife, Rai (pronounced “Ray”), that wintry Friday evening in November, my heart was full, my mind was clear, and I was one happy dude. We were visiting our family for Thanksgiving and had woken up ridiculously early the following morning to hunt down those insane Black Friday sales, wandering all over Lexington to buy items for our very first family home. We had racked up deals and were scheduled to move into our house back in Atlanta in four days. After dinner, we hopped in the car to drive a couple of miles down the road for a movie date with my brother and his wife.

It seemed like the perfect day.

Blasting from the speakers of the car was a fast-paced gospel song that we loved. I hardly ever listened to gospel music, but this song was our jam! Rai and I were both laughing and screaming the lyrics like crazy. The hook of the song says, “The presence of the Lord is here,” and no one could tell me I didn’t sound exactly like the dude on the record as I sang along with him. When the track ended, I did what any respectable man does when his favorite song ends . . . I reached down and hit the repeat button, so we could sing along just one more time.

In that instant the entire trajectory of my life changed. Within a second of restarting the song, the tires of our sedan hit an invisible patch of black ice. At sixty-five miles per hour the car began to spin out of control right through the middle of the interstate. I kid you not, with every fiber of my heart, soul, hands, and feet I tried to will that car straight, but I just couldn’t do it.

Today, as I write these words, that stretch of road has a guardrail separating northbound and southbound traffic (maybe because of us), but back then it didn’t. Nothing but a steep ditch divided the flow of cars in each direction. Our black Mitsubishi was careening straight for the divide, completely out of control. When we hit the ditch, the impact was so jarring that it alone likely gave us both concussions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to stop my car, and according to eyewitness accounts I read in the police report, we barreled out of the ditch and went airborne (Dukes of Hazzard style) into oncoming traffic.

Seeing the headlights of a large pickup truck coming full steam toward her door, my poor wife screamed out, “We’re going to die!”

It was surreal.

Suddenly, it felt as if a bomb had gone off. I was confused. How could a bomb have gone off in the car? I wondered. It seemed like something had detonated directly before my eyes. Nothing else made any sense. It must have been a bomb!

In a matter of moments my perfect life exploded right in front of me.

Flesh was falling from my face.

I smelled smoke.

My mouth was full of blood and glass.

Jagged chunks of my teeth were missing.

I couldn’t understand everything that was happening. But did I know things were really bad? Absolutely.

Still conscious, I glanced over at my wife and realized that I could hardly see. I tried to ask her if she was okay, but so much was terribly wrong with me. In my mind I wanted to talk to her, but my mouth just refused to form the words.

As the shock of the impact wore off, I realized my glasses were gone, and it felt like something unthinkable had happened to my left eye. I wondered if it was even still there. My wife, barely conscious and apparently in a state of shock, just stared at me. She didn’t move or say a word.

That shook me.

Suddenly, I felt pain, unthinkable pain, covering my entire body and particularly all over my face. The desire to observe my surroundings faded away.

The excruciating pain took over.

Of course a bomb had not gone off in our car that night. Instead, we had collided with a large pickup truck. At the last moment, by no ingenuity of my own, I had been able to swerve just enough to keep the truck from killing my wife as she sat helplessly in the front seat next to me. However, the sheer force of the collision crushed our little car.

I was ejected through the windshield, not headfirst but face-first into the dense glass. To this day, I can’t even believe that’s possible. The instant my face crashed through the thick windshield, we hit a guardrail on the opposite side of the interstate. The blunt impact and miraculously perfect timing flung my body back into the car.

The car was now a mangled mess on the side of the road, my face felt like it was on fire, and I began to roar loud moans of pain. With each wail, I felt weaker and weaker. My whole body was wet. It was my blood.

A man came to my door. Yes! He’s going to save me, I thought. Instead, he simply looked at me and left. My heart sank. The roads were pretty empty that night, and I wondered if anyone else would come and help us. Oddly enough, there was no trace of that man in any of the reports from that evening. One of my “ultra-religious” friends insists that he was an angel of death who came to take me away. Whoever it was, he left me alone there and never returned.

About a minute later, the sweetest woman came to my car. I know for sure that she was human, but I swear she felt like an angel! She couldn’t open the door, but she told me that she was a nurse at the University of Kentucky hospital and that she wasn’t going to leave my side until an ambulance arrived. She said I was very badly injured and that she needed to wrap my mangled face up with a blanket she’d seen in the backseat to hopefully slow my bleeding. My leg felt like it had been crushed somehow, and everything from my shoulders up still seemed like it was on fire.

A police officer arrived and asked me my name and whom to contact in my family. I was able to mumble my name and give him my dear mother’s phone number. Then they cut me out of the car, carefully lifted me onto a stretcher, and put me in the ambulance. I missed my wife immediately. I began to believe that I might never see her again.

What happened in the back of that ambulance for the next fifteen minutes is the reason I’ve written this book and also why I want to help you squeeze value out of every precious moment of every day you have left on earth.

On TV, the paramedics are always so doggone calm and cool. Maybe paramedics are normally that way in real life, too, but the two guys in the back of that ambulance with me were nervous wrecks! I heard them talking about the broken bones in my face. One of the guys said my left leg appeared broken. They wondered aloud if I had a traumatic brain injury. I heard them nervously conferring about my heart rate slowing, and it seemed like I was slipping away.

Was I dying? I saw no white light. My heart was overcome with a heavy sadness. The pain disappeared.

I was only twenty-three years old.

I would never get to see my daughter, Kendi, grow up. She’d never know me. I loved her so much.

Rai had always told me that she wanted to travel the world, and I had hardly even taken her anywhere yet.

We had no money in our savings account.

I felt like a failure. I didn’t even get to tell them good-bye. I was sure that God had plans for my life that required me to live so far beyond that painful night. I was bewildered. Everything became darker, and I found it harder and harder to sustain a coherent thought.

“Stick with us, man!” I heard one of the paramedics yell. I was trying. “We’re going to get you to the hospital, and they’ll take care of you. Just stick with us, bro.”

The two men in the back with me then started arguing with the driver to hurry up. “You’re going too damn slow. You have to hurry up, man,” one of them said to the driver. The driver yelled back, “Shut up! The roads are icy as hell. I can’t drive fast, or we’ll all be like him.”

I found myself just wanting to go to sleep. I was so tired.

At my drowsiest moment, I heard the guys ask each other if they should “charge the paddles,” and I remember being scared to death that they were going to use them on me. To this day, I think my overwhelming fear of the paramedics’ placing those electrically charged paddles on my chest gave me all the motivation I needed to stay conscious.

From that moment forward, I don’t recall anything else the guys said to me or to each other. All I remember is a thought in my head that I kept playing over and over and over again: If I make it to the hospital, I’ll live. If I make it there, everything will be okay.

At that point, my mind turned not to what I could do, but to the hope and prayer that God would just get us safely to the doctors so that I could live.

I did not want to die.

I don’t think I made a grand bargain with God that night, but I remember thinking, If I don’t die, if I make it, if I live, I’m going to give life everything I have from here on out.

As soon as we made it to the University of Kentucky ER, I was overtaken with a feeling of warmth. It’s hard to explain, but I felt a deep sense of inner peace, contentment, and even joy. I could no longer see out of either of my eyes or really feel my face at all. I felt them cutting my clothes off with scissors. Hilariously, I still remember being slightly embarrassed that people were going to see me naked. After examining my body, I heard the ER doctors speaking about the bones in my face being broken and how I would need a plastic surgeon. They ordered immediate CAT scans to determine the extent of the damage.

The damage to my lips, mouth, and teeth was so severe that I wouldn’t be able to speak for much longer once they started working on me. I began begging two different nurses to write a note that said, “I still believe in the goodness of God,” and place it on my chest. They both thought I was delirious and refused to write it. I asked several more times, but I am sure I sounded ridiculous. Finally, I felt and grabbed the hand of a third person and asked them to please write the note. They relented, grabbed a piece of paper, wrote the words just as I asked, and placed it right on my chest.

For the next three days I could hardly think straight, but I remember asking everybody who came into contact with me to read that note.

As the doctors sent me through the first set of CAT scans, the results shocked everyone, because nothing was broken. Seeing how badly shredded every inch of my face was, the doctors ordered another set of scans. They, too, came back with the same results. In spite of flying into the windshield face-first, going full speed, and being hit by a truck, not one bone in my body, not even my nose, was broken.

Then and there, the doctors started calling me a “miracle man.”

Kneeling down to talk to me on the stretcher, the plastic surgeon said, “I had already asked my team to get plates and wires ready for your face, but it appears that we were all wrong and that you aren’t going to need them after all. Rarely do people in accidents like yours—being projected through the windshield—rarely do those people live. When they do live, they are almost always paralyzed and need a series of reconstructive surgeries to attempt to repair the damage. It appears that all I have to do is stitch you up.”

I pointed at the note on my chest. I couldn’t muster a smile, but I knew then and there that something miraculous had indeed happened to me. I can’t explain it.

Was I healed?

Was everybody wrong with their diagnoses?

How did my face crash completely through that rock-hard windshield without breaking a single bone?

Why me?

For the next two hours, the plastic surgeon worked magic on my face. He started out by giving me a few extremely excruciating shots of Novocain to dull the pain of the procedure. When it was all said and done, he ended up giving me over forty shots. Bit by bit, he pulled over one hundred small shards of glass out of my face. During the next four weeks I removed over a dozen more.

My left eyelid had been cut off almost completely, and he sewed it back on first. A huge chunk of my bottom lip was dangling. He fixed that next. On the left side of my face was the most severe injury. My cheek had been torn open from the corner of my mouth all the way up to my left ear. In all, my face required over four hundred stitches to be put back together again. My eyes would be swollen shut for days. I couldn’t eat. My teeth were all jacked up. People who see pictures of me taken several days later say I looked like a dead man. Physically, I felt dead, but something deep inside of me was awakened. In so many ways, I now view my life in two phases: BTA (Before the Accident) and ATA (After the Accident).

I valued life before all this happened. I was a good enough guy and did some decent stuff here and there, but something essential changed about me after the car crash. It’s this transformation that allows me to look back on that brutal brush with death and not regret that I went through it. Yes, it took a lot out of me. Physically, I never fully recovered. I’m actually in pain as I type these very words. However, what I gained was so much greater than what was taken from me.

Now I live like tomorrow’s not promised.

Now I live like every day is a blessing full of 1,440 minutes to pursue my purpose and passion.

Now I refuse to allow the excuses in my mind to grow into giants that keep me from living up to my full potential.

Having come so close to death, I now value just how precious life truly is and want to ride what God gave me until the wheels fall off. The American dream alone is not enough for me anymore.

Just a few weeks after the accident, with my body still hurting and my face looking so awful that people everywhere stopped to stare at me, I found my heart, soul, and mind energized anew. I’ve hardly stopped for a break since.

At first, I had no method to my madness. I found myself energized, but with no real system to effectively pursue what it was on my heart to accomplish in the world.

I’ve had some unbelievable successes, and I’ve also learned painful lessons through failures so low I can hardly stand to think of them. This book is about those hard-earned lessons I learned, the practical systems that I’m using now, and how they can help you rapidly accelerate the impact you make with the time you have. My hope is that together we will start a movement of thousands (maybe millions!) of people setting and pursuing their life goals with reckless abandon.