1 A Joint Commitment

Think about an exciting story. Doesn't it always have an interesting character who wants to make something important happen in their life, but first has to overcome conflict to accomplish the goal? Well, the interesting character in this story is me. What I want to accomplish that is important is to become fit again so I will feel better and live longer. To do that, I have to overcome conflict—my past patterns of behavior and how I dealt with the ups and downs of life.

As I tell you my story, I'm probably going to tell you more about the ups and downs of my life than you want to hear. Why? I've found that a lot of people think that because I've been fairly successful in my life, everything has gone along smoothly and all the breaks went my way. This was not always the case.

I was born in 1939 and grew up in New Rochelle, New York. My mom was a very nurturing person. Unfortunately, one of the ways she nurtured us best was by feeding us. If we were happy, we ate. If we were sad, we ate. If we were worried, we ate. Whatever happened, we ate. One of the ways Mom self-actualized was through the food she gave my father, my sister, and me. As I grew up, I used to fantasize about being locked in our local Jewish delicatessen overnight. I can smell a piece of cheese-cake a mile away.

Given that reality, you might ask—with the pattern of eating I got from my mother and my love of cheesecake—why I wasn't obese. Actually, the first 25 years of my life, even though my mom fed us well, I was pretty fit and exercised a lot. But it didn't start out that way.

I was born with flat feet. In those days, the belief was that kids with flat feet wouldn't be able to live normal lives in terms of exercise and activity, because they would get tired and need to rest. My mother accepted that belief and continually was watching that I didn't overdo things. That worked until I was six years old, when my dad put a basket in our basement and I fell in love with basketball. It became my passion. I would shoot by the hour. I led our elementary team to the city championship, played in a number of different leagues in junior high school, broke the junior varsity scoring record my sophomore year in high school, and was cocaptain of our league champion high school team my senior year. What did that mean in terms of my fitness? I was in good shape. I used to run cross-country in the fall to get ready for basketball season. So fitness and weight control were not a problem the first 18 years of my life.

When it came to choosing a college, I decided to go to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I tried out for the freshman basketball team there and made the squad, but since I had not been recruited by Sam McNeill, the coach, he seldom played me. I remember one night when we were playing Auburn Community College in a small band-box gym. They played a two-one-two zone defense that made it difficult to score except from the outside—my specialty. Our starting team was struggling so I got off the bench, kneeled by Coach McNeill, and said, “Put me in, Coach. I could break up this zone in my sleep. After all, I have the hottest hands in the country.” He laughed and started calling me “Hot Hands” but still didn't play me much, although we became good friends.

Rather than realizing the potential of gathering more splinters on the bench, I decided not to go out for the team my sophomore year and instead became a cheerleader. You might think that would have been good for me, with all the gymnastics. Wrong. In those days, cheerleaders didn't do gymnastics—and since we were the only co-ed school in the Ivy League, we weren't allowed to have women cheerleaders. The only criteria for being a cheerleader was (1) you had to drink and (2) you had to know a lot of people. I qualified on both counts, but it didn't do my fitness any good.

During my senior year at Cornell, Coach McNeill was promoted to varsity coach. He asked me to help coach the freshman team because we had kept in touch and he knew I understood the game. This was a thrill for me and got me reenergized about basketball.

The summer after my graduation in 1961, Margie and I began to date. Our romance blossomed that fall as I continued my studies at Colgate University, where I began a master's degree program in sociology while Margie was finishing her senior year at Cornell.

In June 1962 after I had completed my first year at Colgate, Margie and I got married. We spent the summer honeymooning at a well-known canoe tripping camp in Algonquin Park on Canoe Lake in Ontario, Canada. To get a snack, you had to walk uphill five miles or canoe three miles. So I returned to Colgate in probably the best shape of my life, weighing 167.

That didn't last for long, though—Margie was a great cook, and working on my master's thesis required long hours sitting in the library. My basketball coaching did help prevent a complete downward spiral, as I was asked to work with the freshman team at Colgate for the 1962–63 season.

When I was nearing completion of my master's program, I told my Student Personnel Administration mentors at Cornell that I was ready to become a dean. They suggested it would be better if I first got my doctoral degree. Through a former professor at Cornell, I was accepted into the doctoral program in educational administration there. That began my three-year Ph.D. journey.

Basketball was still a major interest, so as a player-coach I organized a team that was sponsored by Hal's Delicatessen in downtown Ithaca. We competed all over central New York against other town teams made up of former high school and college basketball players. We even got to play the Cornell freshman team as the preliminary game to Senator Bill Bradley and his Princeton Tigers' last visit to Cornell in 1964. They opened the doors for the game at 6:00, and by 6:30 they had the largest crowd in the history of Cornell: over 10,000 people poured into our arena. So all those fans had to watch our preliminary game, which we won.

While I continued to play ball, I didn't go at it with the vigor that I had when I was younger, and I began to gain weight. Why? With Hal's Delicatessen as the sponsor of our team, my fantasy of being locked overnight in a deli unfortunately began to become a reality. Hal's had the best cheese-cake imaginable.

One thing I was proud of, though, was that I put my head down and made it through the doctoral program, including my dissertation. While I was doing that, Margie completed her master's degree in speech pathology—her undergraduate major—and gave birth to our son, Scott, in August 1965.

When I was working on my dissertation our last year in Ithaca, I didn't have time to coach or play for Hal's Delicatessen team and started to get a little pudgy. Even though I didn't play for the team, I still visited Hal's on a regular basis to make sure all was well.

My pudginess continued as I finally entered the world of work. In the fall of 1966 after nine years of college, Margie (pregnant with Debbie), Scott, and I all headed to Ohio University where I had landed a job as assistant to Harry Evarts, dean of the School of Business Administration.

Let me take an important detour from discussing my fitness journey. When I joined Dean Evarts's staff, he asked me to teach a course in the management department. I had never thought about teaching—all of my professors in graduate school had said if I wanted to work at a university, I needed to be an administrator because I couldn't write. As a faculty member, if you didn't write, it was career damaging. The rule was “publish or perish.”

Harry said he didn't care about all of that. All he knew was that he wanted all of his deans to teach a course so they were really in tune with the students. Paul Hersey had just arrived on campus as the chairman of the management department. Harry put me in his department and Hersey gave me a course to teach. After teaching for a couple of weeks, I came home and said to Margie, “This is what I ought to be doing. Teaching is fun.”

Margie was quick to respond, “But what about the writing?”

I said, “I don't know, but we'll figure something out.”

That fall I heard that Hersey taught a tremendous leadership course, so I came up to him in a hallway in December 1966 and said, “Paul, I understand you teach a great leadership course. Could I sit in next semester?”

Hersey said, “Nobody audits my course. If you want to take it for credit, you're welcome.” And he walked away. I thought that was something because I had a Ph.D. and he didn't! And he wants me to take his course?

I went home and told Margie about the conversation. She said, “Is he any good?”

I said, “He's supposed to be fabulous.”

“Then why don't you get your ego out of the way and take his course?”

So I took the course, wrote all the papers, and found it to be a great experience.

In June 1967 after the course had ended, Hersey came to my office and sat down. He said, “Ken, I've been teaching leadership for 10 years now and I think I'm better than anybody. But I can't write and they want me to write a textbook. I'm a nervous wreck. I've been looking for a good writer like you. Would you write it with me?”

I almost laughed out loud when he said “a good writer like you.”

Why not? I thought. We ought to be a good team. He can't write and I'm not supposed to, so let's do it.

That's exactly what we did. We wrote a textbook entitled Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources. It recently came out in its 10th edition, and I think it sells more today than it did in the 1960s.

When the book was published, I went to Dean Evarts and said, “I quit.”

He said, “You can't quit because I was going to fire you. You're a lousy administrator!”—which I was. We agreed it was a photo finish between him firing me and me quitting. But that launched my career as a teacher and writer at age 30, with a few bumps along the way.

Why did I take a detour to tell you all this? A lot of people think that when you are successful, it means you had a plan when you were young, set your eyes on the target, and just kept moving toward it over the years. I haven't found that to be true. In fact, John Lennon said it well: “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” My ups and downs in life were not planned but were an important part of my journey.

How was my fitness at that time? Although Paul Hersey and I played in a city basketball league together, I wasn't in great shape. Working on the textbook was more demanding than working on my doctoral dissertation.

It was during that period I joined Weight Watchers for the first time to get some support for eating properly and losing weight. It helped, too, until Margie and the kids and I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1970. I was asked to play a major role in the educational administration department at the University of Massachusetts as well as work with school systems along the East Coast. Those activities, plus writing and teaching, sidetracked my fitness program again as I regained the weight I had lost and then some. I soon found myself hovering around 210 pounds. That wasn't good, to say the least, since when I was playing basketball I never tipped the scale over 175.

Discouraged, I wondered if I'd ever get in shape again. But finally, in 1974, I got serious, rejoined Weight Watchers, and got my weight back down under 190.

In spring 1976, all of Margie's and my hard work paid off. She earned her Ph.D. in communications, and I was promoted to full professor and given a one-year sabbatical leave, which we took in San Diego, California. We found San Diego to be a very healthy, exercise-friendly environment. I started jogging with Margie, even ran several 10K races, and kept myself in pretty good shape. Realizing that “summer in Massachusetts is two weeks of bad skating” and that San Diego probably has the best weather on the planet, it was not hard for us to decide to stay put and not return to Amherst at the end of the year. We began working with Paul Hersey, who had also moved to San Diego to launch the Center for Leadership Studies.

In 1979, Margie and I decided to start our own company. That turned out to be quite a year. My dad passed away in February, Margie got spinal meningitis that summer, my sister Sandy died in October, and Alan Raffe, a local CEO who had helped us start our company, was killed in an airplane accident in December. I'll never forget holding Margie on New Year's Eve as we hoped we would safely enter the next year.

The year 1980 did end up being a special year. In November, Margie and I met Spencer Johnson at a cocktail party. He was a children's book writer. He had coauthored, with his former wife, Ann, a series of kids' books called ValueTales. Margie met Spencer first, hand-carried him over to me, and said, “You two should write a children's book for managers. They won't read anything else.” With that, The One Minute Manager® was born. We signed a publishing contract with William Morrow in January 1982, and the book was launched on NBC's Today show on Labor Day that year. The book went on the New York Times best-seller list the next week and stayed there continually for a few years.

Prior to the instant success of the book, I had maintained a good exercise and eating program and was feeling proud of myself. Then suddenly the phone was ringing off the hook, and I was traveling around the world spreading “the word.” My fitness program took a dive once more as I did not watch my eating habits, did little exercise, and began bulking up again. This motivated me in 1985 to write The One Minute Manager Gets Fit with Margie and our longtime friend Dee Edington, who was the director of the Fitness Research Center as well as professor and director of the Division of Physical Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

During the writing of the book, with help from Dee and prodding from Margie, I got myself back in good shape. My weight was under control and I was exercising regularly. We even held a wellness seminar for top managers at Callaway Gardens in Georgia. That's when I first met Tim Kearin. He was working at the nearby Hughston Clinic as their fitness director. Tim was recommended by the president of Callaway Gardens, Hal Northrup, to do the fitness evaluations and consultations for our program there.

I immediately connected with Tim, not only as a professional but also as a human being. In fact, Margie and I were key encouragers in convincing Tim and his wife, Sharon, to move to San Diego the following year. But even after the inspiration of The One Minute Manager Gets Fit and our Georgia seminar, when Dee went back to his research and Margie decided to stop bugging me, I gradually gained weight again and stopped my regular exercising.

You might be saying, Come on, Blanchard. I'm sick of hearing about this yo-yo weight and exercise thing with you. You write about motivation, you speak about motivation, and you even wrote a book about fitness. Why couldn't you keep your commitment to your commitment and keep on going with your fitness journey?

My first response is a defensive one. “So who are you, Mr. or Ms. Perfect? Everything you say you'll do, you do? Give me a break. How many New Year's resolutions have you broken? If you can't think of any, you probably lie about other things, too.”

My saner intellectual response is that there are three levels to change.

1. Knowledge—this is the easiest thing to change. All you have to do is listen to someone or read a book about something and you'll have new knowledge.

2. Attitudinal—this is more difficult to change than gaining knowledge. Why? Because attitude is an emotionally charged bit of knowledge. Now you feel either positive or negative about something you know.

3. Behavioral—this is the toughest thing to change, because you have to do something. I don't know a smoker alive today who doesn't know, at a knowledge level, that smoking is not good for them. Most smokers also have a positive attitude toward giving it up. But try it behaviorally if it's been a longtime habit—it's not easy. The same goes for me in curbing my childhood eating patterns and maintaining a good exercise program.

My longtime friend and colleague Fred Finch put it well when I told him about my fitness journey. I said, “I just need to get better organized.”

Fred was quick to reply. “Ken, you're the most organized person I have ever met when you want to do something.”

I knew Fred was right. At the knowledge and attitudinal levels I was ready to make a change, but not at the behavioral level—at least not completely. I would think about it at the beginning of every new year and would call Tim to start a workout program. But then, as usual, I'd get too busy and go on the road, and the workout program would fall by the wayside. This was discouraging, to say the least. Tim would encourage me to keep going, but after a while he would get discouraged, too, and move on to greener pastures—clients who were committed to a regular fitness program. I would rejoin Weight Watchers several more times and start going to the meetings, but then I would let my membership lapse and let that go, too. I felt frustrated that I was only interested in being fit, but somehow not committed to it.

Having compelling reasons and a purpose is what motivates you toward goal accomplishment. It's something to serve. Goals are to be accomplished; reasons and purpose are to be served. It became clear to me, if I was going to keep my commitment to my commitment, I needed some compelling reasons. Then, lo and behold, reasons started coming at me fast and furious.

First, when I turned 65 a few years ago, I was talking on the phone to Zig Ziglar, the great motivational expert who passed away late in 2012. He had invited Margie and me to the 59th anniversary of his 21st birthday. I asked him, “Zig, are you going to retire?” He was quick to reply, “There is no mention of retirement in the Bible. Except for Jesus, Mary, Joseph, David, and a few others, no one under 80 made an impact. As a result . . .

“I'm not retiring—I'm refiring!”

That really resonated with me. I decided to follow Zig's lead and refire, not retire. To that end, I had to get myself back in shape so I could walk easily through airports and stand in front of groups and inspire them to lead at a higher level.

Over the next several years I had both hips replaced, and it was suggested that I have a total knee replacement as well. My primary physician, Dr. Lee Rice—who used to be the team physician for the San Diego Chargers—indicated that I might avoid this surgery with strength training and weight loss. Since I had heard that rehab from knee operations was much tougher than from hip surgery, my attitude started to change. Then two other events added to this motivation.

My son Scott and I flew to London to work with some of our clients. He noticed that I was not only gimping around and looking a lot like Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but also huffing and puffing whenever we had to walk anywhere. He finally lost it and said to me, “Dad, I've heard you kid around and say to Mom that when a tour bus unloads passengers at a hotel in Hawaii, 35 women will get off the bus and only 5 men, because the rest of the guys are dead. And you always say that your goal is to be one of those 5 guys. What are you doing about it? I know you don't want to leave Mom a widow. You talk about wanting to be at the college graduations of your grandsons Kurtis, Kyle, and Alec. You're going to have to hang around at least another 15 years. What are you doing about it?”

I didn't really have a good answer. I knew that my lack of focus on my health and fitness just wasn't making sense. After all, if I didn't take care of myself, I might miss out not only on aging with my best friend Margie, but also on watching our kids Scott and Debbie get their letters from AARP, seeing my grandkids grow up, and being with my best four-legged friend.

Four-legged friend?

In November 2008, three weeks before I had my first hip replacement operation, we decided to get a new puppy. We named her Joy, because a wonderful business friend of mine, Fred Smith, often said:

“Real joy in life is when you get in the act of forgetfulness about yourself.”

Dogs, particularly puppies, help you do that.

Joy is a miniature “golden doodle”—a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle. We were told that fully grown she would be between 15 and 20 pounds. She's all black and doesn't look anything like a golden retriever, but she loves to retrieve, which is not a normal behavior for a poodle.

After my operation I was home for five or six weeks rehabbing, and Joy and I really bonded. When I would go out to do an errand or go to the office, she would follow me to the door. The minute I got home, opened the door to the garage, and came into the house, she would come racing down the hall toward me and jump into my arms.

When we got Joy, I was just turning 70. Knowing that little dogs can last 15 years or more, I decided I needed to be in good health until my mid-80s so not only would I be around for Margie, my kids, and grandkids, but this little dog would never run down the hall without finding me there. I know this seems a little strange because most people who love dogs are more concerned about losing their dog than having their dog lose them. But as you probably have guessed by now, I don't always think like other people.

Even though I was frustrated about not having been able to stick to a fitness program because of past failures, I now had all kinds of reasons that motivated me to get serious and take on this project with Tim, who had tried to help me with my periodic fitness commitments over the past 25 years. I still felt Tim had the personal power—he's one of my favorite people—and the most expertise to help me achieve my goals. I knew I was no John Wayne type when it came to my own fitness.

This book follows Tim's and my journey through a one-year fitness program where, finally, I realized that if I were going to become fit, I would need to behave on my good intentions for myself rather than because others close to me said I should do it—or wagged their tails.

Even though it might have taken several decades for Tim and me to get to this point together, I'm excited about our adventure. I hope that by our sharing it with you, you'll be inspired to keep your commitment to your commitment to do something that will improve your life, too.

My interest in making my body into a better-functioning machine began when I was 13 years old. At that time, I remember seeing advertisements in the back of magazines that would show a picture of Charles Atlas, one of the early musclemen. The first part of the ad showed a bully kicking sand in the face of a skinny boy at the beach and walking away with his bikini-clad girlfriend. The idea behind the Atlas program was to develop a strong, muscular body and win the girl back. This also tells you that I have been around long enough to be on the leading edge of the Boomer generation.

I began doing my own program of push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. By age 14, my weight training program had progressed to barbells and dumbbells. That, along with pubertal hormones, allowed me to begin developing muscles. While I didn't go to the beach looking for bullies, I did enjoy that people began noticing my muscular shape. When I began high school, I was quickly recruited to play football. I was a hard-hitting, good blocking lineman but realized my muscles alone did not make me a better player. I soon realized that I needed to eat smarter and develop cardiovascular fitness.

What happened next would begin my inspiration for a lifetime of fitness. I was bench-pressing 400 pounds and had many world-class weight lifters suggest that if I took steroid supplements I could get bigger and stronger than I already was. While few sports administrations did any kind of testing for supplements, the only way you could get steroids was on the black market. As an uninformed, impressionable high school kid, I began my search. My first stop was my neighbor's house. My best friend's dad was Chuck Coker, a highly recognized fitness authority and co-inventor of the Universal Gym, one of the first multiple-station strength training machines. Chuck lectured me about all of the negative effects of steroid use. His talk scared me so much that I became an activist against steroid supplements. I worked summers doing deliveries and demonstrations on the Universal Gym. I learned a great deal about strength training from Chuck, and he inspired me to a lifetime career in the fitness industry.

I went to the University of Arizona on an athletic scholarship and, following graduation, began a military career. My fitness prowess as a junior officer led to my selection to attend graduate school at Indiana University and go on to the United States Military Academy. While working in the physical education department, I became involved in strength training research under Arthur Jones, founder of Nautilus Equipment, Inc. I later became one of the United States Military Academy's early strength and conditioning coaches. I directed the conditioning programs for more than 15 intercollegiate athletic teams. West Point was synonymous with fitness, but it was very challenging to develop muscle mass on athletes who got inadequate sleep because of the rigorous schedule the cadets were required to keep. One of the main purposes of a good conditioning program is to prevent injury, so I became very involved with athletic rehabilitation.

After seven years at the military academy, I accepted a job at the Hughston Clinic in Georgia as director of cardiac rehab, back fitness, executive fitness testing, and adult fitness. As Ken mentioned, I was selected to run fitness evaluations and consultations for the executive wellness seminar that he, Margie, and Dee Edington were holding for top industry managers at Callaway Gardens, based on their book The One Minute Manager Gets Fit. That introduction began what would be a 25-year friendship and fitness relationship with Ken.

In 1986, I moved my family to San Diego and started my own fitness business called Personally Fit, Inc. The first facility was located in Rancho Santa Fe, an upscale coastal community near San Diego. My intent was to develop a training program that would focus on body sculpting and conditioning for high-level aspiring athletes, but I quickly found that most of the sculpting candidates were looking for a magic pill—and aspiring athletes had no money. The people coming in the door were looking for a solution to nagging middle-age injuries that kept them from playing their weekend sports. Most of these conditions—tennis elbow, rotator cuff strain, stiff neck, low-back pain, hip, knee and ankle problems—were a result of poor conditioning and overuse syndrome. These were conditions I could do something about. Most participants were individuals aged 50 to 75 who were self-employed, semi-retired entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who wanted to keep working and be able to play hard in their spare time. Sound familiar? My customers would come in with a specific purpose and realize that they were going to have to get fit to prevent the problem from happening again. Based on this philosophy, I successfully opened a second facility in another part of San Diego.

Even though I eventually sold both of my facilities, like Ken, I'm not retiring, I'm refiring! That involves not only continuing to work one-on-one with clients but also coaching high school kids and consulting within the health care industry. I want to keep working and playing hard for at least another 20 years. Sound familiar again? I am a strong-willed member of the Boomer generation and hope to inspire others by sharing my experience of working with Ken on his fitness journey.

During the first week of November 2010, I got a voicemail message on my phone from Ken. After listening to the message, I thought, Is it February already?—not because the leaves were falling in San Diego, but because I was getting a request from Ken to begin his exercise program. Ken and I had been down this road many times before. In years past, on or about Groundhog Day, I would get “that call” from Ken. I knew that if he was contacting me this early, he must have a newfound commitment to exercise.

I wondered where that commitment was coming from. Through the years I have found that there are three reasons or purposes that help people keep their commitment to their commitment to lead a healthy lifestyle.

The first is a health-driven purpose. I remember a cartoon I saw some time ago that shows a doctor talking to his overweight and unhealthy-looking patient. The doctor tells the patient, “Would you rather exercise for 1 hour a day or be dead for 24 hours a day?” Very funny, but you get the point. If the alternative to exercise is poor health or worse, you have a pretty powerful purpose.

The second is a cause-driven purpose—focusing on something greater than you. Last year my son Deyl decided he wanted to run the Sahara 150. This is an event where you run a marathon a day for four days, and then two marathons on the fifth day over the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert in 118-degree heat. Deyl had done triathlons and a marathon before, but never in such extreme conditions. Knowing he needed a purpose greater than just wanting to do it to say he'd completed it, he decided to make it a fund-raiser with the goal of raising $40,000 for the poor. He told me that without that great purpose, there were several times during the grueling race when he might have quit. He not only completed the race but exceeded his fund-raising goal.

The last, and most difficult, is a personally driven purpose. Why is it the most difficult? Because it often has a short-term goal attached to it and doesn't really involve much lifestyle change. An example would be the mother wanting to lose 30 pounds for her daughter's upcoming wedding so she looks good in the pictures. The weight loss is usually achieved, but the reversal begins at the wedding reception. The purpose for the weight loss is gone because old habits return, and the weight that's lost is usually gained back. Ken had experienced similar motivations in the past and frequently achieved short-term goals only to see them disappear. The main reason for this was that he always was doing it for the wrong purpose. I needed to know what was different this time.

When Ken and I got together in November, I asked him why he was so interested in starting a program at this time. He told me about his desire to avoid knee surgery, pressure from Scott, Margie, other members of his family, and colleagues who wanted him to focus on his health and fitness so he would be around much longer, and his own desire to see his grandkids grow up, mature, and graduate from college. He also told me about “the famous Joy.” Realizing he couldn't do it by himself, Ken wanted to know what it would take to make me as committed to his success as he was. I told him that I could make the time, but it had to be for the right reasons—that his motivation to improve his fitness had to eventually come from within. In other words, he must be doing this for himself, not for his loved ones.

As Ken already suggested, it is difficult for people to make a major change in their overall fitness routine by themselves. They need someone else—whether it be a family member, friend, colleague, or fitness coach like me—to help them keep their commitment to their commitment. How do you determine who that person should be? First, it should be someone who really cares about you and your individual success. Equally important, they have to be willing to hold you accountable, which sometimes requires tough love. That means you not only have to like the person; you also have to trust them. Ken has always been one of my favorite people, and I really wanted him to be around for the long haul. Fortunately, he trusts me, which is very important, and enjoys my company. To top it off, we both agreed that keeping Ken committed to a program would be a challenge. With that thought in our minds, all we had to do was establish a mutual incentive.

After giving it considerable thought, I told Ken that what I wanted was the right to tell the story of his success—in simple words, that he and I would write a book together sharing all of the details.

As Ken thought about it, he realized that if he agreed to write a book with me, he would have my total commitment— because without success in our program, we would have no story to tell and there would be no book. With that, we shook hands and started to work.

Follow along with Ken and me as we begin this journey together. I think you'll enjoy the ride.