I was probably only about 18 years old and this gentleman was 36. I was in the same market that he was in. He would try to shut me down and put me down, because he saw how strong I was when I was performing. People were attracted to me and they loved what I did.

It was the same type of mentalism that he did. Although it was different, it was my personality and he had a different personality. He was jealous. Actually, it hurt me. My own true feelings, I didn?t want anyone to feel bad about me. I didn?t want anybody to look down and say this guy was bad, or this guy is doing something wrong. I almost felt guilty because I was doing so well for myself that people become jealous of what I?ve done.

Nerissa Oden: The lowest point in my life was probably when I felt like my mother didn?t want me and that my father didn?t want me. I came from the divorced family. I didn?t really know my dad. My mother wasn?t getting child support.

She felt like she had been betrayed by the courts. She couldn?t get child support from my dad. So she said, ?Look, it?s nothing against you or anything, but you’re thirteen now. It?s time for him to take care of you. He has to live up to some of the responsibility. I just can’t do this anymore.?

I’m her third child. I definitely understood what she was saying, even at thirteen. It still hurt, nonetheless. Then, when we go to the father?s house, the father?s like, ?We really need to get you back to the mom. No, I don?t want a single responsibility.?

That also felt like rejection. That was probably the lowest point in my life emotionally. I ended up being back with my mother because I basically turned into a runaway for a little bit. I ended up back with my mother.

My mother took us to counseling. I guess, probably on the third or fourth counseling session, I finally opened my mouth and started talking. That was the lowest point in my life. I’m not sure what would?ve happened if my mother hadn?t agreed to come rescue me or take me back.

Then sure enough we were going to come back, get everything together and we were going to go head off to Europe and live our life in Spain. In less than two weeks we broke up and I had another two weeks to get out of the house.

Penniless, I mean it was pretty tough plus I thought this was the person that I was going to spend my life with. Needless to say there were days that I didn?t want to get out of bed. During this time I had this training that I went to, the free training that sold me into a $4,000 training.

Well now to sweeten the pot I?d now committed to another person that I would pay them back the $4,000 by the end of that month. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror one day and was like what are you doing?

There are a few key moments in my life that I can look back at where as they say the rubber meets the road and you just say you know what, it?s a decision and you can?t really tell somebody and no goal-setting book or anything is going to do it. When something faces you and you?ve got the option to roll over or to get up and fight. It?s what you do in those moments and those are the decisions that shape your life and I chose just that.

I said well I?m going to fight this and I?m going to prove to everybody that says I can?t do it, wrong and I?m going to get my confidence back and I?m going to move forward, and that?s what I did.

I would walk up at first and I would try to explain, ?Well, I?m here and I?ve got these guitars.?

A lot of times I was asked by the band to be there, but somebody would mess up. My name wouldn?t be on the guest list. The security guys could care less. It was like, ?Whatever. Your name is not on the list.?

So I observed that that wasn?t working. I was just going up trying to explain my situation. Going to all these shows, I would watch the stage door. I would see a road manager or someone come along and sometimes these people would have their backstage pass on and sometimes they wouldn?t.

I saw many people without a pass. Some guy with a briefcase covered in backstage passes from other shows would come walking in and he wouldn?t stop and try to explain. He would just walk in the door like he owns the place. It?s his production. He belongs there.

Those people were usually British. If the security guard questioned them, they were just kind of like, ?What are you talking about?? They just looked at them like, ?Of course I belong here.? I wasn?t consciously aware of it but I began to model those people. I went out and got my briefcase and I covered it with stickers. I didn?t have a bunch of backstage passes yet so I covered it with guitar manufacturer?s stickers.

I was a good mimic. I could do the British accent as well as the Brits could. That became the deal. I remember the first time I tried it. I just walked up and walked in the door.

Nobody asked me anything. If they would ask, it was, ?Hey. Hello. Where do you think you?re going??

I would just say ?I?m going to the dressing room.? ?Well, where?s your pass?? ?I don?t know. I left it on the bus?, and I would just keep walking and they would sort of shrug and say, ?Okay,? and let me go. I?ve even had arguments with them. It was like, ?Alright mate.

I?m going to leave. When the band comes and they?re looking for their guitars, then you tell them that you didn?t let the guitars come in because I didn?t have a pass, alright?? Then you start to walk away and they?re like, ?Oh, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Go ahead, go inside. You?re okay. That was my early experience with learning to model other people.

However, that was not the lowest point in my life. That?s how I began to overcome obstacles.

What happened when I went backstage to those shows is I saw this guy, the road manager. I was fascinated. He?s like the manager of the band on tour. He?s running the show. That?s what I wanted to be, but, I had no idea how to do that. There was no internet or anything then. It was hard to find any kind of role models.

I realized what I really needed to be doing is working with local bands and just getting more experience and working my way up. I was afraid to do that. I dropped out of college after six weeks. I was an accounting major. That would have been a horrible mistake.

I was managing a stereo store and I was good at it. I had accumulated a lot of stuff. I had two big stereos and I had a Betamax, which was a big deal then, but I wasn?t making a lot of money.

So I couldn?t do that and pay my bills and keep all my stuff. So, what happened is, and I don?t want to go through the whole story but I ended up with a really nasty drug habit. This was late seventies up to about 1980. I?d discovered cocaine.

That just knocked me on my butt. I ended up pawning everything I owned.

It was all gone. I used to have like seven or eight vintage guitars, gone. Stereos all that stuff gone. I had this huge stack of pawn slips. That was all I had left. I came to the point where I had been served an eviction notice from my apartment. The power was turned off. I was about to be homeless.

A friend of mine that was a drummer in a band came by. I?d worked for his band when I was in high school. He offered me a job going on the road with his new band. Up until that point, I wouldn?t have taken it. I would have wanted to but I couldn?t afford to do that.

So, I had to learn the hard way, and I had nothing to lose at this point.
I just had my clothes. I put some things in storage and I eventually lost that because I couldn?t pay the storage bill, but I became willing. That was the key, becoming willing.

I didn?t have to worry about cocaine right then because if you don?t have any money, you don?t have any cocaine.

That was definitely the lowest point. I was physically in bad shape. I had lost everything. I was really beaten down, but suddenly an opportunity presented itself. Within probably a year of that happening, I was road managing Humble Pie.

I had met the guys when I was doing the guitar thing before. I just became fearless. I went to every show and I just made myself known. I didn?t really know exactly what I was doing but I was just everywhere. So I just increased the odds.

You could listen to the whole story and say, ?Well, I was in the right place at the right time.?

It was like I was everywhere and I was willing to do whatever it took. Whatever I needed to do, ?Okay, fine.?

I ended up doing that and basically living out a dream. Now the alcohol and drug thing continued to interfere, especially alcohol which I wasn?t drinking before then. I discovered alcohol. It took me until 1989 to finally get sober. I discovered AA. I discovered that there was a group of people that had been there.

Again, I was just learning from their experience. I haven?t had a drink or done any drugs since then, 1989.

Again, that was when I discovered that you can?t always do it yourself. There?s strength in numbers. It wasn?t people preaching to you ?Don?t drink.? It was just people saying, ?Well, this is what I did.?

I?ve tried to teach people to model what?s worked for me. I don?t want to preach to people what to do. I am just, ?Here?s my experience.?

I like to look at it as I?m not in as good of shape and I?m not as happy and I?m not as healthy and well-rounded and successful as I am going to be tomorrow, because, like I say, I try to work on continuous improvement.

On the other hand, it is also important to know where I came from. I think going bankrupt was pretty low, and when my grandmother on my dad?s side died on Christmas day 1980, that was pretty low.

I think choosing to leave my previous marriage, knowing that I would never raise (then Frankie wasn?t even two years old), knowing that the decision that I was making that was ?best? for all of us, was a decision that would have me not under the same roof as him, to love him and protect him and kiss him goodnight every night.

I?d honestly have to say that that one right there, now that I think about it, that was a low point. There?s not too much lower than you can get, than saying, ?Alright, this relationship is very unhealthy. If I stay, it?s going to destroy my son, too. Teach him bitterness, and anger, and spite, and fighting and things like that. So I?ll just be a man about it and leave, so he can live a better life.?

I?ve got to say, that was not a good day. I laid on the floor and I cried once my ex-wife and my son drove away. I felt like my world ended. I would still, however, make that decision again at that moment in time. That would be my answer.

Right now my twins are four, so three years ago they were one. I came home from work one day bummed out because I was not enjoying my day and not enjoying my life and the direction of my life. Every time I came home my kids seemed to be getting bigger and I wasn?t seeing any of it, and I think to me that was really when I hit rock bottom.

I decided I was not going to live the rest of my life hating what I do for a living and missing out on everything that is so important to me. It was right then and there that I made a fairly quick decision. I talked with my wife, Kari, and we decided that it was time for me to go off on my own and start following the dream.

I have always had businesses on the side but it was time to commit fully to one. So I kind of took my low point and I said, ?Well, what do you really want to do? Who do you really want to be? and I just started following that dream and never looked back. It?s been the best journey of my life.

Obviously, financial burdens are a difficulty for many people. That would encompass, just having the faith, just thinking of the Rocky movies and to keep going and to keep going. There?s going to be light at the end of the tunnel. That would be my best advice. If you believe in something, lock onto it and don?t let go.

Jay Conrad Levinson: I?d say that probably the lowest point was when I thought that I had achieved my lifetime ambition working in Chicago. It was thirteen degrees below zero and I thought, ?Boy, here I am having done everything that I wanted to do. However, it?s really cold here and I don?t think I want to live the rest of my life here.?

I thought that I was a success, but when I went to my advertising agency and went to the boss and asked them to transfer me I was told that that was just not possible and it dawned on me that I was really a slave in a three-piece suit. Although I wasn?t doing manual labor, I was doing hard labor and was still getting a place not fit for man or beast because of the weather.

When I had determined my lifestyle ambition I was twenty-one years old and hadn?t factored in the weather, but now that I was near thirty and I felt it, and I thought I was a free man, that I could do anything. So when I asked for that transfer I thought, ?Of course I?ve earned it and I can do it.?

However, I was told that it was impossible to transfer me and I felt at the bottom, that all along I had deluded myself. I had been a slave. I thought I was just a nicely paid employee at an advertising agency with very little control over my life because here I was doing what I wanted to do but I didn?t have the freedom to pick up and move elsewhere. So that was a bad feeling.

I knew also that in order to get out of it I had to take the kind of action that would risk my career. I had to leave my job, leave my security, and leave my income, but I did it because I wanted to feel the sense of freedom all over again.

I was off for the summer, and I woke up one morning with this giant swelling on my neck. At first, I was kind of freaked out because I hadn?t had mumps yet, and that can have some pretty severe consequences if you get it as an adult, but it turns out I had something worse!

I had a form of cancer; the technical term is lymphoblastic lymphoma. It?s a form of cancer in which people of that age, the age of 21, it is normally fatal, and so I guess, you could say the low point for me is that at that age when you basically feel like you are invincible, you?re getting some news saying, “Hey, you?re not invincible and you have a pretty severe disease and you have to come to terms with it.”

For me, that was one of the lowest points of my life, at least in terms of the news and then, you have to come and gain some perspective that way.

I guess you asked, “How did it change my life?” I guess it changed it in some pretty fundamental ways. I don?t know if I?ve been pretty victorious against everything I?ve come up against. I have taken what I?ve learned from having cancer and been successful for most things.

You get a perspective that says, I decided that no matter what, I was going to do everything that I could to try and beat the disease, even though the treatment that they had at that time was not the greatest. The standard treatment was chemotherapy and radiation, and it wasn?t an exact science. They just did the best they could based on how they had treated people previously.

So, what I decided to do was that I decided I was going to try and beat it and I did beat it. I?m happy to say that I?ve been in remission for more than 20 years now.

The thing that happened from that is that I got the perspective of, I?m not invincible. I think part of my cancer was caused by the stress of a lot of things going on in my life just at that time, and so I learned to put things in perspective and not get so stressed out about certain things. Also, the fact that something even as severe as cancer can be beaten if you believe that you can beat it and that attitude has really affected everything that I have done from that point on.

She yells and screams at me ?Don?t you do this, don?t you leave me?. She yelled and she screamed so much that there was a part of me that thought you know, I?m tired, I?m very tired. At that point I?d probably been drunk for like six months every single day.

I was a functional walking drunk. I would go to work and do my job and drive back and forth, and I could function perfectly normal but my body had said you completely overwhelm me, I?m tired and I?m lying on the floor of a shower with the water flowing and the room is going dark.

It was my wife?s yelling and screaming that I guess pulled me out of it enough to where she helped me out of the shower, and I sat down on the toilet lid and got dressed and they took me to the hospital where they sent me into treatment for alcohol addiction at the time.

A third of my blood was alcohol. It was in excess of .35 I think it was.

It should have poisoned my brain enough where my brain should have stopped working and so they sent me to a 28 day treatment program, and that was the low point of my life. It was the weeks leading up to that I had done a number of crazy things.

I spent three years in Alaska where I was assigned as a soldier and when you go out fishing, or in the wilderness in Alaska you can look behind you and see a bear or a wolf or a badger or some other creature that wants to hurt you.

I carried a 44 Magnum pistol with bare rounds and these rounds were powerful enough, where somebody can drive at you with a car and you can shoot through the radiator into the engine block of a car with a 44 Magnum and stop that car.

That is how powerful that pistol was. I went from Alaska to Florida with the military, I brought my pistol along, and at my lowest point I actually considered suicide. I can remember being out drunk and thinking I?ve lost control. I?m a control freak.

I thought to myself that I?ve lost control and I thought ?Ah I?m going to end it all?. I actually stuck my gun to my head and cocked it and then I thought I don?t want to die alone I want somebody to hold me in their arms as I die. That is what stopped me from shooting myself.

I just didn?t want to be out by myself in the middle of nowhere with no one appreciating the fact that I was killing myself.

I wanted to be touched by another human being as I died. That was the lowest part probably in my life.

Many people go through that and it?s important for those people to realize that it?s ok to be that way, but you need to reach out to others and let them know that you?re struggling because there?s people who are there to help you.

People helped me and you know I turned around, but that was a low point in my life. I was on the verge of taking my own life. I collapsed in the shower and was on the verge of my body just saying ok we give up. You?ve abused me too much and I came back and at that point I was making over $100,000.00 a year on the internet.

You know things have turned around enough now where its seven figures and it happened and when the momentum kicks in its just amazing, just totally amazing. It?s mind boggling.

For me it?s all about serenity. It?s all about being at peace and at ease and comfortable with your role in the world, and if you?re not happy with where you are and with who you are, then you know something is out of kilter, but you need to find that balance because otherwise life is just not worth living to you.

Serenity is very important to me. Peace and happiness is very important to me. I mean I live in northwest Florida where I can get up any day and just go out go fishing whatever, and as long as there are no hurricanes, I can just go out and go fishing I can be out in the middle of the ocean.

The ocean is the most peaceful place in the world. I mean it puts me in touch with my tiny place in the world, because I am just one little tiny speck, a dot in the universe.

You can go out and look down in the ocean and see a school of a million fish and you realize how vast things are, and if you look on your depth finder and you see the ocean that spots like five miles deep which is incredible.

You realize that if you fell overboard you would never reach the bottom, because the water pressure and the things change and you would sink slower and slower and slower and you?d never reach the bottom.

That?s just incredible, but you know I?m all about serenity, I?m all about being happy with what I do and I when I was in the military I?d wake up everyday I?d look at the television and there was the news on and everyday there?s a conflict in the world. Theirs like 35 wars going on in the world right now whether most people think about it or not. I mean Korea has been at war since the 50?s.

They are still technically at war. You know the north against the south. There is about 35 wars going on in the world, and as a soldier I would look on the television and say ?Where am I going to be tonight??

I didn?t know and there came a point where I just said I?m tired of this and I want to experience some of my children?s birthdays and just be more in control of where I am at the end of the day, and that is when I decided I was going to leave the military and build my own business and make it a success. You see failure was never an option for me.

It was; you will build a successful business and you will make over a million dollars a year from your successful business. It was never an option that I could do anything other than that.

A couple of years after that, a long series of events, most of which were out of my control, I was in the candy and ice cream business at the time. Two of my many stores were bypassed and I lost a lot of volume. I couldn’t replace it because there were new toll roads that were taking the traffic away from my shops.

I started a franchise business and I basically had to close the business and it was very painful to me because some of my franchisees, some of my suppliers were hurt financially and although they almost all forgave me immediately for the circumstances that caused that, for me, I felt emotionally very low during that period.

So I would say that is kind of the ultimate depth that I felt. I felt that, rock bottom, that many of the things that I believed in and still do were, how do I say it, I questioned some of the things that I so believed in at those moments. I had some questions; I had a lot of thinking and feeling to get through that period.

My dad died when I was 17. There was a three year process of fighting cancer and the emotional roller coaster of ?Dad is going to be okay, Dad?s not going to be okay, Dad?s going to be okay? and all that.

Most people, by the time they are well into adulthood have probably experienced that with somebody. I remember being really upset about that.

I remember having this conversation with my mom where I said, ?Well, I guess God gave me a dad and if God is going to take my dad away then God can do that.?

Later on, it would have been about a month after my dad died, I was a senior in high school and I was taking this class. We had this interesting assignment to write a philosophy of life. By virtue of having been through the wringer with this I had given those questions a lot more thought than probably most kids do at that age.

I hope I remember this correctly; I wrote down three things and I turned this in. I said, ?Nothing is worth living for unless it?s worth dying for, because to live for something is to spend time which you can not get back in pursuit of it.? That was the first one.

I didn?t make up any of this stuff myself. I got it all from other people. The second one was ?The difficult things you deal with in life will make you a stronger, better person, but only if you let them.?

The third one I think comes from the Westminster Confession. It says, ?The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.?

That was my philosophy of life at age 17, and I don?t think I would change that now. I think that was pretty good, but being forced to confront a lot of hard issues is, I think, the only way you really figure out what is important and what is not.