That isn't modesty; it's arithmetic. My books were sold through this profession rather than to it. Amway's training organisations bought them by the pallet and handed them to new distributors, and the names on those orders belonged to the organisations, never to me. For twenty years it felt like a fine arrangement. I wrote, they bought, everybody was satisfied. Then I sold my company and found out what I had actually built: a large reputation and not one reader I could reach.
I wrote the first book in 1992. I was one of the top distributors in network marketing at the time, and I was tired — tired of people questioning my integrity, tired of watching good people get defensive every time somebody called this business a scam. People needed the truth, the whole truth, so I wrote it down. I called it Who Stole the American Dream? and gave it the subtitle The Book Your Boss Doesn't Want You to Read, which tells you the mood I was in. It sold 1.3 million copies. Not because it was clever. Because it gave people something they'd never had — they could stop defending themselves and start standing tall.
It worked for a reason I didn't fully understand until much later. This profession has a chronic problem. Someone joins, nobody explains the business properly, and ninety days later they're gone. The person who recruited them is usually enthusiastic and usually terrible at explaining what residual income actually is — they've got one shot at it, across a kitchen table, with a spouse listening from the next room. A book doesn't get nervous. A book doesn't oversell, and it doesn't run out of patience. You hand somebody a hundred and twenty pages, and it makes the case for you, in your absence, at three in the morning if three in the morning is when they finally sit down with it.
So I kept writing. You, Inc. in 1996, for people who needed telling that they were already running a business, whether anyone had informed them or not. Read and Get Rich in 1999, on the unglamorous fact that the people who get somewhere are almost always the people who read. Copycat Marketing 101 in 2000 — the argument that we all copy somebody, so the only real question is whether they were worth copying. Then The Parable of the Pipeline in 2001, which is the one strangers still stop me about. Two cousins, one village, a row of buckets, and one of them doing something different with his evenings.
I wrote them short on purpose. A hundred and twenty pages, plain words, one idea a chapter. The people I was writing for weren't readers. They were mechanics and nurses and single mothers who had been handed a business and no explanation, and the last thing they needed was four hundred pages of theory. Twenty languages later, I'd say that was the right call.
Around the books, I built a publishing company — International Network Training Institute. It served this industry for more than twenty years, and for a long stretch of them we supported the Direct Selling Association's Education Foundation in Washington. It never had a year under a million dollars. Then 2008 hit. The economy collapsed, and my partner decided it was time to retire. I kept the rights to my own books and turned my attention to my other business. That's about when my heart started giving out.
You've probably heard the saying: if you're going through hell, keep going. I learned what that means the hard way. It started quietly — a routine life insurance exam found atrial fibrillation, a heart that wouldn't keep its rhythm. Over the next several years, doctors shocked my heart back into rhythm ten times. It didn't hold. Surgeons ran three ablations, burning tiny spots inside my heart to stop the misfiring. Those didn't hold either. Four pacemakers, a defibrillator, and in 2019 a stroke that nearly killed me. By the end, my heart was pumping about a third of what a healthy heart pumps — an ejection fraction of 21, against a normal reading of around 60. I was out of breath all the time, and when your brain isn't getting enough blood, your thinking slows down, which for a writer is its own kind of prison. On December 17, 2024, I got a new heart.
I'll skip the inspirational version. Recovery is dull and undignified, and it lasts a great deal longer than anybody warns you. What it hands you is time, and I used a lot of mine seriously entertaining the idea that I was finished. I'd had my twenty good years. The books were old. The industry had moved on without me.
When you get a heart transplant, death stops being an idea. It's standing right beside you. I'm not afraid of it — my faith took care of that. But in those first weeks I realised something: none of us gets to choose whether we die. Everyone of us gets to choose how we live. I've always tried to live without regrets. I have some anyway. And one question kept coming back to me: after nearly forty years in this industry, have I done enough? The honest answer was no. So once I'd healed enough to stand, I made a vow. I was going to come out swinging.
What I keep coming back to is that the four million copies are still out there. People still write to me about Pablo and Bruno. Leaders are still handing my books to new people, using editions I published before some of those people were born. That isn't a legacy; it's an unfinished job.
So I'm doing three things with the time I've been given. I'm rewriting all ten titles for 2026 and 2027, because a book published in 1992 shouldn't be explaining the modern economy to anyone. The facts needed updating — there was no internet to speak of when I wrote the first ones, then the internet changed everything, and now AI is changing it again, so the numbers and the examples all needed a rewrite. The principles didn't need a single fix. People still want security. They still want a better life for their families. That was true in 1992, and it'll be true a hundred years from now. I'm getting back on stage, which I've missed more than I expected to. And I'm finally building the thing I never had — a direct line to the people who read my work, so that the next four million readers are people I can actually talk to.
A new heart teaches you things an old one never could. I learned how much it hurts when people you expected to show up don't, and how powerful it is when complete strangers show up anyway, with prayers and cards and kindness you never earned. I've been filling notebooks on that lesson, and one day it'll be a book of its own. What I can tell you now is that you're stronger than you think — you just don't find out until life makes you prove it.
Faith, freedom, forward.
