I knew that I had to write this book on October 5, 2003.
That was the day that Butch – my partner, friend, and biggest supporter – died after being terribly burned three days earlier in a fire at one of our waste processing plants.
Butch was the most special man I’d ever met. Strong as an ox and smart as a whip.
He spent a lot of his life farming and he’d been the force that germinated my entrepreneurial seed. His death was a huge blow.
It knocked the sails out of so many folks on our team.
It broke me and pushed me over the edge and into the Valley of Uncertainty, where I languished for years before finally figuring out how to Break Through and make my future much bigger than my past.
Twelve years later, from this super low point where I wanted to quit and forever feel sorry for myself, I sold the company Butch and I had started for a remarkable amount.
That’s when I realized that the ideas and stories that made it into the book needed to get out and be told.
While I knew that my stories and experiences where my own, I also knew that they weren’t unique and that many entrepreneurs end up broken and in their own Uncertainty Valley at some point in their journey…
I’d seen too many of them stay there too long and lose their sense (and hope) for what they were still capable of creating.
I wrote the book to change that.
To give people a roadmap that they could follow (or borrow) to help them get where I believe they deserve to be.
-Mike
