Chapter 1. Principle number one. Make your own map. How the fuck did I get here?

If you've had any success, whether being promoted on the job or in your own business venture,

I'm betting you've had a WTF moment of your own. That moment when the impossible becomes true

in your underdog story. The night I won

the 2019 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award, I had a WTF moment. It was long

after midnight, Liz and I had been partying late with a bunch of famous business people and

millionaires.

Now we were back at the Omni Hotel at the Battery Atlanta, where we'd been put up in an executive

suite with a balcony that looked onto the field where the Atlanta Braves play.

I turned out the lights, lay down and thought, wow, that was a cool day.

But I didn't fall asleep to that thought. Instead,

my brain flashed back to where I came from. I was 18 years old again, back at the university

hospital staring at nine babies not knowing which one was mine. That was the day my daughter

Hannah was born. Two lives started

the day my firstborn came into the world. One was hers. The other was my rebirth. I didn't know it

in that moment, but everything was about to change. I wanted to see my baby girl so bad, but I wasn't allowed.

Excuse me, I'm here to see Elizabeth Stolvey, I said to the nurse. I stood in front of the

admissions nurse at the front counter of the birth unit at University Hospital, where I rolled up

with my buddy, Ben. She scanned her list. There's no one here by that name, she said. We were two

18-year-old kids pretending to be men. The fact that I needed a sidekick was an obvious tell.

My first union sales rep shirt didn't make me any more of an adult either. To the nurse,

we were two little boys playing dress-up. Uh, yeah, there is, I said.

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