Welcome to It's a Good Life Podcast where it's all about helping entrepreneurs think, feel, and do better.

Today we wanted to bring you a special episode from the archives.

One of our most downloaded episodes we hope you enjoy.

Today's show is an interview I did with a truly inspirational man, Mr. John O'Leary.

John and I have been friends for a number of years now and John has a very, very special story.

Brian, but if you need to delight it to be on with the fellow Irishman.

Yes, sir. Now I have the Italian name and you have the O'Leary name so we needed to do something to patty up the presentation today.

But we're delighted to have you here. A number of folks who tune into this show would know your story but there's equally as many people who don't.

And I would love to kind of take a little bit of a walk down memory lane for you. You go around the country and you give hundreds of talks each year and you have a great message of inspiration and hope that has a lot of strength to it.

And I think a lot of people, our audiences that you've spoken to have been not just inspired for the minute but encouraged long term bias.

And maybe we can go back and start at the beginning and talk a little bit about where your story began.

Yeah, and Brian, I think everybody's got a story. Just generally not the one we're telling the world.

Right. Yeah. And that is a big part of my story.

My story is at age nine, I was in a house fire burned on 100% of my body, given absolutely no chance to survive.

Somehow survived the first night through God's grace survived the second night, the third and five months in hospital years of therapy and surgeries lost my fingers to amputation.

And then moved on with my life. I never once looked back. I just wanted to pretend like everything was ordinary like I was normal.

That was the great goal of my life to be normal. What an unusual goal. But that was my goal. And I was very normal for a long time.

I hit it well behind clothes and booze and success and everything else. And then about nine years ago, my mom and dad wrote a book about my story, the real story.

It's called overwhelming odds. They printed 100 copies for their church. They have sold over 70,000 cents, which is a really big number for a self published author.

As you are now recognizing. Oh, my Lord. As a new author yourself. It's a huge number. Yeah.

And one of the copies was sold to your guest today, John O'Leary, for ten bucks. I got to read about how I got burned. It transforms my life.

For the first time, I got to look in the mirror and realize the fingers and the scars and the brokenness and the stairs and others and the pain that I have physically today.

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