Welcome to Darren Daly on demand, your most trusted resource to help you become better every day.

Here's your success mentor, Darren Hardy.

It was the 10th day of May in Lake City, Florida. A beautiful spring day for most, but not for the pregnant woman alone in Lakeshore Hospital.

Her husband, a janitor at the local bank, had divorced her with a baby on the way.

The year was 1930, Dr. Harry Bates. Glasses on, balding, meticulous, delivered her baby boy

without apparent complications.

But as the exhausted mother rested, Dr. Bess frowned at what he saw.

The child's right foot was completely backward, heel forward, toes facing back.

How could he tell this heartbroken woman her perfect son was deformed? When she sensed his discomfort, and he explained, she burst into tears.

There is a procedure, he assured her.

What he didn't say is that it required specialized orthopedic surgery

by experts not found within a hundred miles of their tiny town.

Whatever treatment this impoverished child received would fall to a family doctor with limited

orthopedic experience. In just two weeks, this determined physician educated himself on

infant orthopedic surgery. The procedure demanded precision, severing the pencil-sized fibula

and tibia, rotating the foot forward, all while preserving critical blood supply. Dr. Bates

performed it perfectly. The boy would stand perhaps, but never run. He might someday walk. The grateful

mother in that shabby house on Madison Street compensated with love what the doctor might

have lacked in expertise. The boy's foot grew strong, stronger because he spent hours

kicking a football onto his roof and catching it as it fell.

A block away stood Columbia's High's football field.

Soon the boy was retrieving stray balls, kicking him back over the fence with surprising accuracy.

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