You're listening to the Creating a Brand podcast success story segment.

I am your host, Alex San Felipe.

In this short segment of the show, I bring on friends of the podcast to share a motivational,

inspiring, and sometimes even challenging story from their entrepreneurial journey,

along with a

practical takeaway for us to implement. The point is for each of us to be able to learn and

grow from the experiences of others. With that said, please enjoy today's success story episode.

I'm Dr. Ty Bell Knapp. Go to portbell.com and click on contact if you'd like to get a hold of me.

I found myself homeless as a teenager. And being homeless is difficult, but being homeless as a teenager

is almost impossible. We never talked about the future because, frankly, we didn't see one. And we never

talked about how we would die, but we all assumed it would either be suicide or drug overdose.

Hope was something other people had the luxury of having. Then one day, I was sitting next to an

older homeless man, and he said something that surprised me. Looking at his shoes,

he said, we are so rich. Did you know that the average homeless person in America is richer

than the average regular person in India? And I realized that I was looking at a person who had really

lost hope. He'd resigned himself to being

homeless. Then it dawned on me that I had, too. That was when I was 17 years old. That day I decided

I needed to change. I needed to start hoping that things could be better. I needed to imagine a better

life. Now, I don't know your

spiritual convictions, but to me this was the testament of God, even though I didn't follow him at the time,

because he started putting things in people into my life to help me change. I went from being a

homeless team that knew almost nothing but stress to a beach bomb dive master in Hawaii,

...