Who Is Dr Joey?

Like most 9-year-old boys, this one wanted a new bicycle. Three-speed bikes had just been released, and he wanted one in the worst sort of way. His parents told him he had a bike and to just be satisfied with it. He wasn’t, and attempted to earn some summer spending money for the bike of his dreams the way most young boys do—mowing grass.
Only this little guy had allergies and asthma so extreme that his financial enterprise caused a viral infection in his lungs. Subsequently, he was hospitalized at the best pediatric allergy and asthma center in the world at that time, Duke University Hospital. One evening, the doctors told his mother, “We’ve done all we can.”

His mother peered through the mist tent at the boy lying there in the hospital bed, looked deeply into his eyes, and said, “You can hold on through the night. I am positive that you can do this.”
And he did. He recovered, came home, and, still determined to get a new bike, sold inscribed Christmas cards door-to-door in the heat of an August sun. His neighbors bought his cards; a lot of cards. He asked the folks with whom his dad worked, “How many beautiful Christmas cards with your family’s name inscribed inside would you like?” They bought a lot of cards, too. He asked the folks at his church with the same result. Then people started calling him.

This 9-year-old boy who wanted a new three-speed bike sold so many inscribed Christmas cards that he bought his new bike . . . and a telescope . . . and a then-brand-new-technology cassette recorder/player.

Years later, the little boy grew up and was 17 years old when his dad came home early from a business trip one day and explained that an international company had bought the business for which he worked. They had pulled all of the cash out of it and were shutting it down, eliminating his job. “I don’t know how we’ll pay for your college,” he said. The dad cried for the very first time in front of the son.

The now-teenaged boy remembered selling Christmas cards so well. He knew he could earn extra income to pay for college. So he drove to the local AM/FM radio station, and with absolutely no experience, walked into the owner’s office and two hours later walked out with a job as a disc jockey. At first, he just worked weekends—the times no one else wanted to work. Within six months, he had the number-one rated afternoon drive show in the market.

He completed his bachelor’s degree, paying for it as a Program Director at a radio station. Later he finished a master’s degree and received a doctorate degree.
He went on to lead small, medium, and large organizations in turning around their operations. He liked to say, “I buy low and sell high.” Each of these organizations achieved some type of historical record under his leadership.

Then one day, the 9-year-old boy reached midlife and decided it was time to start his own company, speaking to and coaching people to discover how they could redefine their reality and achieve their business dreams, the same way Dale Carnegie, Colonel Sanders, Hewlett and Packard, and he had. So he started his very first business and called it, “Listen to Life.”

I am that 9-year-old boy.

Excerpted from Work Positive in a Negative World: Redefine Your Reality and Achieve Your Business Dreams