ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When we were putting this book together, we agreed to do our best to
organize it using the principles of The ONE Thing. Most books follow
the Chicago Manual of Style’s traditional guidelines and have a half-
title, title, copyright, endorsements, author bio, foreword,
acknowledgments, dedication, and epigraph pages all before you ever
get to the table of contents and the actual text. Really?
It all got tossed out the window. In terms of advocating for you,
the reader, we felt this was the ONE “design” Thing we could do to
improve your experience. As a result, the acknowledgments ended up
in the back of the book. In reality, if you were to reorder the book in
terms of what’s most important to the authors, this section may well
have fallen just inside the front cover.
We began outlining this book in the summer of 2008 and
submitted the first full draft to our publisher on June 1, 2012—a four-
year journey we certainly couldn’t have navigated without help. Lots
of it.
Family comes first. Without the love and support of my wife
Mary and son John, this book wouldn’t be what it is. My writing
partner, Jay, is equally thankful for the love and encouragement from
Wendy and his kids, Gus and Veronica. Spouses, especially wise,
literate ones like ours, get the largely thankless job of reading all the
rough drafts rife with flaws and riddled with errors that eventually
become a finished book.
We also benefited from a great support team. Vickie Lukachik
and Kylah Magee loaded us up with so much research it took us close
to half a year to digest it. Valerie Vogler-Stipe and Sarah Zimmerman
did their ONE Thing and kept our plates and calendars free so we
could stay focused on the book. The rest of our team, Allison Odom,
Barbara Sagnes, Mindy Hager, Liz Krakow, Lisa Weathers, Denice