Mastering the Art of Success
his church houses tens of thousands. It is a former Houston sports
ar ena. When it was up for sale, millions of Houstonians drove past it on
the freeway but only one had a vision for it as a place of worship, Joel
Osteen. He’s a visionary, a game-changer, and he inspires me to be my
best self.
Game changers cause me to beg the question, “What i nnovation and
boldness do I need to bring to my work and my life
to day?”
Closer to home, my mother and father instill ed in me a w ork ethic
th at lent itself to integrity, wisdom, and a uthenticity. I never forget
who I am and where I came from. It is my obligation to reach out and
he lp o thers up, to teach what I learn, to share the blessings I have been
given with to those less fortunate.
We lived in a blue-collar neighborhood. With working parents, we
kids came home after school, and usually an elder neighbor peered
across the street to make sure we went inside and stayed there until
our parents arrived home from work. The street corners were littered
with a handful of harmless middle-aged men who were down on their
luck, swapping funny stories, one upping each other and taking a swig
fr om a bottle of cheap liquor known as Mad Dog 20-20. A fortified wine
produced by Mogen David wineries that contained 7.5 percent to 18.0
percent alcohol and was anywhere from 15 to 36 proof. However, to
kids walking home alone from school, passing the corner mob was
sometimes scary. Imagine loud voices bursting into laughter and an
awkward silence falling over the streets as you walk by, with your eyes
focused on your home just a few feet away. We had come to feel
disrespect for these guys, calling them “thugs”—behind their backs of
course.
When my father found out that we felt this way and said s uch
th ings, he was appalled. He threatened to punish us if he ever heard us
make such awful comments or be afraid of these guys. He explained to
us that we didn’t know any of their journeys, what rejection they had
experienced, or their pain. And further, it wasn’t for us to judge
another person’s experience. We were to love them into wholeness and
to treat them with all due respect. I have come to know my father’s
lessons as life’s truths. People are people and d eserve to be held in
respect and deserve to be treated as kings and queens. Even when the