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Warning: Proceed with Caution!!!

You are about to enter the most dangerous part of the entire book—it is more provocative, more forceful, and more opinionated than all those preceding. This chapter deals with the truth. My truth. The truth as I see it. I won’t mince words and I don’t intend to coddle. The truth doesn’t aim to please, it aims to reveal—which can be both painful and liberating. Yes, the truth sets us free, but what it frees us from are often deeply rooted ways of thinking that have become at once familiar, comfortable . . . and limiting.

Before you begin, I need to make two additional points. First, as much as I wrote this book for you, the reader, I also wrote it for me, a flawed man. I am a person who, in too many instances, has compromised myself in order to obey people I neither respected nor agreed with. In big ways and in small, I have been true to others at the expense of being true to myself. I have been well behaved . . . but pacing. This part reflects the book’s most personal aim: to speak my truth.

Second, the decision about whether or not to read this rests entirely with you. I would ask, however, that you consider whether or not you have found the book valuable thus far. The question is, do you trust me? If so, then I invite you to demonstrate that trust by turning the page and reading on. If not, then please recall that in the beginning of the book I told you that I would be asking you to take a risk. According to Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, the oldest definition of the word risk comes from the Latin riscaré, which means “to dare.” Thus, in the truest sense of the words, I dare you to enter this final part.