THE THUMBS UP LETTER THAT INSPIRED ME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

A FATHER GAVE MY ORIGINAL BOOK on success, written approximately twenty years ago, to his son, which changed his life. Last year, his son sent me the open letter below, which shares a personal story of how giving someone a thumbs up can come in different forms. After learning of my impact on his life, I was so humbled that I wrote this book. I call that the full circle and the power of Thumbs Up.

—JOEY REIMAN

It’s a long story, but here goes: When Joey was running the Joey Reiman Agency in the early to mid-1990s (before what we’d now call a pivot into the idea consultancy), his offices were in Buckhead Plaza, which is where my dad, Sylvain Lidsky, ran the shoe-repair store on the ground floor, Buckhead Plaza Shoe Service. Joey was a customer of my dad’s. At some point, around late 1993, Joey gave my dad a first edition of his inspirational self-help book called Success: The Original Handbook.

It took me a while to get around to reading it, but as they say, sometimes you don’t read a book until you’re ready for it. I read it when I was flailing about trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I’d gone to law school, but I had no passion for a career as a lawyer. Law firms knew it, too, and I couldn’t even get an interview for a job I’d hate. For six months following graduation I was an associate at a discount department store chain making $6 an hour—not the kind of professional associate my dad had in mind! Then I moved back home with my folks. At age twenty-five, overeducated and under-skilled, I was a cliché—a subspecies of the then much-discussed Generation X.

Joey’s book really helped my attitude and gave me a framework to focus on what I might want to do and how to make it happen. And then Joey generously agreed to meet me. It was the spring of 1995. Advertising was one of the arenas that interested me (along with journalism), and Joey was very supportive and encouraging. He told me he’d give me a job if he had one to give me (which may have been a cold offer, but it certainly gave me hope), and he told me a bit of advice that has held up amazingly well: If all you care about is making money, you’ll end up making money. But if you do what you love, maybe you won’t make any money early on, but in the end you’ll do all right.

Perhaps a month after I met with Joey, I moved back to New York City, which is where I wanted to be. Two months later, after a few false starts, I got my foot in the door at PC Magazine, which was then the largest and most successful magazine of any kind. I was a freelance fact checker and really liked it. They had entry-level job openings and after a few weeks of freelancing they asked me to think about taking a full-time position. The salary was $21,000. My law-school loans would swallow up 50 percent of my take-home pay; rent would take the rest. I was scared to death to take this job. I spent a weekend despairing about the offer and how I’d swing it. But I remembered Joey’s words of advice. And I decided to go for it.

It obviously paid off. I got promoted twice in sixteen months, which got me to a more livable wage. (For years, in a tribute designed for my own personal enjoyment, I closed every email I wrote with “Thumbs Up.”) Today, I have what my wife calls “the last good job in journalism,” and I love it more now, nineteen years later, than I did when I first thrilled to full-time employment in the field. I am arguably the most successful journalist from my college class, even though I never worked on the school paper or took any courses in its vaunted journalism grad school. And it all started when Joey gave my dad a copy of his book for me and when he agreed to meet the son of the guy who ran a service business in his building. Think about that. I can’t even formulate a commensurate equivalent in my life.

—DAVID LIDSKY
Deputy Editor, Fast Company