Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself I grew up in Canton, Ohio in the 1950s. At one point there were six of us living in a two-bedroom house. The earliest memories I have of my parents is of them sitting around the kitchen table. They weren’t eating. They were arguing, trying to figure out how to make ends meet. I remember the tension in the room as she and my father were going back and forth about which bills to pay. Fast forward a few years and my Dad now sat at the head of a very successful life insurance business he had built from scratch. He was always looking for new salespeople, so he gave me a shot. I was already pretty good at selling from my stint with auto parts, but life insurance was a different beast. It was slow going. I was impatient. I had a wife and new baby boy at home to feed and nothing much happening on the sales front. It was right around then – on a car ride home from another failed appointment – my father gave me the best advice of my career. It was a fall day. He was driving and I was frustrated and angry at having lost the biggest sale of my career. In a moment of desperation, I asked him for help. “Gary,” he said, “you’re not going to like what I am about to tell you. The reason you didn’t get the sale is that you wanted it more than he did. And he knew it. You wanted your commission more than you wanted to help his family. You’ve got to be the one in the room who wants to help people. Stop thinking about what’s best for you and start thinking about what’s best for them.” Sure, it took a couple more years for me to realize it, but boy am I glad I did. Because as soon as I stopped thinking about myself, stopped worrying about me, and started really trying to help people – everything started to fall into place. And that’s the reason I started writing books. To honor what I learned from my dad in 1981 on that dreary fall day – the best advice I’ve ever been given – “Be the one in the room who wants to help people.”