There I sat with my back against the bathroom door, the sound of my Tiffanie’s muffled sobs echoing through from the other side. I had never wanted to pull her into my arms and tell her how much I loved her more than I did right then. All I had to do was yank down on the handle and rush in. Except, far more than a door separated us—a wall of deceit and heartbreak a mile thick stood between us. I’d been trying for months to cover up the truth I so desperately wanted to stay hidden, but now, with my girlfriend and me slumped against either side of the door, the secret was out. As the hours passed and the tears falling down my cheeks dried, my mind wondered. I could never be enough. Why couldn’t I just get this right? Why did I keep ending up back in the same place? Why couldn’t I change? I had failed yet again, like I had so many times before, but this time it was big. I had been lying. I’d been covering up the truth that I so desperately wanted to keep a secret. Earlier that day, I had strolled through the snacks aisle at the grocery store and grabbed a bag of chips when my phone buzzed with a message from Tiffanie. As soon as I started to read the text, I realized that she knew everything. I realized the woman I loved had found out just how much I had betrayed her, and undoubtedly had already started packing her bags to leave. I couldn’t bear the fallout of my actions this time. I could make it through losing everything else, but I couldn’t lose the one good thing—the best thing—I had left. Without hesitating, I dropped the chips to the floor, left my basket in the middle of the aisle, and sprinted outside. I jumped in the car and raced out of the parking lot, switching lanes furiously as I passed slow-moving traffic. It seemed that none of the other drivers had a care in the world as they cruised through the streets. Not me. My world was collapsing from the inside out. I slammed the pedal to the floorboard and flew down the road, oblivious to the speed limit. As I approached the stoplight, it flashed from yellow to red, but I couldn’t stop. I had to get to Tiffanie before she left. I flew through the intersection and turned left into our neighborhood, speeding down the street. The tires screeched as I turned into the driveway and slammed my foot on the brake, halting my car next to hers. She hadn’t left yet. I still had time. I leaped out of our old, white, dented SUV and raced across the yard. Grabbing the handle, I flung open the door and hurried down the hallway; it seemed so much longer than usual, each step growing heavier and each breath more strained. As I reached the bedroom door, I paused. I wanted to reach for the doorknob, but the fear pressed down on my hands. I stood there frozen. What if this was it? What if Tiffanie decided to leave me? Those thoughts swirled in my head like leaves in the wind, never settling. I was scared. I was uncertain of what would happen. I didn’t know what to do. But I had to do something. I couldn’t just keep standing there like an idiot. So, like ripping off a Band-Aid, I opened the door. Tiffanie spun around, startled by the door. Tears streamed down her face and a bag full of clothes lay scattered on the bed. She looked in my direction but couldn’t bring herself to look at my face, nor did she say a word. I felt like a ghost as my girlfriend became incapable of even acknowledging my presence. I could feel her disappointment and anger. Suddenly, she spun back away from me, stormed to the bathroom, and locked the door. I could hear her sobs. Have you ever made a mistake you hoped no one would ever find out about? Well, this was mine. Every night for the past few months, I would sneak away into the garage where I could fuel my drug addiction in privacy. When Tiffanie was at work, I would message other women and find people to hook up with. I was stealing to help pay the bills and buy food so that she wouldn’t know that I had been lying about my unemployment. At first, it hadn’t seemed so bad, making up excuses here and there so that it seemed like everything was OK. I had become quite the performer over the years, putting on a mask to hide the real me—to hide the pain. I had done this most of my life, and it was second nature. I had so many stories, so many excuses. When I lost my job due to a relapse a few weeks earlier, I continued to “go to work” each day to make everything seem fine. But in reality, I was running errands for someone who paid me in meth, and when I was off, I chased other women. Our gas got turned off, but Tiffanie put up with it. Then our water got shut off, but she loved me anyway and even believed in me. Now, the charade came crashing down, finding out deception after deception was just too much. She was done. As I walked into the bedroom that day and looked at her, her red eyes and tear-stained cheeks told me everything. I couldn’t keep hurting people like this. I realized I only had one choice if I wanted to save our relationship. If I wanted to fix the things I so meticulously destroyed with one lie on top of the other, I had only one possibility. I had to do something that was so foreign to me that it made me anxious just thinking about it. I had to tell the truth. I had to finally acknowledge my mistakes and own all I had done. I had to accept responsibility for my actions and beg for forgiveness. Even though it seemed like a difficult hill to climb, she was worth it. No one had ever loved me as fully as she did. She let me be myself and she believed in who I could be. Not the man I was today. I didn’t set out to hurt her. I never would have done that, but most of our worst decisions are made not by lying to others but by lying to ourselves. We slowly creep down a path we told ourselves we would never even glance at by making excuses for the little things that put us in a position to make the big decisions that ruin everything. We don’t stumble into an affair, but instead, we lie to ourselves by saying that texting the other person is harmless. We don’t wake up and hate our significant other. We lie to ourselves and say that we are the victim and the innocent one in the fight. We don’t throw away our potential overnight. We lie to ourselves and say that we need a few weeks to decompress and a few months to finish that series on Netflix, but we realize our life isn’t what we hoped for. It’s the lies that we tell ourselves that are the most dangerous. Oddly enough, they are the easiest to believe. So, there I sat on the other side of the door from the woman I loved, crying and begging her to forgive me. “Tiffanie, you know I love you. I never meant to hurt you,” I whispered. I wished I could come up with something more eloquent to say, but the words escaped me. “Can you ever forgive me?” Silence. The seconds felt like hours as I waited for a response. Muffled through the door, I heard her faint whisper. “How could you do this?” Something in me broke when those words came out of her mouth. Five words is all it took for my heart to shatter. Now, even more words escaped me. Nausea filled my mouth as I suppressed the urge to vomit. I couldn’t fix this. “I am so sorry. I don’t know how things got here. I just felt like I couldn’t stop. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how.” My response was again followed by silence. “Please forgive me,” I cried. As the evening lingered on and the tears slowly stopped, I was able to convince her to stay with me, to give me one more chance. Forgiveness was a long way off, but at least she stayed. But as we lay in bed that night, the familiar, daunting thoughts pounded in my head. Why couldn’t I be enough? Why couldn’t I get it together? Why did I always screw everything up? Why did I always hurt those closest to me? As I stared at the dark ceiling, unable to sleep, an answer came to me. It wasn’t an answer I liked but no matter how much I didn’t want to accept it, it was the truth. And it was one of the best lessons I have ever learned in my life. This is the greatest truth that helped me overcome the problems that I had created and eventually build a life that I could only dream of. This truth is so powerful that if you accept it, your life can be different, too. The simple truth is this: “YOU ARE WRONG!” I know no one wants to hear that, but again, it is the truth. Certainly, you have been right about some things, but if you are like me, the times in your life that have been the worst were when you were unable to accept that you were wrong. The greatest lie I ever told myself was that I was always right. I was the victim and I was the one being betrayed. They deserved it. I had convinced myself of my own innocence in the problems I was facing because there was always a reasonable excuse. I had a hard childhood, people were going to betray me anyway, it was just a little money, and I would pay it back later. I became an expert at minimizing my role in everything and maximizing everyone else’s. There is such freedom in knowing that you are wrong. You are able to seek truth. If you are able to accept that you’re wrong, then you can ask what is right? You can finally fix the problem if you accept that you are the cause. You’ve likely made mistakes up to this point in your life. Wherever you’re at right now, it’s most likely your fault to some degree. You’ve brought yourself to the lowest points in your life because of decisions that you’ve made and actions that you’ve taken because you thought you were right. You thought it was the right path, or maybe you thought that nobody would find out. You thought, you thought, you thought, but you were wrong. I am the source of my problems, and the best place to start working on fixing any obstacle I am facing is to work on me. “If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first three sharpening my axe.” —Abraham Lincoln Wherever you are today, humble yourself to see your own insufficiencies. You are directly limited by the amount of pride you have in any given situation. When I was tossing and turning in bed the night after my make-believe world shattered into a thousand pieces, my real journey started. I was liberated by the fact that I was wrong, and instead, I finally asked myself what was right. The beauty of acknowledging that you’re wrong is that you can start asking questions. You can start challenging your own thinking, you can change your mindset, and you can push yourself to find the answers. You can grow. This truth took me from having a fixed mindset and thinking things could never change to having a growth mindset and believing for the first time that things could be different. I had resigned myself to live in the pit of my mediocrity without ever climbing out of it. It’s just how it was. Drug addicts stay drug addicts, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It’s just the way of the world. At least that is what I thought. When I finally challenged my thinking, I freed myself. The question that I kept asking myself—“Why can’t I change?”—slowly lost its hold on me. The thought that I was never good enough slowly slipped into the back of my mind. If I was wrong about all of these other things then maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about the way I viewed myself and who I really was. Maybe I was wrong about how hopeless the situation was, and if I was wrong, then there was hope. I could find freedom in not always having to be right. The key to finding the wisdom to change your life is to start asking questions, start challenging your thinking, start seeking answers. The starting point for changing any situation is a growth mindset. I believe that taking on a growth mindset was the most important thing I did to change my life. My life has changed dramatically from the drug addict you met at the beginning of this story. Today, I have a few more answers than I used to, but I am always open to learning a better way. I’m always open to being wrong. As I’m writing this, I have a two-year-old at home, and we are potty training. She has started doing this thing where she goes to her play area, sits down, and hides while she poops. Eventually, I’ll get a whiff of this awful smell and ask her, “Did you poop?” “No,” she responds. “I know you pooped. Let’s go change.” Again, she responds angrily, “No.” As I go to pick her up and get a new diaper, she always runs off. For some reason, she wants to stay in her mess. For some reason, she wants to stay in her poop, because, although it is gross, it is her mess and she made it. I don’t know for the life of me why she wants to stay in it. Maybe it’s warm, maybe she likes the way it feels, perhaps she just doesn’t want to go through the process of change. But she fights me at getting changed every single time. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you look at your life and there’s one mess or another that you’ve created. Maybe it’s that you failed at a job or let down your family and friends. Maybe your business is failing, or your grades are slipping. Perhaps you’re in my shoes: you’ve lied, and addictions have plagued you. Maybe you feel like you can never be enough. Maybe it’s depression or anxiety. No matter what your mess is, have you decided to stay in it? Be open to being wrong. Hopefully by now you realize your messes are your own, past and present, but if you’re like my two-year-old and you just want to stay in your poop, then this book is not for you. If you’ve made your mess and you’re comfortable in it, if you don’t want to put in the work, effort, and time to change, then you should go ahead and put the book down. Don’t waste your time on the following chapters if you’re not willing to take action. If you’re not willing to get out of your mess, then stop reading now. How do you go from being an underdog to being a champion? How do you go from facing obstacles to overcoming them? If you are ready to get out of your mess, then read on!