Unlimited Power at 10

I read Unlimited Power when I was ten years old. Tony Robbins, a beat-up paperback, a fifth grader in a house outside Philadelphia. The other kids had comic books. I do not remember who left it lying around the house. I remember opening it and not putting it back down.

I did not understand most of it. I understood enough. It was the first time anybody told me that what happens inside your head is a system, and that a system can be run on purpose instead of just happening to you. State, focus, the questions you ask yourself, the meaning you assign to a bad day. At ten I could not have named any of that. I just knew it worked.

That is a strange thing to hand a fifth grader, and it is also the most useful thing anybody ever handed me. I ran those tools on schoolwork. I ran them on sports. I ran them on every business I started before I was old enough to drive, and on every one of them that failed. None of it made me impressive at ten. All of it made me durable later.

Here is what I did not know at ten. Fourteen years later I would be in a situation where the only thing standing between me and not making it was whether I could still run my own mind. The tools I picked up out of a paperback at ten are the tools that kept me alive at twenty-four. That is not a tidy line written for a website. It is just what happened. You never find out in advance which day is the one that saves you.