MY BOOK
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AUTHOR NOTES
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Author's Note
I did not set out to write a success story. I set out to write the truth. For forty-plus years, I built brands, built promotions, built companies, and occasionally built a mess so big I wasn't sure I'd climb out of it. I have been fired, sued, robbed by a business partner, arrested, expelled from school, divorced, and told by a doctor I would never ski, play golf, play tennis, or run again. I have also been the architect behind some of the most successful furniture and consumer promotions in the country, trusted by a multi-billionaire to write his company's training manuals, and loved by a dog who taught me more about loyalty than most people ever did. This book is about the failures. Not because success doesn’t matter, but because the failures are where the actual lessons live. Nobody learns anything from a year that went exactly as planned. The promotions that worked are fun to talk about at dinner parties. The bounced check, the empty bank account ten days before Christmas, the front door I couldn't walk out of because of the ice — those are the moments that actually taught me something, and those are the moments I think might be worth something to you. There's a line attributed to General George Patton that became, without my ever quite deciding, the spine of this whole book: "The test of success is not what you do when you're on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom." I have hit bottom more times than I can count. The only thing I can claim with any real pride is that I kept bouncing. If there's a single thread running from the fatherless kid in St. Paul to the Air Force to Prodigal House to Ashley Furniture to a fenced yard in Florida, that's it. I kept getting back up. Every chapter in this book ends with a section called The Lesson. That is not an accident, and it is not a gimmick. It is the entire point of writing this down. If you are going through your own version of Prodigal House, your own bounced commission check, your own divorce, your own diagnosis, your own moment of staring at a closed door wondering what you're supposed to do now — I want you to see that someone else stood exactly where you're standing, and kept going. You cannot think yourself into acting. You must act yourself into thinking. That sentence saved my life once, hanging on a wall in a treatment center when I had nothing left. I hope some version of it does the same for you somewhere in these pages. I'll tell you where I'm writing this from, because I think you deserve to know. For most of my career, the phone never stopped. Companies reached out to me. People wanted my ideas, my time, my name on their projects. My office filled up with awards and recognition, and when it overflowed, the rest went into boxes in the garage. And then, somewhere around 2021, it went quiet. Now — crickets. No one calls the way they used to. The awards are still on the wall, but they don't seem to mean much to anyone but me, and some days not even to me. At seventy-two, I sometimes feel like an old horse put out to pasture, still strong, still willing, just no longer asked to run. I'm telling you that not for sympathy but for honesty, because a book about overcoming failure that pretends the author has it all figured out is worthless. I don't have it all figured out. There are still mornings the loneliness and the sense of being unneeded open a hole in my soul, and I have to do the very thing this book is about — act my way out of it, one small step at a time, before my thinking catches up. If you're somewhere dark as you read this, I'm not writing to you from a mountaintop. I'm writing to you from the climb. — Bill Napier |
Prologue
My father died on Thanksgiving Day, 1957. I was three years old. Too young to understand what death meant, too young to understand what cancer was, too young to understand that a single day could shape the rest of a person's life. I grew up knowing almost nothing about him. Ironically, my mother lived to be ninety-four. I had lunch with her countless times over the decades, sitting across the table from the one person on earth who could have told me everything. Yet I rarely asked. I think I was afraid that if I learned what a great man he really was, I would finally understand how much I had lost. So I let the silence sit there between us, year after year, and the man stayed a ghost. What I did know came in fragments — a war record, a handful of photographs, a few stories told and retold until they wore smooth — and I spent most of my adult life chasing the rest. I chased it through boardrooms, through sales numbers, through trophies and titles, and the approval of people whose names I've since forgotten. For forty years, I thought I was chasing success. Looking back, I was chasing a man I never got to meet, and the version of myself I imagined would have made him proud. This book is the story of that chase. It's the story of the mistakes that nearly ended me before I was thirty, and the second, third, and fourth chances and more that didn't. It's the story of a woman named Diane who said yes when I had nothing. Of a billionaire farm boy from Wisconsin named Ron Wanek, who became one of the best friends I ever had. Of a German Shepherd named Liberty who loved me on my worst days exactly as much as my best ones and asked for nothing in return. Years ago, Diane and I were relaxing on the couch in our home at 5091 Alameda, just talking, and she turned to me and asked, "If you had one wish, what would it be?" I didn't hesitate. "To know my dad." To this day, that's still my one selfish wish — everything else I'd wish for belongs to my children and grandchildren. But that one is just mine, and it's the engine underneath this entire book. Mostly, it's the story of failure — and what it taught me, over and over again, until I finally started listening. If you take one thing from these pages, let it be this: The bottom is not the end. It's just the place you bounce from. 
This is the last picture of my dad. He is being held up, behind the curtain, because he was way too weak, as this was one of his final days alive.
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