Books
Two books.
One on leading when it is on the line. One on getting your body back after 50.
Badge to Boardroom
Leadership principles from the street to the boardroom, boiled down to five you can run. It also tells how I lost my first business in the 2008 crisis and started over from zero.
5.0 out of 5 stars on Amazon (4 ratings).
“It was a hot summer dayshift. Second watch, almost noon. And I was thinking about Chinese food.” Read the opening
“The principles didn’t end the war. They gave me a way to keep fighting it without losing ground I can’t afford to lose.”
Foreword
“I know I sound like an old man, waking at 4:30 a.m. I remember my granddad waking early to sit with my grandma and drink coffee, and I remember thinking, what is wrong with old people?
I get it now.
There’s a peaceful quiet that only happens in the morning. I can’t explain it, but for me it’s close to being with God.”
Chapter Two: Foundation
“A mistake owned becomes a problem you can fix. A mistake covered up becomes a liability that grows in the dark, collects interest, and comes due at the worst possible time.”
Chapter Three: Ownership
“The truth costs you something once. The lie costs you something every day it has to be maintained. The gap between the lie and reality only widens.”
Chapter Five: Guidance
Forged After 50
A field manual for professional men over 50. The edge dulls for most men. They call it age. Most of it is neglect.
5.0 out of 5 stars on Amazon (2 ratings).
“You are not training for the mirror. You are training for the next thirty years.”
Chapter 1: Why Strength After 50 Is Non-Negotiable
“The strongest man in the room at sixty is the one who was smart enough at fifty to still be training.”
Chapter 12: Train So You Can Keep Training
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is sustainable. Sustainable is what gets results that last.”
Chapter 3: The Recomposition Truth
“The discipline is not never falling. It’s the speed at which you get back to the plan. One bad meal never derailed anyone. The story a man tells himself afterward did.”
Chapter 15: Holding the Line
Excerpt
From the opening
From the Author’s Note
I let myself slide.
Not all at once. It came the way it comes for most men. One long stretch of shifts, then another. Police work first, then a corporate chair. Both of them filed down an edge I used to take for granted. I told myself it was age. Low energy. Short stamina. A body that tired fast and came back slow. Every man around me was fading the same way, so I called it normal.
It wasn’t normal. I built it back on the other side of fifty, harder than it had ever been. I rebuilt the body, and the body rebuilt the man.
I am not a doctor. I am a man who lived this, all the way down and all the way back.
From the Introduction: The Mirror at 50
Nobody decays overnight. It happens in the small stuff you let slide, the workout you skip because the morning got away from you, the sleep you trade for one more hour of work, the food you grab on the go, because there was no time to think. None of it shows the next day. It shows up a year later, then five, in a body you do not quite recognize and an energy level you have quietly learned to call normal.
An excerpt from Forged After 50. Read more in Forged After 50