He opens with a statistic about your potential going to waste—
ninety percent locked in a room you haven’t found the door to yet.
The key is what he’s here to give you, and the glowing
backdrop of his personal brand says you’re next, you’re next,
you’re next to crack open the thing you’ve been afraid to claim,
the part of you that’s been afraid—he’s been afraid too,
he’ll tell you about the afraid, it’s the paid profession
of his particular afraid.
Fifteen hundred seats in the convention center hall,
eighty percent capacity at a hundred-twelve a ticket.
Back rows are the corporate buy-in, HR initiatives
the company purchased for the year.
The message is clear: you can if you decide to,
and the deciding is the thing, the whole cathedral
of his forty-five minutes built on that single hinge.
He’s written four books. The third was about mindset.
The fourth is a cellar of the same content,
different story at the front—
a man whose circumstance was harder than your hardest day,
and what he did with it is what you’re supposed to say
to yourself before the mirror. A chapter near the end.
The message that will bend to fit any shoulder.
The backstage meet-and-greet is two hundred extra.
Five minutes. A photo. The spectra
of his attention for the length of the camera click.
He’ll put his arm around you and the moment will be thick
with the feeling that he sees you, believes in where you’re going.
His assistant emails the photo within a week—
that thirty-second interaction living in your hallway,
a fixed point on the wall between the coat hooks and the door,
the motivational speaker and the two hundred dollars one-way.