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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626345355 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Greenleaf Book Group, LLC |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning
Early one morning in the '90s, my dad was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, slowly drinking his coffee and smoking his morning cigarette. At about six years old, I was almost comically the opposite. I was running around the house in a way that was annoying to anyone old enough to understand the word mortgage.
Suddenly, my dad yelled at me in a stern voice. "Alex, get over here!" I could tell he was using his "angry voice" that only a genuine dad can possess.
Not knowing what I had done, I timidly walked over to the kitchen table and stared up at him.
"Yes, Dad?" I asked.
"Alex," he said, "your room is too messy. I buy you all these toys and games, and you leave them all over the floor. You need to go up to your room and clean it right now. But here's the deal. You clean your room, and I will give you fifty cents. Okay?"
I looked at my father.
I didn't say anything.
I turned around and scrambled up the stairs. I ran down the hallway and into my bedroom, which was right above the kitchen, where my father was sitting. Through the ceiling, he could hear my little feet moving across the floor, pushing things around my room. Then, in a unit of time that was obviously not long enough to do any real cleaning, I ran back down the stairs to where my dad was sitting.
I looked him in the eye, threw two quarters on the kitchen table, and said, "You do it."
He probably didn't think it was funny in the moment, but as time passed, this would become Dad's favorite story about me. He used to tell the story just like that, except with a Chinese accent.
In 1974, at seventeen, my father moved to the United States from Hong Kong. His first name was Wei Min, but everyone just called him Al. I must have heard too many immigrant jokes as a kid because for the majority of my life I thought my father came to America on a boat. Nope. He definitely came on a commercial airplane. After all, it was 1974, not 1874.
Dad started out somewhere in Michigan, but he eventually put down roots in Ohio, where he met my mom, Angela, and where my brother and I have always called home. My brother, Greg, was born in 1983, and I came along to annoy him in 1985. While we were still very young, Dad worked as a short-order breakfast cook and a waiter at a couple of different restaurants while he went to college for pharmacy. He eventually earned his degree, went on to get his MBA, and became a successful pharmacist, working in the same hospital system for twenty-five years.
Probably the most stereotypical thing about my dad was that he was an extremely hardworking immigrant. Dad understood what it meant to be poor and feared that he would end up that way again. I remember him telling me a story that took place not too long after he moved to America. He was living in a house with about six other people. Many of them worked at the same restaurant he did. Dad told me about how hard it was to make a living back then. One day, my father was down to his very last twenty-six cents. He remembered the exact amount. He stared at those coins in his hand, and he cried. That day, he promised himself that he would never allow himself to be that poor again. And because of hard work, he never was.
Even when it wasn't necessary, my dad would often work two jobs. I remember him working a full week at the hospital and then taking a part-time job at a retail pharmacy located hours out of town, so he could work the weekends too. He did this when he was in his fifties. Dad was determined to retire early, and he understood what he needed to do to make that happen.
My dad's work ethic had at least one positive effect on his role as a father. He was good at keeping the promises he made to me and my brother. My dad was far from a perfect person, but if he said he was going to be there, he showed up. If Dad said he was going to be at one of my middle school lacrosse games, I didn't look into the stands wondering if he was going to make it — I only looked to see where he was sitting. If he said he was going to pay for my college education, the check was already in the mail. My dad didn't care that promises were hard to keep. If you say it, you do it.
As a child, and even in my twenties, I thought this type of determination and commitment must have skipped a generation. By my father's standards, I must have been born lazy — an inheritance he thought could only come from my mother. The story of the two quarters on the kitchen table illustrates his point.
Fast-forward to 2011. My father is fifty-four years old and perhaps sitting at that same kitchen table when his cell phone rings. He turns it over and sees that it's the hospital calling. This is where my father works, so he has to answer. Dad swipes the screen to take the call. On the other line is a friend of his, a doctor who works at the hospital. They start talking, and my father soon realizes that this call is not about work. It's about a lab test that Dad has taken recently after having a bout of pneumonia.
In this phone conversation, my father was informed that he had been diagnosed with stage IV small-cell lung cancer.
My father started smoking cigarettes when he was teenager. After decades of the habit, he quit smoking three years before he was diagnosed. Unfortunately, the cancer had already taken its hold. But my father was a "go down swinging" kind of man. He came to this country as an immigrant and he knew what it was like to struggle to survive. He wasn't about to leave without a fight.
With this attitude, my dad elected for the most aggressive treatments. He started radiation and chemotherapy.
A lot of people are familiar with the word chemotherapy, but few know what it actually is. Chemotherapy is literally a poison. Developed prior to World War II, chemotherapy is based on a primitive concept. The idea is to poison the body so deeply that the cancer cannot survive — but maybe that's the only way to give the patient a chance. As a pharmacist in a hospital system for twenty-five years, my father knew more about the drugs he was taking than a lot of people ever will, and with that knowledge comes a distinct understanding of the odds that are against you. In the case of my father, those odds were terrible. But if you work in a hospital long enough, you will see people who do beat the odds. My dad believed he could be one of them.
The tumor was so close to my father's heart that it was surgically inoperable. Fortunately, with chemo and radiation, the tumor actually began to shrink. Over time, it shrunk so small that you couldn't see it on any of the numerous medical scans they did on my dad. Even he — the most genuine of skeptics, I assure you — deemed it some sort of miracle that perhaps he was saved.
I will never be able to find the words to accurately describe the sense of relief that overcame me. That relief quickly turned into a burning need to celebrate victory. My dad paid for me to go to college, so I was pretty good at celebrating at this point. I went to my father and said, "This is amazing news, Dad! Okay, listen, old man. We've got to celebrate! Anywhere you want go! Anything you want to do! Money is no object. Okay, Dad, let's hear it. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?"
Waiting in anticipation, I thought he was going say something exciting, like the Bahamas, New Zealand, or Disneyland.
Nope.
"I want Chinese food."
Dad wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant we'd been to seven trillion times. He was boring like that. But you know how dads are — they have a routine, and they like what they like. I was hoping for something more ridiculous, but it was his day, so he got to choose. You can't argue with that. We had a great time eating at a Chinese restaurant that one of his buddies owned. It was a great night.
You have no idea what I would do for the chance live that night again. I would give you a fortune for just five more minutes. But cancer doesn't care how much you love your father. In less than a year, the cancer would return to my father's lungs. It would spread to his liver, to his pancreas, and to his brain.
On September 4, 2012, the sun shined through the curtains of my father's house. I visualize that morning more than I would like to. I went to my father's bedside with my brother and my step-mom. I played some music for my father that I thought he might like. I held his hand, and, with the best of my ability as his son, I desperately tried to comfort him. I told him not to worry about his boys. I told him that he raised us well and that we were going to be okay. Then I told him to let go. At 11:31 a.m., I said goodbye to my dad for the last time.
Before the funeral, I was asked by my family to give my father's eulogy, to speak of his greatest quality as a man. I kept coming back to this thought: the importance of a promise. Too often in life, people say things like, "I'll get to it," or, "Tomorrow." But one day, there is no tomorrow. The promises that we make and keep and those we choose to dishonor — they are what define us. They define our character. They always have. It was that way long before my father was ever born, and it will be that way long after I die. Perhaps the greatest measure of honor is how we treat our promises.
I gave my father's eulogy and titled the speech "Because I Said I Would." I talked about the importance of a promise that day at his funeral. And, for the very first time, I handed out what I would call Promise Cards. On the front, the cards say because I said I would. On the back, there is nothing.
The Promise Card is a simple concept. You write a promise on the card. Maybe it's something small you said today, or maybe it's something so deep that it defines part of your purpose for being on this planet. You give that card to the person that you're making that promise to, and you tell them, "I'm going to fulfill this promise, and when I do, I will earn that card back. This card is a symbol of my honor. It is my property, and I'm coming back for it." You fulfill your promise, you earn your card back, and you keep it as a reminder that you are a person of your word — maybe someone like Al Sheen was to his sons.
When my father's funeral ended, I went home. The next thing I did set off a chain of events, the scope of which I may never understand. This is where the Internet enters the story. I made a post online. It was an offer. I said that I would mail ten Promise Cards to anyone, anywhere in the world at no cost to anybody.
That gesture became two important and life-changing things:
1. The start of a social movement around the world
2. The dumbest financial decision I have ever made
Kids, don't offer free stuff to strangers on the Internet. You see, getting five requests for Promise Cards in a day is no big deal. You wake up early, pack a few envelopes, feed your dog, laugh at a few memes as you brush your teeth, pack a few more envelopes, and so on — a few here and there. That's how life feels at five requests in a day. But what if you were to get 50 requests overnight? Then all of a sudden, the number is 500. Now think about 15,000 requests in a single day. What do you do when it goes viral? I had to figure that out.
I learned about the importance of a promise not just from my father, but from humanity itself. People around the world started posting pictures of their Promise Cards and the stories behind them on social media. Complete strangers would find inspiration in those messages, and they would ask because I said I would for cards to make their own promises. Pictures of those cards were posted, and the loop would start again.
This book is an attempt to describe what happened when I accidentally started a chain reaction. It's about the impact that promises have on the world and the life lessons they teach.
Because I said I would is a social movement and nonprofit dedicated to the betterment of humanity through promises made and kept. It started as a eulogy to my father, but it has grown into a force far greater than its origin.
I must insist that this is not a business book. In fact, if someone bought you this book trying to motivate you for commercial purposes, please return it to them and point to this sentence. Yes, promises connect with all parts of life, but we are a humanitarian effort and nothing else. I hope that becomes plain to see in the pages to come.
I must also warn you that this book is not in chronological order, nor is it separated into well-defined themes. There are seven sections about our Code of Honor, but those don't create clean division between principles or character values. The somewhat random nature of this book presents the same challenge that was presented to me. Stories just flooded in and realizations did not always come to me in a neat package. The meaning of each promise story wasn't always immediately clear. Sometimes, I got to know supporters on a personal level, and other times, the promise was only an image shared on social media with no context. Somehow, the stories built meaning on one another all by themselves. As the thousands on thousands of messages poured in, it took time for the bigger picture to show itself.
I need to apologize in advance to my longtime supporters expecting extended accounts of my personal promises. While this book is certainly written from my perspective, I made a very intentional decision not to include many of my personal promises and only lightly cover the handful of ones I do talk about. This movement was never intended to be about me; I was just trying to do my part and lead by example. Trust me, though — our supporters' promise stories are much stronger and more insightful than my commitments can ever be.
Please know that, to my knowledge, everything in this book is factual. This is a book of true stories ... as accurately as reasonable based on the interviews I had with our supporters. While it is likely that I have made some unintentional errors, please know I have tried to describe these events as accurately as is reasonable.
Our supporters gave me hope when I needed it the most. I just hope I can do their stories justice.
CHAPTER 2The Son of a Firefighter Apples Come from Apple Trees Bobby O'Donnell grew up in a town called Easton, about twenty minutes outside of Boston. As a kid, his greatest hero and his greatest source of embarrassment was his dad. Bob Senior had a very dad-like sense of humor that made his son cringe, as sons will do. But that sense of humor helped counterbalance the seriousness of Bob Senior's job. He is a fire department shift commander.
In elementary school, it is an epic occasion when the fire department comes to the school for a fire drill. The trucks are massive. The gear is heavy. Imagine growing up as the son of a firefighter. One of those people is your dad. It is something to be proud of.
A lot of Bobby's life has been influenced by his dad's profession. When Bobby turned sixteen in 2010, his dad taught him how to drive in the parking lot of the firehouse. But because Bob Senior's profession focused on safety, it wasn't your typical experience. Bob Senior set up traffic cones about twenty-five feet apart, and Bobby had to swerve the car between the cones at a moderate speed. Like something out of an '80s movie training montage, his father would simulate a ninja-style deer ambush by hurling cones in front of the car as Bobby was driving.
Maybe it was because Bobby grew up around heroes in uniform, but in high school, a very particular goal formed in Bobby's mind. Around the Boston area, there is a distinctive jacket that Bostonians can easily spot from a block away. This is not a jacket you can simply buy; you have to earn it. It is the official jacket for the Boston Marathon, the world's oldest annual marathon and one of the best-known racing events ever held. When you're a seventeen-year-old runner in high school, that jacket represents a kind of determination that you want to have — maybe something like a firefighter's jacket.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Because I Said I Would"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Because I Said I Would.
Excerpted by permission of Greenleaf Book Group Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
because I said I would: The Beginning, 1,
The because I said I would Code of Honor: The Seven Elements, 48,
Element 1. Self-Control: The Greatest Battle Lies Within, 52,
Element 2. Compassion: The World Is in Great Need, 92,
Element 3. Contemplation: Planning and Careful Consideration, 132,
Element 4. Honesty: The Truth Is Often Both Hard to Deliver and Desperately Needed, 173,
Element 5. Accountability: Willingness to Accept Personal Responsibility, 210,
Element 6. Sacrifice: An Unfortunate Reality, 248,
Element 7. Hope: The World Can Get Better, 282,
Last Words: Goodbye Reader, 286,
Acknowledgments, 288,
About the Author, 289,