Prove Yourself

Introduction

If you want to succeed, where do you start? Are you going hard enough? Having trouble in your pursuit? Do you think success is about luck? Or can you learn how to succeed? At the end of the day, you can ask yourself all the questions, have all the doubt – but regardless of the answers, you must recognize the time to start. And for those pursuing success in its truest form, that time is now.

Let’s start with a personal question: Do you feel the desire to succeed or to prove yourself? If you ever felt the need to prove yourself, you have that essential first spark for success, called desire.

As I embarked on writing this book, I thought of how early in my childhood I first felt the need to succeed in life and to prove myself. For me it began in Buff Bay, a tiny seaside town in Portland, Jamaica, where I was born to a single, teenage mother. I reflected on how this strong desire drove me to make it all the way to the best Ivy League schools in the U.S., to work on Wall Street, to graduate with a medical degree with honors from Harvard Medical School, to become a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon, to be the Chief Executive Officer of the KICVentures Healthtech holding company with a net worth of over a billion dollars and growing, and to make time to have a family with three children. The question is: If I did all this, are there lessons and principles that can be learned from my journey? Read on to learn how you can also develop the principles of success to improve your life’s journey, to start your own business, or to rise through the ranks of any corporation.

This book describes real business experiences and recounts private anecdotes from my journey, to illustrate lessons that became successful life and business principles. Written in twelve powerful chapters, it promises to help you on your journey to success. As you read, you will likely see similarities in your life. When you do, contribute to our blog, ProveYourselfBook.com/blog to share your own lessons, and join our movement to empower new entrepreneurs to build multimillion dollar businesses (www.ProveYourselfInstitute.com). Prove to yourself and to others that you will succeed, and when you do, you will enjoy the respect and lifestyle of successful people.

If you have never felt the need to prove yourself, you will have that feeling by the end of this book. When you feel like proving you can desire something and accomplish it, whether it is to prove to yourself or to prove to others, you will experience an inner force awaken inside that will urge you to succeed and make an impact in this life. Society needs people like you, to start businesses and to discover new and better ways to do things to keep the engine of our civilization going. Success is not free, so you must learn how to earn it. You have to learn how to be all-in – to give 100% effort and focus. What if we all decided not to seek success and not to create new businesses? Our society, more than ever, embraces and rewards innovation and sees the value in chasing success. Everyone has the potential within themselves to start and build a successful business or to rise through the ranks and become a well-respected leader.

You don’t control the situation into which you were born, and if you are not in a great position with a lot of resources right now, believe in yourself and believe that you can control where you end up or where you are heading. Like many people who desired success and achieved it, I grew up poor, and was not privy to many resources or financial wealth. This made me first realize my true situation, and I became hungry and developed a desire for success, financial security and independence – but I had to come up with a plan and start the journey to learn how to succeed. To start a journey, you need a path. My path began with observing and listening to anyone around me who seemed to have success, and then using my drive and resourcefulness, I began my own success journey. Along the way I set small, reachable goals, laying the foundation of getting an education, being inquisitive to learn from others, honing my athletic abilities and sharpening my competitiveness. Essentially, I began to prepare to be successful early in life – and you will also need to go through a process of preparation in your own life.

Because of this preparation, when the opportunity knocked on my door to go to Columbia University on a soccer scholarship, I was ready to answer the call. And when I landed in the U.S. and New York, I had arrived in a place where I felt resources were at my fingertips, and that I could prove to myself that I was capable of achieving my greatest desires in life. I could finally prove to all those who helped me – my mother, my siblings and other relatives, my friends, my community and my country, all those who paved the way for me to have the opportunities some of them did not have – that I could rise to the highest level in life and business. Through trial and error and active planning and being willing to learn quickly and make changes without fear, I discovered what is necessary to be successful. My question to you is this: Since I have done it, why shouldn’t you learn from my lessons? If you are already on the path to success, then this book should reinforce many of the fundamental lessons you have already learned, and you can enjoy reflecting on your own experiences as you share mine.

In a nutshell, when you read this book, be ready to learn lessons that will prepare you to reach high levels of success at a faster pace.