The carpenter I hired to help me restore an old 
   farmhouse had just finished a rough first day on the job. A    flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw quit and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start. 
   While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On 
   arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked    toward the front door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands.
        When opening the door, he underwent an amazing 
   transformation. His tanned face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss. 
   Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and my    curiosity got the better of me. I asked him about what I had seen him do earlier.
        "Oh, that's my trouble tree," he replied. "I know I 
   can't help having troubles on the job, but one thing for sure, troubles don't belong in the house with my wife and    the children. So I just hang them up on the tree every night    when I come home. Then in the morning I pick them up again. "Funny thing is," he smiled, "when I come out in the morning to pick 'em up, there ain't nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before."

        We come by business naturally in our family. Each of 
   the seven children in our family worked in our father's 
   store, "Our Own Hardware-Furniture Store," in Mott, North 
   Dakota, a small town on the prairies. We started working by 
   doing odd jobs like dusting, arranging shelves and wrapping, 
   and later graduated to serving customers. As we worked and 
   watched, we learned that work was about more than survival 
   and making a sale.
        One lesson stands out in my mind. It was shortly before 
   Christmas. I was in the eighth grade and was working 
   evenings, straightening the toy section. A little boy, five 
   or six years old, came in. He was wearing a brown tattered 
   coat with dirty worn cuffs. His hair was straggly, except 
   for a cowlick that stood straight up from the crown of his 
   head. His shoes were scuffed and his one shoelace was torn. 
   The little boy looked poor to me--too poor to afford to buy 
   anything. He looked around the toy section, picked up this 
   item and that, and carefully put them back in their place.
        Dad came down the stairs and walked over to the boy. 
   His steel blue eyes smiled and the dimple in his cheek stood 
   out as he asked the boy what he could do for him. The boy 
   said he was looking for a Christmas present to buy his 
   brother. I was impressed that Dad treated him with the same 
   respect as any adult. Dad told him to take his time and look 
   around. He did.
        After about 20 minutes, the little boy carefully picked 
   up a toy plane, walked up to my dad and said, "How much for 
   this, Mister?"
        "How much you got?" Dad asked.
        The little boy held out his hand and opened it. His 
   hand was creased with wet lines of dirt from clutching his 
   money. In his hand lay two dimes, a nickel and two pennies--
   27 cents. The price on the toy plane he'd picked out was 
   $3.98.
        "That'll just about do it," Dad said as he closed the 
   sale. Dad's reply still rings in my ears. I thought about 
   what I'd seen as I wrapped the present. When the little boy 
   walked out of the store, I didn't notice the dirty, worn 
   coat, the straggly hair, or the single torn shoelace. What I 
   saw was a radiant child with a treasure.

        At a young and tender age, Patti Wilson was told by her 
   doctor that she was an epileptic. Her father, Jim Wilson, is a 
   morning jogger. One day she smiled through her teenage braces and 
   said, “Daddy what I’d really love to do is run with you every 
   day, but I’m afraid I’ll have a seizure.”
        Her father told her, “If you do, I know how to handle it so 
   let’s start running!”
        That’s just what they did every day. It was a wonderful 
   experience for them to share and there were no seizures at all 
   while she was running. After a few weeks, she told her father, 
   “Daddy, what I’d really love to do is break the world’s long-
   distance running record for women.”
        Her father checked the Guiness Book of World Records and 
   found that the farthest any woman had run was 80 miles. As a 
   freshman in high school, Patti announced, “I’m going to run from 
   Orange County up to San Francisco.” (A distance of 400 miles.) 
   “As a sophomore,” she went on, “I’m going to run to Portland, 
   Oregon.” (Over 1,500 miles.) “As a junior I’ll run to St. Louis. 
   (About 2,000 miles.) “As a senior I’ll run to the White House.” 
   (More than 3,000 miles away.)
        In view of her handicap, Patti was as ambitious as she was 
   enthusiastic, but she said she looked at the handicap of being an 
   epileptic as simply “an inconvenience.” She focused not on what 
   she had lost, but on what she had left.
        That year she completed her run to San Francisco wearing a 
   T-shirt that read, “I love Epileptics.” Her dad ran every mile at 
   her side, and her mom, a nurse, followed in a motor home behind 
   them in case anything went wrong.
        In her sophomore year Patti’s classmates got behind her. 
   They built a giant poster that read, “Run, Patti, Run!” (This has 
   since become her motto and the title of a book she has written.) 
   On her second marathon, en route to Portland, she fractured a 
   bone in her foot. A doctor told her she had to stop her run. He 
   said, “I’ve got to put a cast on your ankle so that you don’t 
   sustain permanent damage.”
        “Doc, you don’t understand,” she said. “This isn’t just a 
   whim of mine, it’s a magnificient obsession! I’m not just doing 
   it for me, I’m doing it to break the chains on the brains that 
   limit so many others. Isn’t there a way I can keep running?” He 
   gave her one option. He could wrap it in adhesive instead of 
   putting it in a cast. He warned her that it would be incredibly 
   painful, and told her, “It will blister.” She told the doctor to 
   wrap it up.
        She finished the run to Portland, completing her last mile 
   with the governor of Oregon. You may have seen the headlines: 
   “Super Runner, Patti Wilson Ends Marathon For Epilepsy On Her 
   17th Birthday.”
        After four months of almost continuous running from West 
   Coast to the East Coast, Patti arrived in Washington and shook 
   the hand of the President of the United States. She told him, “I 
   wanted people to know that epileptics are normal human beings 
   with normal lives.”
        I told this story at one of my seminars not long ago, and 
   afterward a big teary-eyed man came up to me, stuck out his big 
   meaty hand and said, “Mark, my name is Jim Wilson. You were 
   talking about my daughter, Patti.” Because of her noble efforts, 
   he told me enough money had been raised to open up 19 multi-
   million-dollar epileptic centers around the country.
        If Patti Wilson can do so much with so little, what can you 
   do to outperform yourself in a state of total wellness?