The CD My Mother Was Reading When I Was Sixteen

I have Wayne Dyer's initials tattooed on my left arm. Two letters, WD.

Next to Mack Newton, he is the biggest teacher I have had, and I never met him. I want to tell you how he got to me, because the route is the actual story and I only saw the shape of it recently.

2007

I was twenty-two, a year into professional baseball. In Phoenix in the offseasons I threw with a chiropractor named Bob Larson — the man I have already written about, who showed up every winter for years so I would have somebody to throw to.

At some point in there, Doc handed me a CD.

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life. Wayne Dyer reading his own book. I listened to it in a car in Arizona because a chiropractor thought I might like it.

It went straight through me. I have been carrying that material ever since — it is underneath most of what I say to kids, underneath the way I think about money now, underneath the whole EVEryday framework.

Then I passed it on

Not long after, I reconnected with an old friend whose brother had died by suicide.

I did not know what to do. I was twenty-something and completely unequipped, and what I had was this thing I had just been given. So I used it. I sat with her and I gave her what was on that CD, or my clumsy version of it, and I tried to help her carry something I had no business thinking I understood.

I do not know how much good I did. You never do. But it was the only tool I had and it had been in my hands for about five minutes.

And then I found out

Here is the part that stopped me cold, years later.

My mother was reading that exact book when I was sixteen.

I remember it. I remember seeing the title, and I remember almost rolling my eyes at her, the way a sixteen-year-old does about anything a parent is visibly getting something out of.

She died when I was nineteen.

So: my mother had it at fifty-something. I dismissed it at sixteen. She died. A chiropractor put the same words in my hands at twenty-two, and I did not connect it to her at all — I thought I had found something new. I passed it to a friend who was grieving a brother. And then, a long way down the line, I worked out where it had actually come from.

I got my mother's book back three years after she died, from a man who had no idea, and I did not recognise it as hers for years.

What I am not going to do

I am not going to put a moral on the end of that.

There is an obvious one available and it would cheapen it. The shape is the point. Some things circle back and it takes twenty years and the person who handed it to you the first time is gone before you notice she did.

If you want something from it, take this: the stuff your parents were into, that you rolled your eyes at, may well be waiting for you. Not as a lesson. Just waiting.

Why Dyer, specifically

People ask why him and not the hundred others.

Because he was not selling certainty. That is the whole reason it worked on an athlete who had been told what his body could do by a room full of experts.

There is a line of his I think about constantly — he said, in a talk, that he did not know what was going to happen over the next ten years. He said it plainly, as a man in his seventies, with a body of work behind him.

That landed on me differently than any motivational thing I had heard, because I had spent my life around people who were extremely confident about what my next ten years held. Doctors who knew I would not play. Scouts who knew the hip would not last. An advisory board somewhere who knew I was a business risk.

They were all wrong, and they were all certain, and here was the most credentialed guy in the room saying he did not know.

I am forty-one. 2016 was the worst year of my adult life. 2017 was the best year of my life. A decade later, 2026 has been one of the hardest again. I do not know what the next ten years hold either, and I have made my peace with that being the honest position rather than a failure of vision.

Mack and Wayne

They are the two men I am trying to be a combination of.

Mack Newton taught me what to do with a body — he had two replaced hips of his own, he rehabbed Bo Jackson, and he trained me for two months that I am still living off.

Wayne Dyer taught me what to do with the rest.

One of them I met. One of them I did not. Both of them reached me through somebody else who thought I might need it — Mack through a mentor named John Kazanas, Wayne through a chiropractor with a CD in his car.

Nobody gets to anybody directly. Somebody always hands it over.