Contents
Foreword................................................................................................ xiii
Prologue …............................................................................................. xv
Introduction .......................................................................................... xvii
Chapter1 Werner Reich ........................................................................ 1
Chapter 2 TomButts .............................................................................. 35
Chapter 3 Jenny Maher ......................................................................... 60
Chapter 4 Doug Herald .......................................................................... 82
Chapter 5 Virginia Armstrong ............................................................... 102
Chapter 6 Jeanne Beard ........................................................................ 131
Chapter 7 Lito Mason ............................................................................ 157
Chapter 8 Laurene Hope ....................................................................... 186
Chapter 9 Dr. Elizabeth Rodger ............................................................. 211
Chapter 10 Daniella Cippitelli ................................................................ 232
Chapter 11 Shannon Knight ................................................................... 257
Chapter 12 Peter Gantner ..................................................................... 287
Note From The Author ........................................................................... 301
Acknowledgments .................................................................................. 303
Book ClubDiscussion Questions ............................................................. 307
Epilogue .................................................................................................. 309
Author Quotes:
"Adversity is an uncomfortable teaching tool if you are open to learning. Otherwise, it's just meaningless suffering."
"It feels really good to be the messenger of hope as I share the inspiring stories of these truly amazing people."
"This book is by and about twelve regular people, and I promise you that reading their stories will be time well spent. I hope the positive messages stay with you."
Foreword by David Arquette
I met K. C. Armstrong through the universe of Howard Stern. We are both renegades, thrill seekers, and like to live life to the fullest. Having such a lust for life often leads to a life of bizarre adventures and an endless search to find the meaning of why we are here on this spinning rock we call Earth.
One thing you can never take away from either of us is our heart. That’s what bonded us together and why we are friends to this day. I’ve called him when I’ve been down, as he has done the same, to talk each other of the edge. I’m so glad to see him in such a great place, and I’ll always be here for him because of his heart.
He has found others with similar hearts and has interviewed them for this book. I hope you enjoy it!
Prologue
“Did you hear K. C. Armstrong is rereleasing his book Simply Amazing?”
Yeah! It was originally published in November, but I couldn’t find the book anywhere! It was supposed to be in Barnes & Noble and in bookstores everywhere! I heard he was finally going to explain everything!
“What the . . .” At this point, the manager of Walmart took the phone out of my hand and shut the intercom off then encouraged the sweet old lady in the electric shopping cart to stop checking receipts and bonk me repeatedly over the head with a rump roast that was labeled “Manager’s Special.”
I wanted to get back on the intercom to explain once and for all why I’m republishing this book and then its history. I have to laugh because everything I tried to convey in this book about overcoming obstacles is what actually happened in the process of getting it out. Yes, there certainly were obstacles—too many to list, some innocent and some not—but being stuck in the past prevents you from enjoying the amazing things in front and ahead of you. I have moved on like the people in the book, but that does not mean that when things go wrong, you just ignore them and provide no explanation for what happened.
To be as brief as possible, here is the reason for the new edition. I pitched the idea of this upbeat project that I so passionately believed in to everyone that I thought had a story to tell, and that means pitching everyone.
Because everyone has a story. I ended up initially with ten lead authors, and the person I believed had the necessary experience and shared vision was on board to publish it.
The plan was to do three to four months of interviews with each author and then have their words transcribed and then edited down in tight chapters that tell a story chronologically, with the final goal to inspire the reading audience, spreading good news for a change and sharing ways regular people use their life challenges to help others. It’s important to know that most of the time, I was working from the hospital while I fulfilled this goal.
This book was going to be what I left behind; it was to be my last message to anyone who would listen because I had spent essentially every holiday and birthday in the hospital because of my poor choices, mistakes, and the lessons I hadn’t learned until too late in life. I expected to be dead around the time the book launched or soon afterward. That’s not me being a hypochondriac or having some morbid, far-fetched idea. This prognosis was given to me directly by doctors, and it determined how I felt and lived, and I was trying to accept it.
I got all the interviews back in written interview format, and the manuscript turned out to be close to two thousand pages. The diamonds were there in the rough—the courageous stories of these inspiring people— but in speech, we all repeat ourselves (especially over the course of multiple interviews when we feel we have to review), use those ticks of expression (“you know,” “like,” “I mean,”etc.), and tell our stories out of order and in varying tenses. The two thousand pages were packed with redundancy, inaudible blank spaces, and more grammar and spelling mistakes than you might expect from me . . . in the second grade.
It was then determined by the person I trusted (and paid) to help me with this project that the interviews should be put out, in their entirety, in two books in “raw” (unedited) form. Two books, five interviews each, approximately two hundred pages per interview. Not knowing much about books, even I knew that would be lazy, laughable, and a complete embarrassment for us all. I took a stand and would not allow my name to be put on something so ridiculous. That is when I teamed up with my best friend Virginia to learn everything I needed to publish a tightly edited, readable book to do justice to the amazing people who had entrusted their stories to us.
And here is that book. Through all this and more I learned the most expensive yet important lesson in my life; no matter what comes your way, just do the right thing.