License to Live – Michael Baisden’s Book of the Week Winner!
Podcast: Play in new window
Every day, as we are given an opportunity to live our lives with passion and fulfill our destinies with purpose, it is important to remember that we have a choice to make. We must choose each day to wake up out of a slumbering sleep and do something, or simply lay there and let life pass us by. Once we make that first and most important decision, however, everything else is left up to our own actions and the omnipotent will of a God who neither slumbers nor sleeps.
“Must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free? No, there is a cross for every one… and there is a cross for me.” Having grown up in humble beginnings on the floor of an abandoned building and given up for adoption by my birth mother, I can truly say that I have been blessed. My adoptive mother, Mrs. Mamie Brown, managed to instill in both myself and my twin brother, Wesley, however, a belief that I was better than no one else, but second to none as well, and that has made all the difference.
By all accounts, my life has been a great testament to the fact that, with hard work and determination, anything is possible. As a young student, I was labeled educably mentally retarded, but my mother, a single woman who had very little education herself, instilled within me a sense of hope and optimism that continues to buoy me to this day. Even still, with no formal education past high school, but with an unyielding determination that, through the process of self-education, I earned a master’s degree in overcoming obstacles and my doctorate in human potential. Today, having started out as a local radio deejay, served as a three term state legislator, only to go on to make millions of dollars as one of the greatest professional speakers to walk the planet, I know for myself that success is possible for those who refuse to accept the limits placed upon them by others. After all, there has never been a monument erected to honor a critic.
My friends, having experienced both the highs and lows of life, I know what it takes to succeed. I have had five PBS television specials, published books and spoken to audiences of over 80,000 around the world. I believe that you, too, can live your dream. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE GREAT TO GET STARTED, YOU JUST HAVE TO GET STARTED TO BE GREAT!This book, License to Live, is an essential tool in helping each of us to plot our own “Real Life Roadmap” to live our greatest life, with quality and satisfaction. It’s simple truths, wrapped in a framework that most of us can understand—learning how to drive—and the universal rules that we can all learn from this common rite of passage, as we travel along our way. Just as importantly, Elvin Dowling’s compelling life story of triumph above tragedy continues to remind us, throughout the pages of this book, of just how blessed we really are.
Read this book. Take the test. Live with passion. Change the world!
