With Purpose Success, part 54

But as I said, it won't just happen by itself. Robert Chambers didn't wake up one day with a pool of capital and a list of honest-but-poor folks who needed a decent car at a decent price. He had to find bankers and credit counselors who were willing to work with him. He had to vet his prospective clients for honesty and commitment. He had to research and document how his organization would help his clients break the cycle of poverty and turn them into good credit risks. It took years to put together. Somehow, he figured it out. Katie Ginsberg didn't just wake up one day with a well-oiled organization preparing sustainable-living curriculums and seminars for students and teachers. The whole effort was a nearly anonymous labor of love for two years, during which she researched the subject and attended lectures and symposiums. She had to figure out what organizations were pursuing similar goals and might partner with her and how to set up an IRS 501(c)(3) charity. She learned how to approach the government and private donors for grants and why it's important to set up a board of directors with diverse talents in education, the law, writing, business, and publicity. She had to make all that happen from a limited knowledge base. Somehow, she figured it out. 

I want to leave this chapter with another anecdote. I'll have more to say in the next chapter about my friend Augie Nieto. But this a good place to introduce him because his is a powerful tale of fruitful late blooming- not in the same sense as Clint Eastwood and Mark Twain, who enjoyed wonderfully creative success late in life, or even like Robert Chambers and Katie Ginsberg, ordinary folks who managed to break free from their auto-life rut by attacking social issues of personal importance. No, the story of Augie Nieto is vastly different; yet the lessons are universal. 

Finding His Purpose Through Illness

Augie Nieto was a robust, driven, ambitious, and even Nieto would say, largely a self-centered man. He was a health nut who stayed in tip-top shape and was always supremely well groomed. He was rich, having founded Life Fitness of Chicago, a maker of exercise equipment that he co-owned and which was sold in 1997 for $310 million. A brilliant and driven entrepreneur, power and money were important to him. "Money was a way for me to keep score," Nieto says. "That's how I measured if 

I had won." By that standard, he clearly had. Nieto drove a Ferrari and lived in a cliff-side house in Corona del Mar, California. He and his beautiful family indulged their every passion, like exotic travel, scuba diving, and Arctic snowmobiling. 

But Augie's fairy-tale life turned upside down in 2005, when at the age of forty-seven he found himself struggling to lift weights that were always an easy task for him. After a few weeks of uncertainty and terrible anxiety, he went for a checkup and was absolutely shocked to learn that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative and fatal illness better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Unaccustomed to setbacks that he could not pay his way out of or fight his way through, and envisioning the torturous decline that awaited him, Nieto became deeply depressed and suicidal. During that dark period he rethought all of his core values and concluded that his final hurrah, his legacy, needed to be about more than money. It needed to be about doing something important for the world. 

Nieto might have languished in self-pity, or he might have decided that with so little time left he should live life large and indulge his "bucket list" fantasies. He could afford it, and he always enjoyed being flashy. But material things and self-gratification had somehow lost their appeal. With each day bringing more incapacity and misery and the end of his life in sight, a series of changes happened inside of him that led him to conclude that it was the things that he could not buy that were most important to him-his family and his relationships, and his potential contributions to others.