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It was just before noon when I got a voicemail from a man I didn’t know.

“I’ve been renting an apartment for the last three and a half years to your father and he is very ill,” the man said after giving me his name. “He’s being transported currently to Regional Medical Center in Anniston and the EMTs that are here believe that he’s passing away.”

I’ve been estranged from my father for most of the last decade, but this is a call nobody wants to receive. He has no family left and he’s all alone in what might be his final hours or days. I felt very conflicted about what to do. As I thought about it, my mind returned to an incident from my childhood.

I was about 5 years old when a drunk man ran a stop sign and hit our car. I was the only one injured. We were traveling from Birmingham back to Atlanta, where we lived at the time. We were about an hour east of Birmingham on U.S. 78 in Anniston. I had been next to my father in the front seat. When we were hit, the force of the impact knocked me into the dashboard.

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There are a lot of motivational books about how to get the success you want. Millions of people buy those books every year, but few people end up satisfied with what they have in life. Why?

We talk a lot about how to get what we want, but we rarely talk about how to know what we want — and I’ve come to the conclusion that very few people understand what they want and need. This leaves them pursuing other people’s goals and living other people’s lives.

I’ve spent many years working to get myself emotionally healthy. That has involved looking at where I came from and what happened to me, but it took me a long time to question what I really wanted. For many years — especially early in my life — I was certain that I wanted success, power, money and fame. In a culture driven by those things, it’s an easy mistake to make.

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I felt panic when I got the photo assignment. I was an 18-year-old part-time reporter and photographer with only a couple of months experience. Sports editor Mike Kilgore handed me a piece of paper with an assignment for later that night — and I had no idea how to do what he wanted.

The assignment was simple. I was to shoot pictures of a basketball game at Cordova High School, a small school about 10 or 15 miles outside of town. But I had never covered a basketball game. I had no idea what to shoot — and I told Mike that.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” he told me. “Just get in a position to one side or the other behind the basket and shoot what feels right.”

The game was a blur to me. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I shot several rolls of film, hoping for one usable photo. I felt as though I was in way over my head. The gym was badly lit. I didn’t know a soul there. I couldn’t move the camera fast enough to catch the action.

I walked out feeling like a failure. I was scared to turn my film in.

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