David McElroy

I was 12 years old when we moved to Pensacola, Fla., and I was enrolled in a brand new school. It was my seventh school so far if you counted kindergarten, so I was accustomed to being the new kid.

But I had never experienced anything quite so different. I had always been in middle class suburban schools where almost everybody looked and acted like me. But when we moved to Pensacola, we lived on the beach — and the beach kids were bused all the way to the inner city, where nobody looked like me.

Academics were terrible and the classes were way behind where I’d been in my previous schools. Mostly, though, it was a different culture. There was only one other white boy in all of the seventh grade. Almost every student in the school was black and they came from homes and neighborhoods very different from mine. It was a culture clash.

On one of my first days at the school, a knot of kids gathered around me in a hallway to make fun of my pants.

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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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