When an Email at 2:00 a.m. Changes Everything
Few of us really know the impact we are having on others
I t was a bone cold night in January, four hours after my wife and kids had gone to bed and I was sitting alone in my man cave with nothing but a laptop and the painful recognition that even though I had written five books, created a successful company, and supported my family for the past 15 years, I had yet to accomplish a single meaningful thing in my life.
This is a feeling most writers know all too well, the moon-howling moment when they recognize that their early promise of genius has not yet borne fruit — the kind of feeling, I imagine, at least partially responsible for Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his ear, a man who had sold only a single painting in his entire life, and to his brother, at that, a man he knew was buying mostly out of pity.
It was at precisely at this moment, too late to be early and too early to be late, that I just happened to glance down at my inbox and noticed an email coming in from someone whose name I did not recognize — a name with a lot of consonants and very few vowels
Clearly, this email wasn’t from a friend of mine. No. It was from a stranger, a man from Croatia, he explained, with a terminal disease – someone who had been reading my blog for the past five…
