After six weeks, I earned the privilege of being relocated from the ICU to a standard hospital room. It was pleasing to know that the medical experts no longer considered me on the verge of death. I was now on the miraculous road to recovery.

This past weekend, I found myself in one of those “woe is me” moods, which, fortunately, don’t hit me too often.  The amount of consulting work that needed to be done by Monday seemed overwhelming, I’d fallen pretty badly behind on writing my new book on leading “out-of-the-box” change, and on top of that I was struggling with a cold that wouldn’t go away.  Some TLC would’ve pepped me up, but, alas, my wife Barbara was in North Carolina on a buying trip for her interior design business, so I was stuck with my morose self.

Earlier today I had a fascinating telephone conversation with JR Harding, who serves as External Affairs Manager with the Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities in Tallahassee.  JR is also the author, with his wife Erika Richards-Harding, of a book that will come out this summer: Now What?  I was privileged to read the manuscript of Now What? a few days ago, and I can tell you that you'll definitely want to add JR's new book to your library.

In my keynote address at the Bristol Mayors’ Award of Distinction ceremony at the lovely Paramount Theater in Bristol, Tennessee on May 1, “Lessons From The Blind Visionary,” I told real-life stories from The Blind Visionary to illustrate three of the lessons that Virginia Jacko and I discuss in Part Three of our book:  Reach Out Aggressively; Don’t Let Fear Win; and Keep Things in Perspective

I'm a pretty strong person with plenty of getup and go and a pretty large dollop of self-discipline, but I'm definitely not what you'd call a loner.  I couldn't have achieved nearly as much at Purdue without really reaching out constantly in all kinds of ways and situations, and, God knows, there's no way I could've gone from vocational rehabilitation student to board member and CEO of the Lighthouse on my own. 

As Virginia and I worked on The Blind Visionary, we talked about a number of writers who influenced our thinking.  Two of the most important are Viktor Frankl and Reynolds Price.  You might recall that Dr. Viktor Frankl spent years as a prisoner in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in World War II, losing his new young wife and his father, mother, and brother in the Holocaust. 

I really do believe that I’ve become more creative in my work since becoming blind for the simple reason that I’m not bothered by as many distractions.  My gut feel is it’s because I’m not distracted by what I call “visual noise.”  You know, sight is such a powerful sense that it can bombard you with visual sensations, which doesn’t happen to me, of course.  I read a tremendous amount, by the way, using things like books and journals on tape, but because I’m not distracted by a lot of other visual input, I spend more time actually thinking and solving creative problems than I di