What's YOUR Story?

Excerpt from my new edition of The MAGIC Hundred

Whenever I read books about success, goal achievement and ‘getting ahead’ in life, I’m always interested to find out as much as I can about the people who wrote them. I’m always asking myself ‘what puts this person in a position to tell me how I should go about getting what I want from life?’.

It’s a good question when you think about it.

After all, it’s relatively easy to write a book about success theories isn’t it? There are enough goal setting books out there that one could get ideas from, write into a new format and sell as an original piece of work and make money from whilst never having actually experienced any of the success principles they claim to be masters of.

People do it all the time in all genres.

Obese people writing weight management books.

Serial bankrupts writing books about financial success.

Struggling business owners writing books on marketing success.

And much more besides.

I’m not knocking anyone for struggling with their weight, their finances or their businesses, everyone is on their own journey, but I find it both strange and sad that they set themselves up as gurus in the very areas that they themselves are lacking success in.

I think of it as a kind of fraud and one which, unfortunately, has a massive knock-on effect far beyond them and their own lives. After all, if people are trying to follow the advice of someone who has failed to achieve success themselves then they’re not exactly likely to achieve much of their own are they?

That’s why I’ve now included this ‘who is Dax Moy’ section to the book (I didn’t have it in the first edition) so that you could get a feel for who is sharing advice with you and why it might be worth listening to.

Be aware though… it may not be what you were expecting when you bought the book so don’t say I didn’t warn you!

My story…

Like most of the authors of ‘success systems’ and goal setting programs, I didn’t just happen upon the principles that I now call The MAGIC Hundred. I found them partly through extensive searching and researching and partly through trial and error and, truth be told, largely by what most people would call luck.

Let me set the scene for you….(This is where you can imagine those wavy ‘dream wiggles’ that you see in movies if you like)

I grew up on several of Central London’s housing estates that had been built and reserved for the poorest of London’s residents. Practically every family was either legitimately on welfare due to genuine financial hardship, or else conning the welfare system by making claims whilst working for cash and avoiding taxes.

The areas I lived in were high in poverty, high in crime, high in violence and high in alcohol abuse and low in just about anything that could even remotely come close to the kind of life that anyone would ever call satisfying, let alone successful.

And that was true of my home too.

My mother genuinely loved her three sons, of which I was the oldest, and tried her hardest to make sure that there was always food on the table and that we were always clean, well dressed and well cared for. Despite her best attempts to look after us she struggled against the fact money was scarce and that what little there was, was often taken for booze by my alcoholic stepfather who would disappear for days at a time on drink binges leaving us with cornflakes and little else to eat and return, more often than not, in violent rages where he would beat my mother, us kids or both.

Life at home was pretty grim so we spent a lot of our free time playing outside in the streets so that we could make believe and pretend that what was happening at home wasn’t and that life was better than it really was.

My brother Kaz and I would often resort to stealing milk and bread off of other people’s doorsteps on the way to school and call it breakfast. We’d line up for second helpings of our free school lunches to make sure we got enough to eat and we’d resort to the occasional bout shoplifting whenever the opportunity to grab a chocolate bar or packet of cookies presented itself.

Looking back, I guess my brother and I became pretty feral in many respects.

One minute we’d be dealing with bullies at school who would pick on us because of our many times repaired hand-me-down clothing then when we got home we’d have to start all over again with the bullies on the housing estates who would want to take from us what little we had for no other reason than the fact that they wanted it.

By necessity we learned to take care of ourselves pretty well and, though we always did our best to keep ourselves to ourselves, found that we had to fight almost every day whether at school, at home or on the journey in between.

This was our life.

It was normal to us.

We didn’t like it but we weren’t scared of it either. After all, compared to what happened IN our home, everything outside of it was play fighting. After you’ve been properly beaten up by an adult other kids don’t really scare you anymore.

As our childhood years passed us by nothing about our lives really changed. There were still drunken arguments and beatings at home, still fights with ‘outsiders’ whenever we went out and, of course, still no money.

Kaz and I became pretty good at thinking up ways to get our hands on some whenever we could and did everything from going through my stepfathers pockets when he was drunk to selling our old toys for cash, to babysitting, running errands and practically anything else we could think of.

In the UK around November 5th each year we’d have Guy Fawkes night in celebration of Fawkes’ failed plot to blow up parliament in 1605.

It was customary in the 1970’s and 80’s for children up and down the UK to make effigies of Guy Fawkes from old clothing and masks and stand on street corners shouting “Penny for the Guy” at the passers buy who would, if you were lucky, slip you a few pennies, ostensibly to buy fireworks which you’d set off on the evening of the 5th around a massive bonfire on which you’d burn the Guy you’d made.

Kaz and I would often have no spare clothes to make our Guy with so I’d end up sitting my brother in a baby buggy or a box, stuff his clothing with newspaper to make him look more like a ‘real’ Guy and put the finishing touches by making a mask from a paper plate and drawing on a face. Pull on a hood so you couldn’t see hair or skin and, Bob’s your uncle, we had a Guy.


On a good day we’d make several pounds from passers by, which was a lot in those days and, after buying ourselves a few bars of chocolate and the odd comic book, we’d hurry off home and give most of the rest to my mum so that she could either buy dinner or feed the electricity meter.

She never asked, we just did it. Come to think of it, I don’t think we ever bought fireworks with that money.

The fighting continued. Both at home and outside.

As kids, we couldn’t do much about what went on at home. We were too young, too small and too scared to stand up to my dad, but one evening in 1982 we found a way to deal with the bullies.

After watching Sylvester Stallone in Rocky 3 and still with ‘The Eye Of The Tiger’ ringing in our ears, Kaz and I joined our local boxing club and quickly found that we were not only good boxers, we were very good.

A combination of streetwise self confidence, natural aggression and, in reflection, a burning anger at what life had dealt us up to that point made us both extremely dangerous adversaries to face in the ring and we reveled in the attention and praise lavished upon us by the tough east-end coaches who trained us.

Within a very short period of time the discipline and toughness of the boxing training began to pay off. We were both asked to box in competition first representing the club locally, then the borough, then the region and then for all of London. We kept on winning and found our faces plastered over the sports section of the local newspapers almost every other week.

We were celebrities. We thought we’d made it.

We were wrong.

Seems that, whilst your average bully is far less likely to pick on a champion boxer, gangs of kids with nothing better to do but stand on street corners spraying graffiti and smashing streetlamps are less put off from doing so.

I found this out when I was 13 or so and was beaten up by a group 16 year olds who felt I was too big for my boots because I’d been in the papers again that week. They decided they’d teach the boxer how to fight for real. And their lesson was a thorough one which included detaching the cartilage from my nasal bone, among other things.

After that, my life became a blur of tit for tat battles with my new ‘teachers’, as I thought of them. They’d pick a fight and usually win, I’d wait until one of them was alone and get him back and he’d tell his friends and they’d get me all over again.

It wasn’t a great life but at least it was predictable.

You never had to worry about whether or not trouble would find you on any given day. It would.

Always.

You just never knew when or how many.

Some days 4 or 5 boys would jump you on the way home from school and other days you’d find three of them waiting for you outside a shop so at least there was a little variety in my life.

As time went by it became obvious that things would have to change. The fights were getting more violent and more and more often weapons were being used. I still wasn’t scared. I always ‘gave good account of myself’ but at 13 going on 40 I knew this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life.

My grandfather had served in World War 2 with the paratroopers and the S.A.S, or so he’d told me when I was small.

I used to love his war stories and tales of secret missions behind enemy lines and was totally army barmy, promising myself that as soon as I was old enough I’d join up, travel the world and live a life totally different to the one I’d been shown up to that point.

I was only 13 so I still had a few years to go but I joined the army cadets to get a feel for what the army might be like. A youth club with combat clothing and rifles arranged around a military rank system, the army cadets became my home away from home for the next few years with almost every weekend given over to assault courses, shooting weekends, bivouacs, survival exercises and adventure training.

It was like I’d moved to another planet. I was actually enjoying life and could see a bigger picture.

I became supremely fit, running 20-30 miles a week with a 35lb pack and gaining my proficiency in numerous weapons as well as gaining the rank of sergeant that required me to learn how to lecture and train the younger cadets in everything from navigation to weapon handling to survival training. I was just 15 by this point and was pretty much a shining star in this closed little community of the cadets.

At home though, it was like we were caught in a time warp.

We still lived in a dump, my dad still drank and hit my mum (though he hit us kids less now as we were getting bigger and starting to stand up to him more) and kids in gangs still wanted a piece of me whenever they clapped eyes on me.

I couldn’t wait to get into the army.

At 15 I applied to join the ‘Junior Leaders’. These are kids who have leadership potential who are to be trained for rapid rank acceleration once they reach age 18. They couldn’t, at that time, go to war until they were 17 ½ but they were trained exactly like their adult counterparts… though paid much less.

I didn’t mind. I wasn’t joining for the money anyway. I wanted the travel, the adventure, the freedom and the chance to start my life over the way I wanted it to be.

I emotionally blackmailed my mum into letting me join and attended the selection weekend for the elite Parachute Regiment and passed with flying colours. I was still too young to join but they told me that a place would await me as soon as I graduated secondary school at 16 and a half.

Life was definitely looking rosy.

Or so I thought.

Then, one night not too long before my sixteenth birthday I woke up to the sounds of my mum screaming. My dad was drunk again and showing my mum how much of a man he was. I’d grown up with this all my life and I was kind of used to it and ignored it for a while until suddenly there was a different quality to my mum’s screams.

A different pitch.

One that told me she was in serious trouble.

I jumped out of bed, ran into the living room and, without pause or hesitation, headed straight for my dad and punched him as hard as I could in the ribs.

Only I didn’t punch him.

As I pulled my hand away I saw that, without understanding how it got there, there was a 7 inch hunting knife that I used on my cadet weekends. It was covered in blood, as was my hand and the side of my dad’s shirt from where blood was escaping from the puncture wound to his heart that I’d given him.

I’d stabbed my dad through the heart and didn’t even know I’d done it until after the fact. Still to this day I don’t know how that knife got there.

Ironically, it was only the first aid I’d been trained in as an army cadet that saved his life and, ultimately, saved me from going to jail for murder. That, and the fact that when he came around eventually he refused to press charges against me out of some strange kind of ‘code of honor’ that he lived by.

Soon after that I quit school. I couldn’t pretend to be a kid anymore and sit in a class learning math and English. I’d changed.

It was six months until my final exams and I’d done well enough to ensure that I’d pass with very good grades but I couldn’t face another day there and instead went off to live in Wales where I could train in the mountains and get fit for the army.

So there I was.

Sixteen years of age.

Homeless.

Broke.

Unemployed.

Unqualified.

Attempted murderer.

Sounds bad doesn't it?

But I didn’t tell you this in order for you feel sorry for me.

I certainly don’t!

There’s nothing to feel sorry for.

Nothing at all.

Fast-Forward 21 years…

Fast-forward Airborne forces, Royal Marines and back to civilian life again.

Fast-forward getting married and having 4 children.

Fast-forward numerous dead-end jobs from bodyguard to builder, sewer worker to street sweeper and everything in between.

Fast-forward setting up my own personal training business, becoming an industry leader and a published author.

Fast-forward to today where I now run 5 separate businesses, earn 6-figures a year, appear on TV, radio and magazines and spend several months of the year travelling to far flung parts of the world with my family.

How life changes, huh?

So, why did I share all of this?

Well, two reasons really.

First, I wanted to share with you the story behind how I came to be in the position to be writing a book about becoming more successful and, more importantly, becoming happier with your life.

As the story shows, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I didn’t come from a nurturing, supportive environment and I didn’t have mentors or role models who were available to teach me how to get what I wanted.

Yet now, by most people’s standards, I’m very successful. I’m now in a position where I’m able to choose the kind of things that happen to me on most days rather than simply have life happen indiscriminately.

Things can and DO change.

Second, I wanted to share something far, far more important than my actual story. I wanted to share something that I hope will make you feel differently about your own story from this point forward.

It’s a simple yet surprisingly profound statement that has taken me until just recently to fully grasp and one that changes literally everything about everything.

Ready?

Here it is then…

Your story is not who you are. None of it matters.


That little statement either hit you right between the eyes or left you thinking ‘huh?? What is this guy going on about?’

Let me explain.

For years, especially when I was struggling and when things were bad (or I thought they were), I used to pin all of the blame on my story.

“Of course things are bad! Look at how I grew up!”

I’d justify and rationalise that my life was a struggle because of all the things I’d experienced up to that point; the violence, the poverty, the lack of support or role models.

I’d think to myself “If only we’d lived somewhere else”

“If only we’d had more money”

“If only my dad didn’t drink”

“If only my school were better”

If only, if only, if only…

I had a bunch of ‘em to fall back on whenever things weren’t going well for me.

You’ve probably got your own ‘if only’ list too, right? Most people have and we’re pretty quick to use them when things aren’t going our way in life.

Anyway, over the years things started to change for the better.

I had a lovely family, the beginnings of a great business and an income that I’d only ever dreamed about up til then. I vacationed all around the world, flew planes, helicopters and scuba dived and lived a life that most people would consider to be pretty glamorous.

People would ask me how I did it. How did all of these things become possible for me. You know what I’d answer?

“It’s because of my background.

I grew up so poor, so hungry and fighting so hard for everything I had that I learned to be tough and go after what I wanted”

I thought that was true.

I thought that my background have toughened me and ‘trained’ me for success and I revelled in my ‘street kid made good’ heritage. You could say that I’d learned to identify myself with my story. That I’d used the story as a means to describe who I was and why.

But clearly, that wasn’t the case at all.

How could it be?

How could the very same circumstances that I blamed for my failures be the very same ones that I now praised as the catalyst for my success?

They couldn’t. And that’s when I realised that my story was just that; a story.

It was neither good nor bad, right nor wrong.

It didn’t contribute to my previous failures and had no bearing on my subsequent successes. It was just a story about what happened to a boy at a particular period in his life, nothing more and nothing less.

My story wasn’t me. It didn’t define me in any way, shape or form. It didn’t matter at all what had or hadn’t happened in my past, what mattered and what still does is what I intended to do with my present to shape my future.

In other words, what did I want for my life and what action was I prepared to take in order to make that a reality?

When you think about it, this is the most important question any of us could ever ask ourselves. After all, we’ve all experienced bad stuff in our lives at some point haven’t we? We’ve all had things happen to us that we wish never had taken place but they did, and we can’t change them.

What we CAN do however, is choose whether or not to let those things, our stories, define us or to simply acknowledge that they happened, let them go and move on. The truth is, we live our stories by choice, not because we have to.

Realising this is the first real step to success and happiness.

Dax Moy

For Your Copy Of The Fastest Goal Achievement Program On The Planet visit
http://www.themagichundred.com