First the owner and CEO of a multi-million-dollar insurance company, then a writer, keynote speaker, and author of the widely influential podcast Your Voice to the World – the life story of Terrance McMahon, author of the best-selling self-help book SuperHero Self, appears filled with nothing but success.
But, as is often the way, all is not as it may seem.
In his recent TEDx talk, aptly titled Broken to Beautiful, Mr McMahon spoke of the darker sides of his biography – ultimately, the events that led him to recreate himself and develop his acclaimed ‘algorithm for happiness’.
Having grown up in a small town in Western Massachusetts, Mr McMahon was accepted into collage on a baseball scholarship. This came as no surprise – coming from a long line of successful baseball players, this was the natural path for him to follow.
All didn’t go according to plan, however. Experiencing a panic attack on the very first day upon arrival in college, young Mr McMahon – like so many college freshmen faced with unprecedented levels of stress – turned to alcohol to ease his nerves. At the time, he believed he found what he describes as ‘the algorithm for anxiety’ – comfort in alcohol and drugs.
This led to Mr McMahon dropping out of college, with no job and, to raise the stakes even higher, a baby on the way. Desperate for a means to support himself and his new family, he took the only job available to him: that of a door-to-door insurance salesman.
Just when things were looking exceptionally bleak, however, Mr McMahon found a stroke of inspiration – leading to the foundation of his very own insurance firm. The firm that would, in fact, go on to become a multi-million-dollar company in the space of two decades, with 60,000 clients all over the country.
But in another bizarre twist of fate, this unexpected success had ultimately contributed to Mr McMahon’s downfall. Drinking all the more heavily to manage the stress involved in running a company had eventually led to Mr McMahon experiencing liver failure, and needing a transplant.
It was this brush with death that caused Mr McMahon to discover within himself the need to not only restore his health, but to recreate himself altogether. Realizing that he had an ‘algorithm’, or system, for everything else in his life – particularly in the course of his job – he decided to look for an algorithm for the only thing missing in his life: happiness.
This was the start and the basis of Mr McMahon’s work to teach others to discover their true happiness, too. Three times in his life, he had achieved the seemingly impossible: building a hugely successful company from scratch in record time, surviving a near-fatal case of liver failure, and using this experience to improve himself and reach happiness.
Thankfully, Mr McMahon not only survived his health ordeal and found a way to reinvent himself, but also decided to share his experience with the world and help others do the same. The plan for a complete personal transformation contained within his best-selling book SuperHero Self has already helped thousands of people reach their full potential and find joy in their lives.
To find out more about Mr McMahon’s story, watch the full TEDx talk here.
