Book Review by Dr. Sally Gelardin

I didn't think I could do it.  Drive three hours Saturday and again Monday from my home over the Golden Gate Bridge down to South Bay where I teach graduate students in counseling a crunch summer career course. I'm in my mid fifties, but I felt like over 60 as I contemplated the drive. Instead of driving, I asked my husband Bob if he could drop me off at the new train to Sunnyvale from San Francisco and then pick me up when class was over. Then we'd take a work associate for a business dinner.  Bob kindly obliged.  That's how I ended up reading on the train Shelly Brady's Ten Things I Learned from BILL PORTER:  The Inspiring True Story of a Door-to-Door Salesman Who Changed Lives, published by Novato-based New World Press.

From the first chapter of Bill Porter to the end, tears streamed down my face. As the train sped from town to town, my life flew before me. Like Bill Porter, my father was an honest salesman (sold automobiles), and my grandfather was a door-to-door salesman.Even closer to home, my son Eli was born with achondroplasia, a type of dwarfism. Like Bill, who was born with cerebral palsy, Eli does not see himself as disabled.  When he was in his late teens, Bob and I asked him if he wanted to participate in a bone-stretching procedure to increase his height. "No," Eli responded, "This is who I am."

At the age of 26, Eli currently manages a team of twelve dedicated employees who serve challenged individuals in our community. Like Bill, Eli encounters challenges that most people would never dream of every day of his life. Eli is a leader of himself, and thereby, a leader of others, perhaps due in some part to my refusing to shield him from the world when he was growing up, but rather telling him he could do anything he wanted to and to let nothing stand in his way.

I was not an ideal mother.  Eli would have appreciated less pushing out into the world and more at-home mothering. He succeeds in creating a life of value and meaning despite, as much as because of,  his upbringing. Like author Shelly Brady, I worked throughout my children's school years, and often fell asleep reading to them or playing with them, or arriving home from work after they had gone to bed. On the other hand, I can identify with Shelly's need to use her talents in meaningful work outside the family, as well as within the family.

Inspirational biographies can have a profound influence on readers. I recommend to my students (counselors-in-training) that they incorporate biographies, such as Ten Things I Learned from BILL Porter, or the movie based on the book (Life of a Salesman) into their practices as a way to elicit feelings, change perceptions, and inspire creative career problem-solving.  I wrote in my recently published book on mother-daughter relationships:

As we view the nightly news, reality television shows, and documentary films, we can become mesmerized by the lives of both famous and ordinary people. Similarly, hand-held cameras, autobiographies, and personal memoirs bring a person’s life story into the viewer’s intellectual living room.  By viewing the thoughts, emotions, and actions of others, we can learn more about ourselves.  Increasing self-understanding of how we lead our lives can be a catalyst for change, enabling us to take control of and to improve the quality of our lives  - both in work and at home.  By first becoming leaders of ourselves, we can then share what we have learned with others.

Two ordinary people - Bill Porter and his assistant and author, Shelly Brady, jump out of the pages into the reader's life. By the end of the train ride to Sunnyvale, I was so taken by the book that when I arrived at class, I chose to introduce the lesson with a story from the book.  I described to the class how career advisors sent Bill to jobs that required manual dexterity. He was fired from three or four of these jobs within days. The lesson this story offers to counselors-in-training is to listen to their clients, help them identify their skills, interests, personality traits, values and needs, and together figure out how  these factors and traits can best be used in a satisfying work environment.

I am very pleased that books like Bill Porter are replacing impersonal how-to books.  It's not that steps to enlightenment are not helpful; it's just that contextual storytelling is so much more effective as a way to give meaning to these steps so that they can really be absorbed into our minds. We are inundated with advice and information from electronic and print media. Reading about a door-to-door salesman's inspirational life puts our own lives into a different perspective. "I have no obstacles," Bill says. If one man born with a disability, but who says that he doesn't have any physical limitations or obstacles, can believe that, think about each of us can put aside limitations and obstacles to influence our nation and world.