Something was happening to me. They say that the best way to wake an adult up is to get them learning again. Boy was I learning! I had come alive. Answers to problems were miraculously popping into my head. Problem solving and deciphering the best solutions to the everyday dilemmas of life were becoming child’s play. I was even welcoming the challenges of my world. They had become a stimulus, a drug, or type of addiction. I had been reading so much that I could quote authors of books and I could recite messages delivered from the speakers of audios and podcasts that I had been listening to. They were giving me answers and helping me solve my own problems. They were creating a thinking machine. This is all coming from a man who had only read one book his entire life outside of a required text for school or work.

Prior to my Self-directed Shift, I didn’t really understand personal development and how important it is on one’s life. The cobwebs were being cleaned and cleared from this previously empty room I called a head. One day I was trying to explain something to a friend of mine and he said, “tell it to me like I’m a two year old”. He just wanted me to give him the information in a clear and simple way. The best way for me to do so and the best way for me to learn is visually, so I created the visual representation of what I have labeled “The Self-Directed Shift”. The theory itself is rather simple and doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand. I will try to explain it to you like you’re a two year old. We are all born naked into this world. We know very little and we learn a lot over the course of our lives.

Some things are learned from our parents, from our friends, and from our environment. The knowledge we acquire from year to year produces the results that are in our life. Those results may be material possessions, friendships, money, careers and jobs, our faith, the type of marriage we are involved in, the type of parents we become, and our overall health and physical appearance to name a few. There is a natural progression that we all follow in life. We get better at life as time goes on. Some of it is just maturity. The natural path is paved with trial and error, bumping our head a time or two, and grabbing that hot pan on the stove. Once you’ve burned your hand pretty good, you become a little wiser and won’t do it again. That’s the way life works. Well…

Hindsight, as we all know, is always 20/20. What we may not know is that what is hindsight for us was foresight for others. Our author, Mr. Rickey Lewis, has had the foresight for not only me, but also several other students, many of whom have shared their stories in this book. He is a father, a teacher, a friend, and in his classroom, he had the foresight to teach us lessons not necessarily found in textbooks, but lessons he knew we needed to succeed on our various paths of life. On my journey to becoming Dr. Sydney Labat, I used a particular lesson that Rickey Lewis taught me every single day. That lesson being, “It is not about what resources you have, but how resourceful you are.” This book is your resource on how to be resourceful.

Here you will find countless one-liners that will imprint your mind forever, numerous stories that will alter the way you view the world, and an enormous amount of respect for our author, the man who guided us all. Mr. Rickey Lewis has had the audacity to guide and shape young minds in a way that is passionate, fun, and worthy of all the praise. The content of this work will display how his students strongly believe that he is not only a teacher in the classroom, but also a teacher in life. It will always be the challenge of those impacted by him to develop his foresight and leave the world a better place than when we found it.

Join us in our journey towards making planning ahead just as easy as looking back and use this book as your opportunity to learn what we’ve learned with the help of our mentor and friend, Mr. Rickey Lewis.

Sydney Labat, M.D. Anesthesiology
Resident Physician
VP and Co-founder of The 15 White Coats.