Boyd Clewis has defied the odds and gravity. He was born dead, changed schools and homes as a child more times than he can count, became a teenage father and a track star, had more than one close brush with the law, and endured unimaginable family tragedy—all by the time he was barely old enough to drink.

He found a brief silver lining in the darkness. When it didn’t last, he found himself unable to even get a job in the produce section at Wal Mart. He refused to fail, and in the process, learned how to turn crisis into opportunity—over and over again. As he relentlessly pursued success, his trajectory shot straight upwards: international success, speaking on major stages—and love. Even then, there were days he couldn’t get out of bed.

Yet again, he reinvented himself, failed, and learned from it. Then, from a place most would consider their peak, he started from scratch to build his own business from the ground up. In the process, he learned what it truly meant to manage success. It can fulfill or destroy you, and it can bring your family closer, or tear it apart. It can isolate you from your community, or raise everyone around you up.

For better or worse, what you focus on determines your character and the trajectory of your life. Focus on any one thing to the exclusion of others, and everything you built can fall apart. There are two sides to every coin, and every seeming misfortune contains a lesson. There’s an alchemy to turning adversity to wisdom, and curses into blessings, and this is the story of how it worked for Boyd, and how it can work for you.