John R. Miles

And I think another thing that really keyed me in on what you were saying is a number of years ago, I had a life or death type of situation.

And I'm going to tie this into your new book, which, and that was, I was whitewater rafting.

I was on the front of

the raft and we hit this really hard rapid and I got thrown from the raft that we were on and got trapped underneath the raft.

And when I was down there, I was originally in this panic mode until I really started focusing on my breathing and what I needed to do to get out of the situation.

And in your new book, wise effort, subtitled how to focus your genius energy on what matters most.

Your forward has an eerily similar situation with a mutual friend of ours, Rick Hansen, who also, a little bit younger than me, had a similar death-defying moment.

But I think that moment really sets up the core essence of your book.

And I was hoping you might be able to talk about, Rick, that story and maybe introduce the book with it.

Well, I love the simplicity of the name because wise ties into wisdom and effort to me ties into energy and how we use our energy.

So wisdom and energy combined really cool underlying aspect to the book.

Well, I moved to Tampa from Austin, Texas.

And when I lived in Austin, we had this really incredible view behind our house.

And so we decided to put in this huge picture window so that it was the main thing that we looked out at from the kitchen.

And it had an unfortunate side effect to it.

And that is birds would see it and think that they could fly through it.

And so we suddenly had birds hitting this window, unfortunately, but they wouldn't hit it just once.

They kept repeating that.

And I bring this up because in your introduction of the book, you tell a similar story of how you live on the coast, on the West Coast, and you leave your door open.

Sometimes birds get stuck in your house.