You Can Make It Happen: A Nine-Step Plan for Success

For the people who know Stedman Graham as one of the nation's most quietly active community business leaders, it may be hard to envision the time when he was held back by considerable self-doubt.

He was. He grappled, also, with his share of daunting obstacles to the success he has worked at length to enjoy. Graham explains, "You are not your circumstances; you are your possibilities." He is tenacious in his commitment to the idea that all can overcome adversity and build self-esteem by determining who they are, creating a vision of success for themselves, and then working doggedly to realize this vision.

In formulating his Nine-Step Plan for Success, Graham draws candidly on his experience as a professional athlete, the founder of the not-for-profit Athletes Against Drugs, and as a corporate and community leader who sits on the national boards of Junior Achievement and the Urban League. This plan is grounded in his conviction that the circumstances of your past are not nearly as significant as your belief in your capabilities and your determination to carry through a plan to accomplish your goals. Graham explains, through revealing anecdotes from his own life and the experiences of others, how the negative effects of a poor self-image can be incapacitating at worst, and limiting at best. "You Can Make It Happen" shows how to chart a course that can enable you -- just as it enabled him -- to superimpose success over all of the doubts, insecurities, and life difficulties that threaten to keep achievement elusive.