fb

Happy Living“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
(Henry Ford)

Have you ever wanted something so much that your entire “being” seemed wrapped in it? You wanted it so badly that you lost all perspective on who you were. It was you. Without it, you were nothing. Less than nothing! Or so it seemed. In clinging to it, you became so self-focused that it seemed as if the entire world spun around you. Yet at the very same time, you were riddled with insecurity and fear… fear of failure and fear of being exposed!

That’s the story of Scott Barry. And I am very proud to announce Happy Living Books Independent Publishers will soon be publishing his first book, The Greener the Grass.

Scott was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in the 1985 N.F.L. draft. In his forthcoming book about gratitude, he shares a deeply personal, hard-earned lesson: to live life with humility and acceptance for what you have in the moment. He’s learned that happiness comes from being true to who you are and what you have (i.e. inside you), rather than from the relentless pursuit of what you want (i.e. outside you). He shares his story with raw, uncensored language, exposing his very soul, unprotected by vanity, and with delicious detail. Scott shares a very serious and important message about life, and at times, he is laugh-out-loud funny with it, too.

The story begins with a view of what it’s like to be the big man on campus. He lets the reader feel the pure unadulterated adulation he himself felt as a college quarterback. He shares how Draft Day was the most important day ever. He also reveals a deep insecurity masked by the glorious armor of the biggest man on campus. With humility, Scott lays bare his innermost feelings, as he confesses to the over-growing ego that develops in a super-star athlete. He takes the reader along as that same ego collapses on itself, nearly destroying the being he once considered “He God of the Battle Field”.

You feel what he was feeling during Draft Day and other exciting, confusing, and disappointing moments in his life. He takes you on his wild adventure of ups and downs, twists and turns, fantastic highs and devastating disappointments. His story reads like watching a beautiful, magnificent sports car as it crashes into a brick wall, leaving only a mangled heap of steel. You almost can’t look, but you also can’t help but look! But don’t worry, this isn’t a story about football. It’s a story about life and, more specifically, about being grateful for what you have now.

The Greener the Grass is vivid, descriptive and very funny. For example, of the game that was his life, Scott writes:

“We are, after all, talking about a game, with grown men, in tight pants, chasing a little lemon-shaped ball around a patch of grass—mowed fresh that afternoon —and a ball made from the skin of a pig…”

“It’s all I’d thought about since I first stuffed socks under my shirt and played ‘on-your-knees-tackle-football’ in the living room of my grandmother’s house.  That’s it.
Not women.
Not family.
Not God.
Football.”

In the end, Scott comes to realize, just as Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz, that there’s no place like home. The grass is not greener on the other side, it just looks that way, perhaps because it’s further away. Over time, Scott was able to reshape and rework the mangled steel of his broken dream into a gratitude-filled and deeply satisfying life. The Greener the Grass is a beautiful story with a powerful message.

Stay tuned. We are expecting The Greener the Grass to be released in January 2017.

Image via Unsplash | This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you click and then purchase we will receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for reading & supporting Happy Living!