On the outside, David Cook had a classic “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” story. In his young teenage years, David moved from a California suburb to San Francisco and found that city life was a culture shock.

Within a few months, he was doing drugs. A few years later, he was arrested for selling joints to an undercover cop and spent his first night in jail.

When David was 19, his mom died of pancreatic cancer. Just one week later, his brother, Rob, was killed in a pipe bomb explosion.

Terrified of becoming an alcoholic like his father, David began self-medicating with cocaine. While he was high on the drug, he could drink without feeling the effects of the alcohol. He started working late nights at a restaurant and fell into a routine.

“It was the perfect job for a coke head. I could sleep all day, work all night, and then go and blow all my money at the bar. I was a closet user. I functioned very well. No one really knew, other than maybe guessing why I never had any money.”

For 14 years, David worked in the restaurant, also selling real estate and driving a cab throughout the 80s and into the early 90s. But then his drug habit took a hard turn and he graduated from snorting cocaine to smoking crack. Within three months, he was jobless, homeless and living out of his truck.

“I was earning money by driving around and collecting cardboard and cans and bottles and turning it in for cash.”

But on October 4, 1995, David made a decision to change his life.

“One of my crack buddies owed my brother $5,000. He told me if he didn’t have it back in three days, he would press charges. I turned myself into the police, spent my second – and last – night in jail, was convicted of felony grand theft and sentenced to a year in a rehab center.”

After that, David never looked back. He had a baby girl, and in 2002 he married his beautiful wife, Tina. Soon after, he started his own construction business. To anyone looking at his life on the surface, David was successfully living the American dream.

But in reality, he was working 100 hours a week trying to dig his family out from under a mountain of debt. He felt overworked and underpaid. His business was flatlining, and he was abandoning his family to try and keep it afloat.

A colleague introduced him to a Dani Johnson product, and he began plugging into DaniJohnson.com content. A few years later, he decided it was time to go to a live training event, First Steps To Success.

“Since my first event, I have almost tripled my business volume and hired people, cutting my hours in half, giving me more family time. We have paid off $79,000 in debt and are now credit card debt-free. We have an investment property, are in the middle of our first house flip, and we feed orphans and widows and help build homes for the extreme poor.”

David broke free from being homeless and destitute, became a businessman, husband and father, but for years he continued seeking society’s definition of success. What he found, is that kind of life wasn’t much better than a life of drugs. It came with debt, stress, strife and pressure. At First Steps To Success, he had a pivotal experience and found a better way.

Now, David is living his life on his terms, according to his design. He is free to be the family man he wants to be, free to travel the world and free from the stress and pressure of debt. If you want to live life by your design, follow David’s example. Reserve your seat at our next First Steps To Success live training event, and start living on your terms TODAY!