Evans - The Four Doors: A Guide to Joy, Freedom, and a Meaningful Life

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I am grateful for my wife and to have been blessed with such a companion on my earthly sojourn. I am grateful for my parents, both of whom have passed on: my mother who, in her good times, taught me tenderness and love, and my father who taught me to work and to question. I wish to acknowledge my publisher, Jonathan Karp, who from the first time he heard about this book wanted to publish it and had the courage and faith in me to do so. And my agent and dear friend, Laurie Liss, for her enthusiasm for The Four Doors.

The Four Doors has been a thirty-year journey for me and throughout this process my thoughts, mind, and heart have been shaped by many books and essays written by brilliant, inspired authors. Their teachings have shaped not only my life but every book Ive written. These authors include: Og Mandino, C. S. Lewis, M. Scott Peck, Marianne Williamson, Dr. George G. Ritchie, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and Don Miguel Ruiz.

I am grateful for all those who have asked that I put these principles down on paper. This book is for you and those you love.

Epigraph

For my Heavenly Father, for His guidance, love and blessings, including those that came in disguise.

The most important story we will ever write in life is our ownnot with ink, but with our choices.

From my book The Gift

A little more than a decade ago, I was signing books in Dayton, Ohio, when one of my readers, a schoolteacher, handed me an envelope filled with money. My students raised this for your charity for abused children, she said. Then she asked, Is there any way you could come thank them?

I was in Dayton for another day, so I set a time to meet her students the following afternoon. I had expected to visit with the students, thank them for their contribution, and say a few words on the importance of reading and literacy. When I arrived at the venue, I was surprised to find buses waiting outside. Unbeknownst to me, my visit to a few students had been turned into a district-wide assembly. You have an hour to talk to the youth, the teacher said to me.

As I frantically considered what I would say to this room full of students, the idea came to me to share with them everything I wished I knew when I was their age.

Thats precisely what I did. For the next hour I spoke from the heart, and the teens sat in complete silence. About halfway through my talk, I noticed that some of the youth were crying. When I finished, the students stood to applaud, then lined up to meet me. Some of them wanted to share with me their own stories and struggles. Some of them just asked to be hugged.

That afternoon was the beginning of a journey for me, one that has taken me all around the world, sharing this message with hundreds of thousands of people from remarkably diverse groups ranging from the American Mothers, Inc., Harvard MBA graduates, and the Million Dollar Round Table (a global association of the worlds top insurance agents and financial service professionals) to recovering drug addicts and convicted felons. And just like the first time I shared these principles, in each of those subsequent presentations I have also witnessed a powerful reaction. And, after every presentation, audience members have asked for a written copy of my talk so that they too could share these principles with those they care about. This book is the result of those requests.

Initially, my talk didnt have a name and I just referred to it as the talk. It was more than five years after that first presentation before I began calling my talk The Four Doors. I liked the metaphor of the door for two reasons. First, because passing through a door requires knowledge, intent, and action. We cant pass through a door we cant find and we cant pass through a door without moving ourselves.

Second, once weve crossed a doors threshold, we are not in the same place as we were before. These characteristics are true for each of the doors, or principles, in this book.

I believe that the greatest thing that all humanity has in common is the desire to make their lives matter. In the last two decades, I have met thousands of people and heard many of their stories. Far too many are living what Thoreau termed lives of quiet desperation. They live far below their own potential for joy, accomplishment, and power, caged in the prisons of their own unknowing. To some degree, this describes all of us.

The Four Doors is about how to live life joyfully, with freedom, power, and purpose. I have witnessed the powerful effect each of these doors carriesin both my own life and the lives of those with whom I have shared this message. If you are willing to follow even just one of these principles, you will find immediate, positive change in your life. If you choose to live them all, you will soon be in a very different place than you are now. The choice is yours. And, as you will soon learn, the Four Doors are entirely about choice.

T hroughout my writing career, Ive discovered, with some amusement, that bookstores arent always sure how to classify my novels. Ive found my books shelved in the literature, romance, philosophy, popular authors, inspirational, spiritual, self-help, and religion sections of bookstores.

If you asked me what I think I write, Id tell you that I pen stories that explore the human experience and impart inspirational ideas about life. This book is a compilation of my beliefs presented in a nonfiction format.

By way of full disclosure, I believe in God. Im pretty much out of the closet about that. More specifically, I believe in an all-loving, purposeful God who is willing to give us hard things so we might spiritually progress: not a made-for-Sunday-night-movie Deity whose only goal is, at the end of the day, to make sure a good time was had by all. That kind of being would be as impotent and uncaring as a parent whose only goal in sending their child off to college was to give them a place to party. Life is difficult. But it is also purposeful. And, spoiler alert, in the end, love wins.

In addition to this overriding premise, there are three foundational truths upon which the Four Doors rest. Without these truths there would be no reason for this book, as personal change would be pointless and impossible. In addition to my belief in God, these principles comprise the core of my personal belief system and I believe are, to a large degree, self-evident.

First, the greatest power and gift humanity possesses, and will ever possess, is the freedom of self-will. All our successes and accomplishments come from the personal exercise of our wills. So do our greatest failures and mistakes. In even the most coercive of circumstances, we have the option of exercising our wills. As Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, a renowned psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote in his seminal book Mans Search for Meaning,

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedomsto choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way.

While it is possible to relinquish our freedom, in degrees and in totality, even the act of giving up our power of choice is, in itself, a choice.

Second, we are not an accident of God or nature. The universe is demonstrably purposeful, and theres a purpose for our being here on this earth. The experiences we have have come to us for our spiritual growth and evolution. Simply stated, earth is a schoola divine educational process custom-fit to each of us.