My journey began without a destination.

As I straddled my Harley Davidson motorcycle to drive away the pain, I felt myself moving into the unknown, both on the road before me, and spiritually, within me. I did not feel courageous.

I was leaving behind the highway markers of my life so far: academic achievement, big money, personal acclaim, high times, and finally … personal failure. I had lost it all.

My detailed plan was to motorcycle the back roads of the West and to still myself with the vast desert, sagebrush and mountains. But serendipity led me into the path of a woman from the other side of the world. I began to find the void inside me was filling up as my impenetrable walls were coming down.

That motorcycle journey was the beginning of an exciting new adventure, now told in my book Tau Bada: The Quest & Memoir of a Vulnerable Man. It’s a story about money, new love, cultural challenges, and above all, vulnerability.

I traveled with Fiona to her homeland, Papua New Guinea, where we built a coffee and chillie growing business. The 2400 natives there called me “Tau Bada,” which means Big White Man in their language. Used to a boardroom in a skyscraper and living in posh Grosse Pointe, MI, I found myself conducting meetings while sitting on the bamboo floor of a thatched hut, and conversing with a tribal chief in his seventies. It was from him that I learned some of my greatest lesson in business and in life, including vulnerability.

Fiona and I almost didn’t survive that quest. It was financially ruinous and physically dangerous. It was full of beauty and hard work and laughter and revelation. There were death threats, mudslides, curses, and finally, an assassination attempt on our lives. In dealing with deeply different yet similar cultures, I came to fully appreciate the value of vulnerability.

My story is one that takes me from the impenetrable walls of self-sufficiency, wearing the protective layers of invincibility, to a man who discovers that true power lies not in being invincible, but rather, in being vulnerable.

Read the book and journey with Fiona and I to the other side of the world and back, as we take a deep look within. What you find may change the path you are on.