At twenty, Luke was out of the Army with a Purple Heart and everything he owned crammed into a Ford Mustang. That was also where he slept through a Nebraska winter, with his dog Cole.
Moving into a double-wide trailer felt like a promotion. It was so overrun with rats that he and Cole both got sick, and every piece of food he owned had to live in a plastic tote box on the floor.
He sat in that trailer one night and decided whether to keep living. What stopped him was looking at Cole and realising that if he died, nobody was going to feed him.
So he stayed. And he gave himself one condition: Whatever life he had left was going to be worth reading about. From then on, whenever he had a choice, he took the option he couldn’t predict the ending of.
Luke now employs four hundred and thirty-eight people.
And somewhere along the way, choosing the uncertain path stopped being a survival strategy. It became a philosophy.