- People often ask me, "Hey, Terry, why'd you
leave the corporate world? You know, you worked at
Adobe, you worked at Facebook, all these great companies." The truth is, when I worked
in corporate, I was cocky, I was reckless. And the first time I
really felt like lit up and where I was meant to
be is when I was teaching. It felt like an art. Normally, when I tell
the story of my journey, I'm on stage delivering my keynote about how to develop a money mindset. But I just felt an opportunity
to j
ust be more real. The reason why I made this
change is 'cause my son died. My name's Terry Rice. I'm a biz dev consultant,
keynote speaker, podcast host, and I am a creator. Throughout my life, there've
been things that I've done that seem great, seem extraordinary, like I was a college athlete, you know, I worked at
Adobe, worked at Facebook. Didn't really like any of that stuff. A lot of it was ego-driven. I would love it when I was at parties and people asked me what I do. So I could say, "Oh
, I
work at Facebook," right? But I wasn't as responsible with myself and my body, my health, and
I was drinking every night. And as you can imagine, it took a toll. It took a toll on my
health, my performance. So often, I would leave a job before I got fired or just get fired. The same time, I found out
that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So I'm like, "Great, I'm
still spinning outta control "and I have a kid on the way," which is not a good combination to have. That was just the wa
ke-up call when I started working
out, I stopped drinking, and just worked on more
personal development before the professional development. So after getting laid off, I could have tried to
get another job, right? But people were gonna wonder like, "Why'd you leave Facebook
after a year and a half?" You know, "What's going
on, what's your deal?" I didn't want to have those conversations, and I don't think I was ready
to go back to corporate, now realizing I was never
ready to even be in corporat
e. So I figured, "You know what?" "I'm gonna do consulting." So it took about 18 months to feel like things were actually working and I would have predictable income and wasn't worried so much all the time. And one reason why that worked so well is because I was teaching
marketing and business classes at a school called General Assembly. The first time I really felt
lit up and purpose-driven and where I was meant to
be is when I was teaching. And it was my first time teaching, which they didn't
know, fortunately, but there's like 30 people
in the room looking at me, all walks of life, all ages,
but they were looking at me because they wanted me
to share information that would help them get a better job or do better in their current job. And that responsibility felt great, and it felt like an art. Because when I deliver content, I'm not just like reading my
slides or anything like that. I'm performing, that's what lights me up. And it was wonderful because I was literally
getting paid t
o prospect. People come there, learn
from me, and then hire me. Things were going pretty well. It's like, "Wow, I'm
making over six figures." Like, you know, second
year of my business, things are going great and
I finally felt comfortable. Like I was getting in better
shape, things were more stable, like things were gonna work out okay. When my daughter was
about nine months old, we found out that we were
pregnant with my son, T.J. And I'm like, "Okay, great,
this is the thing, right?" "We're g
onna have a family." And I still remember the picture of her with like this bib on
that says "Big Sister." And she's reading a book that says, "Big sisters are the best." Right, it's like a cute picture. So the whole time that he's on the way, like I'm just trying to
really build my business. Because I wanna take time off, for once. With my daughter, I
didn't take any time off. With him, I'm like, "You know,
I'm gonna take a month off. "I'm gonna really just do
the paternity leave thing." Things
were going well with the business. I was like, "Wow, this
is actually working." And I was getting better as a dad too. And I remember it was May 29th of 2017, my wife and I are walking
with our daughter, we're going to the park and stuff. And she starts having contractions. And we're like, "Okay,
cool, it's game time." 'Cause at this point,
he's 37 and a half weeks. And I'm like, "All right,
he's gonna come early." Right, you know, this is how it goes. So I make all the arrangements, get the ba
bysitter there
to watch my daughter, you know, rush off to the hospital. They hook her up to all the machines. And I'll never forget the
look on the doctor's face, like when he looked up, because
he couldn't hear anything. And he just said, "Look, this
is a very serious situation." And couldn't detect a heartbeat, right? So like, "Okay, we're gonna
try another machine real quick just to make sure it's not the machine." And in my head I'm like,
"Oh, this is gonna work." It still didn't work, righ
t? So still no heartbeat. And in that moment, I just said to myself, "You're about to have the
worst night of your life." And I did. My wife delivers my son,
and I'm holding him, and I'm like holding my
breath as tight as I can. I'm like, "Let me see if I
can just feel him breathing a little bit." Right, maybe something's wrong, maybe the machines are still broken. So I'm like holding him,
holding, holding, holding him, like almost about to pass out
'cause I don't wanna breathe because I wanna s
ee, I
wanna feel if he does. And, you know, he didn't. But one thing I'm proud
of is I never gave up hope that maybe, maybe, maybe,
this will still work out. And it didn't. I think that one of the toughest parts for anyone who goes through, any parent, is the car ride back when you
have to look in the back seat and you see the empty baby seat there, and it's like a reminder
of what you thought the journey back would be. This is my son's grave, and it's rare for anyone
to see their own name on a
tombstone, right? And I remember at his funeral,
I'm carrying his casket and handing him over to the pall bearer so they could put him in the ground. And the guy kinda like
snatched the casket from me. And I was hurt, you know,
because I'm like, "I lost my son, and this is the last time
I'm ever gonna hold him, and you're just kind of
snatching it from me." But what I later realized is like, how long would I have held it? You know, forever wouldn't
have been long enough. Obviously losing him, I
was upset because of all the things
I wanted him to be. And I would say it's a reminder, "Well, hey, all that stuff
that you wanted him to be, you do it, right? You wanted him to have a big
impact on the world, you do it. You wanted him to help people, you do it." I think resilience starts with acceptance. And you have to realize
this thing happened. And I think people exhaust themselves and waste time trying to go
around it, trying to go over it. You gotta go through it. So as soon as you reali
ze this happened and I can't do anything about it, you realize I have full
control over everything that happens next, including my perception and my reaction and my endurance. What it looked like for
me was initially solitude, where I just didn't want
anyone to say anything about anything because everyone
tries their best, right? But you can't tell people,
"Behave exactly this way, or I'm gonna get upset," right? So I'm like, "No one owes me anything, in this case except respect and distance." S
o that's how I got through it. And then, I just really
leaned heavily into fitness. I went to the gym and the
cool thing was, is I was able to be around people again
who didn't know my backstory. I just wanted to be around people, but not answer all the questions
and get the weird looks. So I started doing
CrossFit and it was great. Like just, you know, being
able to be my old self again, like the charismatics, sarcastic guy who's just trying to get a workout in. And to this day, I mean,
that's
still my community, but the majority of people don't
know this story whatsoever. They don't know why I showed
up, they just know I did, and it's been about six years. On the way back from my
first class, I'm like, "Okay, I'm doing something different, I wanna keep on doing something different, so I'm gonna walk back on a
different side of the street than I normally do." I kid you not, as I'm
walking back, I look down, I see my name written in concrete, and I was like, "Holy
cow, if that's not a
sign that you're on the right
path, you know, what is?" And it encouraged me to keep on taking opportunities
like that going forward. So when I first started my business, it was all time for money. I was doing pure consulting
and that worked well enough, but after a while, you
run outta time, right? And you just still want more money. I realized I don't wanna
necessarily just do client work because that's tedious, right? Like you always have someone
who's gonna be unhappy and like, you know,
you
're getting interrupted all times of the night. I wanted to be a creator because the benefit of
creating is you create content and people can consume it asynchronously and still get value from it. And also, when you're
going through some stuff, you don't have to be out
there live all the time. You can just post some
content, drop a newsletter, whatever it is, you're
still sharing your gifts while you're recharging, right? So, again, you don't have
to do more to be more. So from there, I started
creating online courses, but I was so cocky when I
made my first online course, it was a Facebook course,
and I thought to myself, "Look, I worked at Facebook, I'm teaching Facebook courses all the time at General Assembly and
all these other places, it's gonna blow up." It blew up in my face because I did not have
an email list to sell to. I was just talking about
it on social media, "Buy my course, buy my
course," so on, so forth. And it flopped. I fumbled that opportunity solely because I did
not have an email list. I was on MailChimp for a while 'cause I feel like that
was a thing to do, right? But what I like to do whenever
I have to make a decision is I look for people who I respect and see what decisions they've made. So I looked at a few
of my favorite creators and I looked to see what kind of email marketing
platform they're using. So Pat Flynn, I looked, ConvertKit. Dory Clark, ConvertKit. A few other people, ConvertKit. I'm like, "Those are the
people that I aspire to be lik
e so I'm just gonna follow their
lead and use that program." And that's why I switched
over to ConvertKit and have been super happy with it. I was taking my daughter to
a gym class here in Brooklyn, and I walk in and I see Jason Feifer, who's the Editor-in-Chief
of Entrepreneur Magazine. And I'm like, "Holy cow,
that's Jason Feifer, I gotta talk to the guy, right?" But I couldn't find a good way
to break up the conversation he was having with his wife. So finally I'm like, "Look,
I gotta say som
ething" because often that window
of opportunity is so small and closes so quickly, if you
don't get on it, it's gone. So I just said to him, "Hey,
man, I like your podcast." And he's like, "You know who I am?" I'm like, "Yeah, you're the guy." You know, 'cause I'd been following him on social media for years. We exchanged information. A week later, we had coffee together and we're just talking about business and entrepreneurship and all this stuff. And he identified a need
that they had an entr
epreneur for someone to help with marketing because their lead marketing
person was gone for a while. A week later, I'm talking to
the whole senior team there and they're like, "Oh,
can you help us do this? Can you help us do that,
can you help us do this?" I'm like, "Yes." They're like, "Oh, and we're gonna let you be a published author." So writing for Entrepreneur
has changed my life. But one thing I was very
clear about with myself is I'm not gonna let the Entrepreneur logo become my identit
y. Because when I worked at
Facebook, when I worked at Adobe, that was my identity, right? And I said, "That's
never gonna happen again. It doesn't matter who I'm working with or who I'm working for,
that will not define me." That said, it was pretty freaking cool because I can write about
whatever I want, get it published by this major organization
and reach thousands of people. I eventually was offered the opportunity to write a book about starting
a consulting business, which came out in 2020
. But then, another thing I started doing was I wanted to make more video content so I started doing that
for some of my articles and eventually Entrepreneur's like, "Do you just wanna like have like a video or a podcast thing going on?" And I'm like, "Yes, I do. Like I've been trying to find a way, you know, to bring this up." So that's been great
because it gives me access to a lot of really smart people. Like I was talking to,
like Shaquille O'Neal, Rosario Dawson, Daymond John. I was hired t
o speak at Craft + Commerce, this event put on by ConvertKit. And the day before, there
was this private mastermind. It wasn't one of those corny masterminds, "Look, here's how you
make more money, bro." We got really deep into just the emotion behind being a creator,
some of the frustrations, and supported each other
through that process. There was this one gentleman there who never felt like sufficient
because he grew up poor, and even though he is doing well now, always had this child inside
of him that felt less than, and other people struggling
saying, "Hey, you know, people think I'm making all
this money and I'm not." And like literally tears
coming from people's eyes. And that made me feel
comfortable to be more open. And I'm on stage delivering my keynote about how to develop a money mindset. And normally when I tell
the story of my journey from beginning to where I'm at now, I just say, "Hey, I wanted to
make a change in my business and that's why I went
into business consult
ing." But based on what happened the day before, I just felt an opportunity
to just be more real and say, "The reason why I made this
change is 'cause my son died." And my perception of what I wanted for my life going forward
changed drastically. And that's when the
connection with the audience really, really picked up. So that moment was
extremely transformational. And I was like, "I can't go back to anything I've done
before after this moment. I can't go back to the
guy who's just saying the n
uts and bolts of business. There's so much more." Sometimes the only way
is through that pain and sharing it, right? So it's like this paradox where you think, "Oh, I'll talk about it later." No, talk about it now. Whatever way you feel
comfortable, talk about it now, and you'll be amazed at how
people rally to support you. Because after I got off that stage, so many people came
running over to me saying, "Oh, my God, that was amazing." So and so forth. But one woman really stood
out to me and s
he said, "Look, this was great
because unfortunately, my friend is burying her son today. His name is also T.J. And you telling that story on stage, I relayed that to her and
it gave her some comfort." But if I didn't share that pain, I would not have been
able to help her, right? So we all have these stories inside us that we're afraid to share
for one reason or another. Yes, it is gonna feel uncomfortable, but when you share, it
cuts the pain in half and doubles the joy. And you'll be amazed a
t the
opportunities that come up too, because people give you opportunities because they feel connected to you and they can't feel connected if you're hiding behind some
manufactured personal brand. And that's why I feel strongly
that character branding is more important than personal branding, especially in the age of AI, when you can manufacture so many things, but you can't fake character, right? You can't fake your stories and the way that you treat other people. And if you don't share your
full story and your experience, you
won't get those opportunities. And if you're afraid to
express them publicly, you're gonna have challenges too. So the sooner you can start
sharing your experiences, your ups and downs, whatever
it is, what you've learned, the faster that you'll grow. I mean, that's the hallmark
of being a creator, is creating good opportunities and good experiences for people. So after losing my son, which is obviously a challenging time, I was literally looking
at his tombst
one, right? And he has the same name as
me, you know, Terrence Jr. It's impossible to look
at your own tombstone and not think, "How do
I wanna be remembered? What legacy do I wanna leave behind?" And the impact I want to
have is helping other people live in their vision,
and that's the the gift that this whole experience gave me is the ability to help other people. Your time is limited, right? We got one life. You want a situation
like this to change you, but not make you bitter
towards other p
eople or just feel like a victim. And I'm glad to share this
story because by using my gifts and my pain to direct that
towards helping other people and empowering them to help others, there's a multiplier effect where the worst moment
of my life helped people I'll never meet have a better life, and that's the legacy that
my son can leave behind.
Comments
Thank you for sharing this story of the tragic events in your life. We unfortunately have similar experiences in that I also lost my son when he was 34, to a sudden and unexpected heart attack. To say that this experience is devastating is the understatement of my life, it has changed me beyond comprehension. Also, I am a creator and a full time artist, and I have changed my artistic persona, and taken the name of my sons company so that we are working together, and my artwork will continue his legacy. My artistic name is Sterling Lee Auto Art, after his company name of Sterling Lee Recruitment. When I had to be made a director of his company so that I was able to close it down, this was the worst part of the experience for me as it felt as though I was removing him from the face of the planet, and I just had to find a way of continuing his legacy, so this is what I did. Hearing you share your experience is refreshing for me, as I have shied away from talking of my experience, as I did not wish to be seen as trying to profit from my experience. It is enlightening to see and hear you discuss your challenges, and I thank you for that.
Thanks so much for allowing me to share my story! Hope it provides inspiration and motivation for those who need it most. I'm planning to write a book focused on the transformative power of resilience so I would love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks for sharing, Terry. Hearing your story at Craft & Commerce last year was incredibly moving. It was so much more powerful because you shared your true self on stage. You're changing lives by sharing your story! 🤗
Thank you for this, Terry. It really is amazing to see such courage. It's very encouraging. Thank you.
When I think of resilience, you certainly come to mind Terry. I'm inspired by your journey and feel fortunate to have had you coach me as I began to pivot more seriously. Your story shows that we can decide at any time to step up, to make things happen, to follow our soul's purpose. Seeing Terry on the concrete walkway because you decided to take a different path - well, if that wasn't your intuition sending a sign...and that you heeded it! So inspiring! I look forward to watching you soar even higher. Because it's happening.
What a great experience it was to work with Terry! I learned so much ⭐
Very emotional seeing your journey Terry… It reminds me of the monumental shift our son Owen’s death created in our lives. I’m sure Tj was giving you a clear sign bc you have found your path & are doing so much to help others. Hugs to Tj’s dad & crew