Why I Never Mention My Beautiful Bride's Name

by Glenn Shepard

January 5, 2010

If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?

Mine would be playing lead guitar for AC/DC.

But as fun as that sounds, I know it would be more difficult, exhausting, and physically demanding than most people could ever imagine.

How can I be so sure? Because most jobs are.

People always think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone's told me how easy my job is. “Just show up, give a speech, and walk away with thousands of dollars,” they say.

They don’t see are the hundreds of nights alone in hotel rooms every year, the working seven days a week to finish books by deadline, or the countless hours of driving or being stuck in airports.

And they don’t know the reason I never mention my beautiful bride's name, but I’ll share it with you.

My job requires making thousands of people I’ve never met, but who have heard me speak or read my writing, feel like I’m talking one-on-one, directly to each of them. The industry term is “connecting with your audience on a personal level”.

But when you connect with that many people, there’s bound to be some who are a few French Fries short of a happy meal.

I remember the first about 10 years ago. After hearing me speak in New York, she sent an 8-page hand written letter, explaining how she had picked up on the “secret messages” I was sending her and planned to move to Tennessee, marry me, and run my company.

I guess she eventually found someone else to stalk (probably married a prison inmate with no chance of parole), but there were more to follow.

The next year, a woman in India who took my “Assertiveness Skills for Women” program and described herself as a progressive modern feminist, wanted to fly to the U.S. to have me spend a week with her husband, and teach him how to treat her more like Parvati (a goddess).

Though I don't know if I could have helped, I would have been glad to oblige for my standard fee. But she somehow thought I had a moral obligation to give them a week of my life at no charge if they flew over, and was outraged when I refused.

And then there’s the people who simply go bonkers over a brochure advertising one of my products or seminars.

Someone in Iowa who works in mental health went nuts over the fact that a brochure had a headline that read “Are Your Employees Driving You Nuts?”

A gas station owner in Florida threatened to cut off a certain part of my anatomy (one that I’d very much like to keep) if I spoke in Jacksonville, because he was so offended that I said women are better at multi-tasking than men.

A labor union in Kentucky threatened to picket outside the college sponsoring my seminar because they were so upset that the brochure included “How to legally fire bad employees”. I'm not sure if they preferred keeping them forever, or illegally firing them.

And those are just a few examples that I can tell you about (you ought to hear the really juicy ones).

While I realize you can’t remain a private person while working in a public venue in a world that’s F.O.F. (Full of Fruitcakes), I can at least make sure those fruitcakes who see photos of my beautiful bride and send lewd comments don’t know her name.

The moral of the story is this – No matter how cushy other people's jobs may seem from the outside, few are as easy as they look.

If work was easy, businesses wouldn’t have to pay people to do it.

To Your Success in an F.O.F. World,

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