text: have you ever ascended from worst to first?   yes i have, but first i want to talk about what it means to be worst or first. success isn't achieving a popularity contest after you've been nothing to the crowd. success is overcoming your own personal weaknesses and making them strengths.  this is my success - eight years ago i was critically injured, damaging my brain and fracturing bones on one side of my body. after a coma, i had months of therapy every day. learned to open my mouth, make noise, hold my head up, sit up, move on command, make sounds, into words, stand up with the help of a person, sit in a wheelchair. you get the idea - stand up by myself and walk, to speak and talk to people. count, write, and went back to college later that year with a wheelchair, then a walker, then crutches. it was hard, but i wanted bad enough to keep going. finally i walked on my own, took driver's ed at the university, studied, became part of the national honor society in my field, and graduated from college. after that, i became a personal trainer, then a massage therapist. please don't assume that because i went so far, it was easy. it wasn't. it was grueling and exhausting. i was dealing with depression and had to fight urges to hate myself.   i am a success. i don't say that because i work downtown, training executives in an office building, or massage across the street at the city's swankiest hotel. i am a success because i never gave up. life's not over, i still don't give up. that's success, you just keep going.