Only a few weeks after John Haines freak accident which left him paralyzed from the waist down, he rolled into his work office in his new wheelchair and said to his co-workers, “Man, I feel like I was run over by a train.”

The story you are about to read is about redemption in the form of luck (good & bad) & calculated risk that some might call charity.

You can see the chart I prepared for you showing you the adventurous and non-linear life and career of John Haines, the current head of Mercy Corps Northwest, a micro-venture organization providing business loans to motivated individuals with little or no net worth.

John’s story is really three unique stories. The first is the story of John’s adventures. How he bicycled across the Himalayas by sneaking his bike into Tibet from China and later completing the first kayak descent of Africa’s 2,600 mile Niger River avoiding malaria, angry hippos, and swarming killer bees.

John’s second story is one where the son of a Wyoming banking family follows the tradition of becoming a banker and then seems to almost willfully limit his career progression by taking adventure sabbaticals followed by taking a new job ranging from freelance writing for backpacking and kayaking magazines to renovating urban storefronts in downtrodden Trenton, New Jersey.

The third story is your own story and how you share with others.

The prodigal son would eventually return to his roots of banking; sort-of, but only after serving as the Senior Financial Adviser to the Czechoslovakia Ministry of the Environment.

Everything was going great, and then…

In 1999, John boarded a train in Prague headed to Berlin to participate in the 10th anniversary of the collapse of communism. John wanted a cup of coffee. As the train came to a routine stop at a local town, he jumped onto the platform, intending to fetch a cup of coffee. He awakened two-weeks later on life support and paralyzed from the waist down.

A few weeks later, he returned to work and made his infamous line to lighten the mood with his co-workers by saying, “Man, I feel like I was run over by a train.”

John may have lost something on those train tracks, but he returned with so much more. He was different from most bankers because he was a natural risk taker. After all, bankers are trained to to say, “here are all the reasons why we shouldn’t do this. John would say (referring to lending money to motivated individuals with little net worth), ‘these are people who share our values, and these are people with some business sense, and here are all the reasons we should do this.”

Three years after the accident, John became the leader of Mercy Corps Northwest. He would take the principles he learned in the states and abroad, combined with others learned in war and disaster stricken areas of the world, and apply them to deserving people in the Pacific Northwest.

Mercy Corps Northwest is not just a lender; it has become an incubator training center for entrepreneurs. Mercy Corps is a micro venture model.

When I read this story for the first time, I thought it was about the obvious adventure spirit living-out his bucket list and getting sidelined for a routine coffee stop and not plunging down a Class V rapid. The feel-good story of turning tragedy into good for others- and it is.

John Haines understands risk and redemption very well, but that’s not the big idea I’m trying to share with you today.

If I told you the story about a man who worked hard every day at the same company who finally saved-up enough money to treat himself to the Ford Taurus he wanted, would you shed a tear as I described how happy he was depreciatively driving off the Ford dealer’s parking lot inhaling the new smell of Ford?

Nobody cares about that story.

Here’s the point. Marketing is an authentic story told over time. You get to insert the interesting stuff. You can be that story that is authentically unique.

The problem is most of us don’t know how to share a story, let alone ours, and certainly not our business idea. It’s not that most business ideas are boring, it’s just they may seem boring to people who need your services.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Do you have a proven process for taking your business idea and converting it to words or sound that your ideal clients want to consume and share?

This post is inspired by an article written by Ted Katauskas in the October Portland Monthly Magazine.