From Bedridden to the Boardroom: Life Beings When You Lose Everything

Some mornings the whole project for the day was making it fifteen feet to the bathroom.David Good was bedridden most days of the week, with migraines and neck pain that did not let up for months, and a twenty-year software career that was over. By any reasonable projection, that was the end of the story.It wasn't.An autistic systems-level thinker, David did the only thing that made sense to him: he reverse-engineered the one thing he had never been able to find, a safe place to belong. Working from a computer at home and a boba tea and coffee shop in West Michigan, he started building. What grew from that became International Friend Connection, a peer-led volunteer community that reached more than fifty chapters in over twenty countries, run by ordinary people for almost nothing.Eight years after he was certain his life was over, he was standing in a boardroom, telling the people who built one of the world's largest community platforms what he had created with it. The same path carried him to the United Nations.From Bedridden to the Boardroom is the honest, unsentimental account of how that happened, and of the tools that gave him his life back along the way. It is a book about what becomes possible when you stop waiting to be included and start building the room yourself.This book is for you if:You have been counted out, sidelined by illness, or left out of the design, and you are looking for a way forward.You love someone who is neurodivergent, isolated, or starting over.You care about loneliness, belonging, and building real community.You have lost everything, including hope.Bob Burg, coauthor of The Go-Giver, calls David one of his "e;real-life action heroes."e; David Siegel, former CEO of Meetup and Investopedia, chose him to represent hundreds of thousands of organizers worldwide. Perry Knoppert, founder of The Octopus Movement, puts it plainly: "e;He is not trying to fit into the old world. He is helping to create the next one."e; And Dr. Liliya Bakiyeva Wheatcraft, autistic psychiatrist and author of AUTISTIC First Principles, calls it "e;a no-stigma, psychologically safe ecosystem"e; and "e;a much needed resource."e;David Good is a Points of Light honoree and a recipient of multiple Presidential Service Awards for volunteer leadership.If you are reading this, the power you need is already in you.