This is the story of a woman who has been an inspiration to millions of people all over the world. Her name is Dani Johnson. Johnson came from a very difficult background, like many of us, but chose to make something beautiful out of her life. At 23, she became a millionaire and it wasn’t as if it was given her on a platter of gold. I know a lot of people who have one story or the other, an excuse not to make it. I sincerely hope that after reading Johnson’s story, you’d find the courage within you to be what you have always dreamt to be.
Dani Johnson grew up in a violently abusive and drug-infested home. She was emotionally, physically, verbally and sexually abused on a regular basis.
As a result of the personal trauma and violent conditions she identified as home, she became pregnant at the age of 17 and at 21, she was homeless.
Now, here’s the thrust of her story, as written in one of her books and her website, instead of accepting what life had so far scripted for her, she rewrote her own playbook, chapter by chapter – and by 23, she became a millionaire. Since then, she has become a millionaire many times over, owns five companies with her business partner and husband; Hans, and is a best-selling author, internationally sought-after speaker and radio show host.
Now, here’s the thrust of her story, as written in one of her books and her website, instead of accepting what life had so far scripted for her, she rewrote her own playbook, chapter by chapter – and by 23, she became a millionaire. Since then, she has become a millionaire many times over, owns five companies with her business partner and husband; Hans, and is a best-selling author, internationally sought-after speaker and radio show host.
While speaking on her life in a recent interview, Johnson said she had to sleep with eight different men in the space of two month because that was the only way she could eat.
On Christmas night of 1990, she joined other waitresses at the beach on a drink and drug binge looking for a way out of her “miserable existence. That day,” she said, she would have become “a prostitute for coke and that’s how low I became. I hated everything about myself. I knew my future would never be good. I was suicidal from the age of six. My life was not worth living. There was no chance to turn it into anything better. I was disgusting. I hated how my parents raised us. My life was filled with broken promises and lies and people stealing and people beating me and people hating me and me hating myself even more…”
One would make an educated guess that this self-loathing was one of the catalysts, if not the major one that pushed her into wanting to end her life the following morning. She said she started walking “towards the ocean and dived underneath the wave.”
But she did not die. She got another chance to make something out of her life.
“The whole time I was driving, it was as if the left side of my mind was saying, ‘This is not what is intended for your life, you shouldn’t be drinking.
There is more to life,’ and the right side was saying, ‘You’re a failure, you’re a loser, you’re filthy; worse than your parents. Drive this car into the ocean.’ This was like a war inside my mind with these voices and I was literally in a trance. And I have no idea why I chose to listen to that first voice.
Inside the car she had been living the major parts of her life, an idea struck and that was how the journey to making her millions began.
“There was this weight loss program I had purchased long before I was homeless, lying in the back seat. I had used it for a week. I never paid attention to it before. And it just caught the corner of my eye in the sun. It was warped from the humidity. But it was as if this device was talking to me. I picked it up and it was as if this thing was saying, ‘I’m your answer.’ And my first thought was, ‘No, I’m not going to peddle a weight loss program! No way I’m going to do this!’ I turned the box around, saw the manufacturer’s details and called them from the payphone,” she said.
But something made her do exactly what she said she wouldn’t do.
To cut a long story short, Johnson ended up with $4,000 dollars from the first month.
She cautioned that everything wasn’t so rosy at first though. “The first six months that I was in business, I did fail miserably and I mean I failed miserably and I failed until I met two young men who happened to have been at that same exact symposium and yet they were making money and I was not. I knew it wasn’t just because of my gender and I knew it wasn’t just because I didn’t have a college education.
“In fact, I’m a high school dropout. But I began to ask questions. I began to ask questions and they pointed me in a direction where I could go to a training seminar and after that seminar, I had been to six of them in a six-month period, and I made $50,000 with the same industry.”
Dani made a quarter of a million dollars that first year just by selling the weight loss program, became a millionaire by the second year and went on to open up 18 weight loss centers around the country. She sold the business in 1996 as a multi-millionaire.
Credits: Dani Johnson’s First Step To Wealth, Forbes Magazine and Eventual Millionaires.
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