Byline: WestWord

It sounds like a tidy piece of inspirational fiction: A coke-snorting, booze-guzzling dropout squanders every opportunity in life, turns to armed robbery, burglary and sleazy telemarketing scams, spends much of his adult life behind bars as a self-proclaimed “worthless piece of shit” — then discovers the secrets of better living from self-help gurus, totally reforms, emerges from prison in time to salvage a relationship with his young son, and builds a multimillion-dollar company from scratch in just four years.