Who’s Dan Sherman?

You can reach me at myself AT dansherman DOT com.

I find myself very fortunate to have experienced so much that has shaped me into the person I am today, at 41 years old. I was born into relative poverty to a 17 year old mom who dropped out of high school at 15. That was also when she married my dad (he was 25.) As you’d expect, they were divorced shortly thereafter.

We were very poor, moving and living with many family members over the years. My mom remarried (6 times to date) and when I was 10 years old, we lived in a tent high up in the rugged back country of the Sierra Nevada mountain range of northern California. We made money by dredging for gold (when it was worth $25 an ounce) and shot deer out of season for food. I still remember picking nuggets out of crevices with tweezers and panning a LOT of gold. Our tent was next to a small stream where we grew vegetables. It was an amazing learning experience.

I’ve lived in almost every town in the central valley of California from Marysville/Yuba City to Turlock and all points in between. Not to mention a few places in Oregon, Nevada and Georgia. By the time I graduated from high school I had attended 21 individual schools and moved 26 times.

I can still remember telling my mom when I was very small that I was not going to be poor all my life. Although I wasn’t discouraged from achieving success in life, I certainly wasn’t pushed towards it. I was never expected or even encouraged to attend college. My family was always of the opinion that you can’t get ahead in life because the deck was stacked against us because we were born INTO poverty. (Typical poor Democrat thinking.) I NEVER could share that opinion, even when it permeated all that we did and lived for while I was growing up. Indeed, there were many times I felt like I was being raised by someone else’s parents. It was surreal.

I joined the USAF out of high school. I had wanted to be in the USAF since I was in 4th grade. I just knew it was for me. Can’t explain it. Just was.

It was in the USAF that my life went in a direction that I could never, in my wildest dreams, imagine. So wild, in fact, I wrote a book about it called ABOVE BLACK. It’s about my role relating to an NSA alien contact project called Preserve Destiny. It made a fairly big splash in the alien/UFO aficionado world but has yet to get traction in the mainstream news since, like many others that have worked on such projects, there is absolutely no hard evidence I could have come away with in support of my claims. I’ve been featured and interviewed over 200 times on radio, tv and print and we’re currently shopping a screenplay of it around Liberalwood.

Reconciling the two parts of my life… my book and my entrepreneurial spirit, is difficult to air in public. Indeed, up to this point, I’ve not really discussed my book on my blog in depth. Because of the obvious implications. I know people will automatically assume that I am lying and wrote the book purely as an entrepreneurial “opportunity.” Yes, I admit to being an entrepreneur and indeed, an entrepreneur that sees opportunity in EVERYTHING. But in this case, I’m an entrepreneur that just happened to have experienced something that is quite remarkable. Yes, I make money from the telling of that story (through book sales.) Just like many other ex-government officials do after leaving their jobs. Yes, of course I knew it was something people would pay to read about when I wrote the book. I’m not dumb. But I have to implore my visitors to give me the benefit of the doubt regarding my overriding motive for writing the book. The book and my entrepreneurial spirit are distinct entities from one another. They overlap to the extent that one person doing two different things will obviously apply his knowledge to the furthering of either endeavor, but the book was not a opportunity for opportunity sake.

Oh, and the graphic on the blog here? Well, I gotta poke some fun at myself, right? (I do have a sense of humor!) But it not only is a reference to that part of me that is written about in ABOVE BLACK. It also speaks to what I always refer to in being a “remarkable” entrepreneur. It denotes something pretty remarkable. I mean, what’s MORE remarkable than a UFO flying by… right? 🙂

Anyway, despite my apparent lunacy regarding aliens and such… I hope you can take something from what I share here on my blog and apply it to your journey. It is my hope that I can inspire my readers to go further than they ever thought possible. If you live in America, you have absolutely NO reason for not succeeding if you are of sound mind and body. The choices you make in life get you closer and closer to your goals. Don’t make bad choices and the world is your oyster.

It’s true and think about it. Say it again and again…

If you ain’t remarkable, why?