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Welcome to Darren Daly on Demand, your most trusted resource to help you become better every day. Here's your success mentor, Darren Hardy.

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Today I want to share a story that asks a pivotal question. When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, do you have the bravery to not just question the finality of expert opinions, but to act decisively on your instincts? Here's the story. Natalie was 20 and pregnant. She and her husband Martin wanted a baby girl. The couple lived in a two family house in Hoboken, New Jersey. It was a modest but happy home, not far from the railroad yards and the docks. Martin was a small businessman. He owned a tavern in town. Natalie, in addition to taking care of the house, was a nurse. And now she was pregnant. All through the fall, the expectant parents made plans for the new arrival. They wondered what day she would be born and whom she will take after. They were so certain of a daughter that the young mother purchased all pink baby clothing. How frivolous those considerations must have seemed on that chilly December morning so many years ago. Natalie's mother, Rosa, had been up with her daughter most of the night. It was a difficult labor. And now, by dawn's early light, still no child. Now Mama Rosa, as she was called, had, having born nine children of her own, had developed a reliable intuition about these things. And she knew that this time something was terribly wrong. By the time Dr. Peterson arrived, Natalie was many hours into her labor. A quick examination revealed the difficulty. The child was simply too large and unable to move. It would have to be a so called forceps delivery. Well, minutes later the child was born, but utterly quiet. The left side of the infant's head had been lacerated by the forceps. The left ear was almost severed. I'm sorry, said Dr. Peterson gravely. The child is stillborn. And now the only question was, could Natalie be saved? Well, as Dr. Peterson did everything he could to stop the hemorrhaging, Mama Rosa, Natalie's mother, gazed at the silent infant in disbelief. Her grandchild born dead. No, it must not be. And at that instant, she remembered something one of her own midwives had told her long ago. Maybe she'd remembered it for a reason, for right here and now. Quickly, Mama Rosa took the infant to the wash bin, placed it under cold water and turned on the faucet. A moment went by, but nothing. Another moment and the baby, the one the doctor had given up for dead, coughed, cried out, breathed in, and lived. And Natalie was as lucky as her newborn because shortly thereafter, the bleeding stopped. And as the bright Sunday sunlight danced on the Freshly fallen snow, a new life was given to the world. Natalie's baby had weighed 13 and a half pounds at birth. That had been the problem. But now mother and child were safe. So it didn't really matter much when Natalie discovered that her hope for she was a he. In fact, for the rest of his life, Natalie's baby boy would bear the scars from Dr. Peterson's forceps as well as the name originally intended for a daughter, Frances. You see the blue eyed boy who in December 1915 was supposed to have been a girl. The infant the doctor thought was stillborn, was stillborn and grew up to become Francis Albert, or as he preferred, Frank Sinatra. So what lessons can we draw from old blue eyes, turbulent entry into the world? I think a few. Number one is trust your intuition. Mama Rosa's decision to act on her intuition against the grim diagnosis of Dr. Peterson changed the course of her grandchild's life and the life of the rest of us and what we've been deprived of as one of the most popular entertainers of the mid 20th century. So what can you and I do with this? Listen to your gut, especially when faced with critical decisions. Often instincts honed by experience can offer guidance that defies conventional understanding. Number two, challenge authority when necessary. Despite Dr. Peterson's finality on the baby's fate, Mamarosa chose to challenge this expert opinion based on her maternal experience. So for you and me, yes, we want to respect expertise, but maintain a healthy skepticism always. Experts can be wrong and often are. So it's essential to question and test their conclusions, especially when your experiences and intuition suggests otherwise. Number three, preparation meets opportunity. Mama Rose's recollection of an old midwife's advice at a critical moment illustrates how preparedness can enable one to seize opportunities to alter outcomes dramatically. There is a US Navy SEALS quote that goes, under pressure. You don't rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training. And the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle. That is why you and I need to keep sweating in training. And that is what we do here each morning. No doubt the occasion is going to arise when one of the ideas that we've discussed here one morning could keep you or somebody that you love from bleeding or, in the chairman of the board's case, from dying.