At five years old, Lorenzo Ray Phillips stood outside a Detroit grocery store and offered to carry bags for strangers. His mother worked multiple jobs. The bills went unpaid. Utilities got cut off. Carrying bags was how a small boy tried to keep the lights on.
A bystander saw him there and labelled him publicly — a “hustler,” they said, headed for jail or worse. Ray-Ray was five years old. He had not yet started school.
That moment sits at the centre of Lorenzo Ray Phillips’s chapter in the upcoming anthology Unleash Your Greatness – From Discipline to Destiny. The book launches on Sunday, 1 February 2026 at the Atlanta Airport Marriott. Les Brown and an international group of co-authors join Phillips on stage. What the chapter tracks is the distance between that grocery store pavement and the man Phillips became. A retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel, an Industrial Engineer and a holder of a Master’s degree in Business. It is considerable distance. And Phillips, true to his engineering background, shows the working.
The first turning point came from an unexpected direction. A 17-year-old student named Clarence Ray Cooper started a military-style drill team at Phillips’s middle school. Phillips joined to look impressive. What he found instead was a natural facility for leadership, motivation and bringing people toward a shared goal. Cooper, barely older than the students he was organising, had no idea he was redirecting a life. But he was.
Phillips builds his chapter around the practical principles that carried him from that Detroit childhood to the life he eventually built. Five of them stand out. The first is grounding in a higher power — prayer, visualisation and gratitude as daily practice rather than occasional gesture. A second is the attention principle he states plainly: “Where your focus goes, your energy flows.” The third involves identifying the things you do best with the least effort — your core gifts. Protecting them from distraction and dilution is the work. The fourth, which he calls OQP, stands for Only Quality People. It describes the deliberate choice to upgrade your environment by choosing carefully who you spend time with. The fifth draws on Mel Robbins’ 5-Second Rule. It works against procrastination and the internal commentary that keeps people stuck.
None of these principles is complicated. That is, in part, the point. Lorenzo Ray Phillips does not argue that this path requires exceptional talent or unusually good fortune. His argument runs the other direction. Greatness, as he frames it, does not belong to a select few. It follows naturally from God-given gifts combined with discipline, faith and consistent action. In turn, the gifts, he suggests, were already there on that grocery store pavement. Discipline came later.
His chapter’s most direct statement on this lands in a single line he writes directly to the reader. “You’re the only you we’ve got. If you don’t do you, then you won’t get done.”
The launch event on 1 February brings Phillips onto a live stage at the Atlanta Airport Marriott. Les Brown joins him there, alongside the other contributors to the collection. Together, they share the stories behind their chapters: accounts of discipline, faith, leadership and what each author calls legacy.
Unleash Your Greatness – From Discipline to Destiny arrives as an anthology built around a straightforward idea. Write transformation down honestly and it becomes useful to someone facing similar circumstances. Phillips’s chapter earns its place in that project. Detroit, the drill team, the military, the degrees — the line runs clear from one to the next. And the line is traceable.
That may be the most useful thing about it. Not inspiration as abstraction. A specific account of how one person moved from one kind of life to another, step by documented step.
Tickets and event information: https://lesbrown.com/atlanta
