In 1980, Steve Cowan had the idea of writing a series of essays about remarkable people who had changed the path of his life. This idea was developed and finished in 2016, after his retirement from 42 years of being a systems analyst, but that was not the end of the project. It was only the beginning. What he discovered, much to his surprise, was that he very much enjoyed writing essays about his life, so he wrote more and more and more of them. During the writing of almost 50 essays, the dream of compiling them into a book took shape, and it emerged as this autobiography.