Q&A With Douglas Smith 

Mickey Mikkelson connected me with Douglas Smith who wrote a memoir titled The Path Of Rocks & Thorns: Leadership Lessons from a Prison Cell. I am honored to be doing this interview with Douglas. 

Q: Douglas, welcome to Book Notions! Would you please give a brief description of The Path Of Rocks & Thorns & discuss why now was the right time to write and release your memoir? 

A: The Path of Rocks and Thorns: Leadership Lessons from a Prison Cell is a memoir disguised as a leadership book. I chronicle my descent into mental illness and addiction, experiences that very nearly cost me my life and ultimately led me to prison. In prison, I learned how to live in my own skin and experienced, for the first time, freedom from the self-defeating patterns that destroyed my career. I took that freedom with me and learned to lead as an investment in others. This is a leadership book for anyone who has fallen – experienced failure, descended into addiction, sabotaged their career. 

My leadership development practice involves elevating the leadership capacity of people like me – people with addiction and mental illness histories – people who have experienced trauma – formerly incarcerated people. I noticed that the things that often hold them back in their careers are so relatable to everyone. I realized that I needed to write a book, helping people transform their own life experiences into powerful lessons of leadership. 

Q: How long did it take you to write The Path Of Rocks & Thorns were there parts hard to reminisce and write down or was it more therapeutic getting everything from pen to page? 

A: I started writing The Path of Rocks and Thorns as a lark. I read a leadership book written by a Navy SEAL. Each chapter started with a SEAL operation gone wrong and the hard leadership lessons gained from the mistakes. I thought to myself, “Wow, I could do that! I’ll call it ‘Leadership Lessons from a Prison Cell.’

I started to write the book and quickly realized that writing personal details about my own experience of mental illness, addiction, and incarceration, required me to wrestle with the factors that led me to prison in the first place. 

Before prison, I was a Social Worker, public policy expert, and adjunct professor at The University of Texas at Austin. I was also someone with a co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorder. I also have experiences of trauma from my past that followed me into adulthood. These experiences tore my career to shreds, leading me to the streets for illicit drugs, and the streets led me to prison. 

Unwilling to let the project go, I decided to reckon with the past. I heard a voice in my head, someone I assumed to be a younger version of me, say, “Doug, write my story. Do justice for me.” 

The process of writing the book was deeply unsettling at times. I’d go back through chapters to edit certain portions, reading my own experiences back to me, and they made me sick and dizzy. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the project without going through the darkness. 

In fact, I loosely structure the book like Dante’s Inferno, with nine levels and 34 cantos. The metaphor is that authentic leadership is born by going to the deepest core of Hell. From there, you can climb again. 

Q: What messages and emotions do you hope readers learn, remember & feel after they finish reading The Path Of Rocks & Thorns? 

A: I hope that people will read the book and find something for themselves. Maybe they will recognize themselves in my own self sabotage, or they might recognize their inner landscape in the self-defeating thought patterns that haunted me. Maybe they will find hope in the knowledge that fully experiencing their most uncomfortable emotions will lead them to deeper wisdom and greater self-awareness. At the end, maybe people will put the book down, open their laptops, and write their own book. That would be really cool. 

Q: Do you plan on writing a follow up memoir to The Path Of Rocks & Thorns or will you try your hand at writing fiction? 

A: I’m already thinking about my next writing project. It will likely be in the vein of leadership development, but I hope to keep bringing the magic of grit and scars into space. The one gift that prison gives is freedom of no longer having to hide or be someone you aren’t. Imagine if we could all escape from a place of freedom like that?