What I Learned When I Almost Died: How a Maniac TV Producer Put Down His BlackBerry and Started to Live His Life

by Chris Licht

Overview

Equal parts Mitch Albom and Jerry Maguire, Chris Licht tells the tale of a brilliant career nearly cut short by a brain aneurysm—and how that near-death experience changed everything.

Chris Licht was a “killer” at his day job as the executive producer in charge of running MSNBC’s must-watch politics and morning news show Morning Joe. A thirty-eight-year-old control freak who thrived in the high-octane world of media, he had spent years sacrificing relationships with family and friends in the fiercely driven pursuit of his career. But that was before a brain aneurysm nearly killed him. Suddenly humbled, Chris is forced to recognize the richness of the life he nearly lost and to reckon with his family and career. This is a story of a man who nearly died—and found a way to remove what doesn’t matter and wound up more in love with his work and his family than ever.

What I Learned When I Almost Died brings to life the set of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, plunging into the competitive world of television and revealing all the egos and adrenaline it takes to create a popular cable TV political show. Licht also flings back the curtain to one of the nation’s most prestigious emergency rooms as his life hangs in the balance, detailing the extraordinary courage and professionalism it takes to bring him back from the edge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476787954
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/19/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 5.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Chris Licht is the recently appointed chairman and CEO of CNN Global. Previously the executive producer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Licht was also vice president of programming at CBS News and the executive producer of CBS This Morning. Licht has also been the co-creator and original executive producer of Morning Joe—the popular daily morning show on MSNBC hosted by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist—as well as the executive producer on Scarborough Country. He lives in Manhattan with his family.

Read an Excerpt

prologue
The Killer Producer

Lately, if I happen to be looking through my address book for a phone number, I’m apt to stop when I come across the name of someone I haven’t been in touch with for a while. A friend, maybe, or an acquaintance. When I do, I’m likely to fire off an e-mail with no more length or gravitas than this:

Hey, how you been?

The gesture is a small one, but I didn’t used to do this. Days that were filled with the pressure and crises of running a national cable television program had little room for casual nicety. If I wasn’t in the control room producing it, I was in my office thinking about how to produce it. If the talent was unhappy, I’d let it gnaw at my gut. If somebody screwed up, I could go off like a roadside bomb, in a finger snap. I knew this. But the show so consumed me that it couldn’t be merely acceptable. It had to be great. I had ambitions. I had to be the killer producer.

Then one day, with no warning whatsoever, I became scary sick in a random and hard-to-figure way, given that I was not even forty years old. Most people with the medical emergency I had do not emerge from the experience physically intact, if they emerge at all. Weeks later, my health restored, I went back to work, and was eager and happy to do so. Illness hadn’t scared me into some big life makeover. I had no urge to surrender my spot in the fast lane for ownership of a B&B in Vermont.

But serious illness had recalibrated me. It had brought a trove of knowledge, as if I had involuntarily paid a painful tuition for an elite education. It was about letting go of my fears. It was about what I could control and what I couldn’t, and how people felt about me, really felt about me. It was about how to use time. It was even about Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States.

It would be nice, I thought, if everyone could get the education I had gotten without having to nearly die.

So I decided to write a book.

© 2011 Chris Licht

Editorial Reviews

TV news honcho Licht was used to calling the shots as executive producer of MSNBC'sMorning Joe, but that changed one day when something popped inside his skull.

Instead of prepping for another episode of the successful morning show with hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the author, not yet 40, landed in the emergency room. There, he learned that his brain was bleeding—and no one knew exactly why. Licht, who up until then was the picture of health, found that he was no longer in control. What followed was a harrowing ordeal that, even if it didn't ultimately kill him, was destined to change him in ways that he could never have dreamed of before. As a "stop and smell the roses" parable, Licht's tale of sudden life-threatening illness covers familiar ground. Still, hearing how this classic type-A personality was forced to confront some hard truths about himself in order to survive makes for a compelling exercise. Readers might not care much about how attentively Scarborough and Brzezinski buzzed around his bedside, or that Vice President Joe Biden personally got on the phone with the hospital in an effort to ensure his recovery. But other candid observations, like the impact the author's steady-as-a-rock father had on his son's healing, are right on the money.

Not exactly revelatory, but often moving.

Kirkus Reviews