Les Brown has a dream, and he is living it. In 1986, broke and sleeping on the cold linoleum floor of his office, he began to pursue a career as a motivational speaker. By the early 1990s, he was one of the highest paid speakers in the nation, with his company, Les Brown Unlimited, Inc., earning $4 million a year from his speaking tours and the sale of motivational tapes and materials. His audience is wide: from Fortune 500 companies to automobile workers to prison inmates to special-education classes to ordinary individuals. His mission "is to get a message out that will help people become uncomfortable with their mediocrity," he explained to a reporter for Ebony. "A lot of people are content with their discontent. I want to be a catalyst to enable them to see themselves having more and achieving more."

His message works because "he kindles the warmth, humor, and well being in a society that has seen the gradual disintegration of families and mounting technology and alienation in industry," Maureen McDonald wrote in the Detroiter. Brown knows the function of the able individual in a worn community: he delivers not only nurturing words but money as well, donating 20 percent of his business revenues to fund drug prevention programs. His message also works, and for a stronger reason, because he is not an outsider, an academic who offers a theoretical prescription. "I cannot lecture on something unless I am living it," Brown wrote in his 1992 bestseller Live Your Dreams. He connects with other people--their misfortunes and missed opportunities--because he has been through it all and triumphed.