Six Dimes and a Nickel
Life Lessons to Empower Change

From a life-sentence to a global inspiration, Six Dimes and a Nickel introduces the principles and stories that allowed Damon West to rewrite his narrative and become one of the greatest underdog triumphs of all time. Damon West was a promising college athlete and Division 1 starting quarterback when a career-ending injury incited his struggle with drug abuse. Once he was introduced to methamphetamines, he became instantly hooked. The lives of many innocent people would forever be changed by the choices he made in order to feed his insatiable meth habit. By 2009, a Dallas jury had sentenced him to sixty-five years—a life sentence—for engaging in organized crime. Or, in prison slang, he got six dimes and a nickel. It was a RICO case, of which he was the ringleader. Inside the suffocating walls of a Texas maximum-security prison, fighting for his life and sanity, he found grit, courage, and determination to make a change. After a fateful discussion during his incarceration with a seasoned convict, Damon had a spiritual awakening. He learned that, like a coffee bean changing with the application of heat and pressure, he was capable of changing the environment around him. Armed with a program of recovery and a renewed sense of faith, Damon transformed so thoroughly that the parole board released him in 2015, placing him on parole until 2073. Since then, he’s become a highly sought-after speaker, bestselling author, husband, and stepfather, college professor, philanthropist, and an extremely successful entrepreneur. If you want to not only make a change in your life, but discover how to maintain that change and become the best version of yourself, then you’ve come to the right place. The principles and stories in this book are the blueprint for how Damon rewrote his story and, if applied, how you can rewrite yours.