Picture a man at 2 a.m., staring at the ceiling of a room that doesn’t feel like home. The house is gone. A big chunk of his paycheck disappears before it ever hits his account. His kids are with their mother this week, and the apartment is so quiet he can hear the refrigerator hum. He keeps asking himself one question: How did I get here?

Maybe that man is you. Maybe you’re asking that question tonight from a buddy’s couch, a rented room, or the driver’s seat of your car. If so, I want you to hear this first, brother: you’re in good company. Some of the most successful men in America hit a floor just as hard as yours. A few of them hit it harder. Every one of them got back up.

Let me introduce you to a few of them.

In 1966, John Paul DeJoria was 22 years old, newly out of the Navy, married young and raising a two-year-old son. One day he came home and handed his wife the car keys so she could run to the store. When he walked upstairs, his son was sitting in the middle of the floor next to a little pile of clothes and a note. His wife had written that she couldn’t handle being a mom anymore. She took the rent money and their only car, and she was gone.

Within days, DeJoria and his son were evicted. He collected bottles for change. A biker friend took them in, and some of the women in that crew helped watch his son while DeJoria hustled for work. He later told Big Think that he was too proud to tell friends or family how bad it was.

A second marriage was falling apart years later, and he ended up homeless again, this time sleeping in his car. A backer had promised to fund his new hair care company and then pulled out. So DeJoria and his partner, a hairdresser named Paul Mitchell, started John Paul Mitchell Systems with about $700 between them. He sold the products himself, door to door, salon to salon. Years later he co-founded Patrón tequila and became a billionaire.

Divorce knocked him flat twice. He got back up both times and built an empire.

You probably know Chris Gardner’s story from the Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness. The real version is rougher.

In the early 1980s, Gardner’s relationship with his son’s mother fell apart. A fight between them landed him in jail over $1,200 in unpaid parking tickets, and while he was locked up she took their son across the country. Months later she brought the boy back and handed him over. Gardner was living in a boarding house that didn’t allow children. That same day, he became a homeless single father.

For close to a year, Gardner worked as a stockbroker trainee by day. At night he and his toddler slept wherever they could find safety: church shelters, airports, his office after hours, even a locked subway station bathroom. Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco gave them space at the church’s shelter when he could. Gardner’s coworkers never knew.

Gardner had grown up without his father, and he’d promised himself that his own children would know who their dad was. He kept that promise. In 1987 he started his own brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Co. His son Christopher Jr. later said that, as a little boy, he didn’t know they were homeless. All he knew was that they always had to keep moving.

Brother, read that again. That man kept his son feeling safe while sleeping in a train station. Whatever you’re carrying right now, you can carry it too.

Before Steve Harvey was hosting Family Feud and making millions, he was sleeping in his car. In a 2020 interview with People magazine, Harvey said that after his first marriage fell apart he lived out of his car for about three years, chasing a comedy career on roughly $50 a week. Whatever he did earn, he sent home to support his kids.

He called that season “very painful.” He also told People that during those years he felt God telling him that if he kept going, he’d be taken places he’d never been. He kept going. In 1993 he landed Showtime at the Apollo, and the rest is television history. He went through a second, very public divorce years later and still kept building.

Here’s the thing I love about Harvey’s story. He was broke, and he still sent money home for his children. A man who does that already knows who he is, even when everything else is gone.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson can lift a small car. Divorce still put him on the mat.

On The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast in late 2025, Johnson opened up about his 2007 split from his wife, Dany Garcia, after about a decade of marriage. He said the divorce sent him into depression. His biggest fear was a question a lot of you have probably asked yourself: What kind of father am I going to be? He even admitted that he picked lighter family movies during that stretch because he didn’t have it in him to take on roles that would gut him emotionally.

What happened next is the part I want you to study. Johnson has said publicly that therapy helped him learn to co-parent and work with his ex-wife. Johnson and Garcia went on to raise their daughter Simone together and to build Seven Bucks Productions, one of the most successful production companies in Hollywood. Johnson summed up their arrangement in five words: “building a business can be.”

You may never go into business with your ex, and I’m not suggesting you try. But you can decide that the anger stops with you.

Garry Junkuhn isn’t a celebrity, which is exactly why his story matters. In a 2023 profile from RBC’s Discover & Learn, Junkuhn described what happened after his marriage ended and he told his sons he was moving in with his girlfriend. They cut him off completely. For almost three years, he didn’t hear from them. Then he found out from a school email that his older son had changed his last name to his mother’s.

He said the pain felt like “four wild horses” pulling him apart.

Junkuhn found two mentors. One of them asked him a question that turned his thinking around: “What is the gift inside your tragedy?” He sold his belongings, moved to South America, and rebuilt himself from the inside out. Eventually, he reconnected with his sons. Today he runs a movement called 100k Fathers, with a goal of reuniting 100,000 dads with their kids.

If your children aren’t speaking to you right now, hold on to Garry’s story. A door that’s closed today can still open.

Hollywood loves a comeback story, and science backs it up.

Researchers Anthony Mancini, George Bonanno and Andrew Clark tracked more than 16,000 people for years in a study titled “Stepping Off the Hedonic Treadmill,” published in 2011. They looked at how life satisfaction changed after major life events, including divorce. Most of the people who divorced bounced back to where they’d been before, and nearly one in ten actually ended up happier than before. Fewer than one in five showed the long slide we all assume divorce causes.

A 2017 study by Matteo Malgaroli, Isaac Galatzer-Levy and George Bonanno, published in Clinical Psychological Science, followed older adults through divorce using the national Health and Retirement Study. About two-thirds showed resilience, holding steady with no lasting depression.

So if you feel like you’re the only man who’s ever fallen this far, the numbers say otherwise. The research also says something more important. Recovery is the most common outcome.

Look at those stories again and you’ll see the same thing in every one. Nobody climbed out alone.

DeJoria had a biker buddy with a spare room. Gardner had Reverend Cecil Williams. Junkuhn had two mentors. The Rock had a therapist. Even at their lowest, each of these men let somebody in.

Rebuilding also takes a willingness to start over from scratch, with whatever you have in your hands that day. DeJoria started over with $700 and a car full of shampoo. Gardner started over with a toddler on his hip and his eyes on Wall Street. Harvey started over with a back seat and a stage. Junkuhn started over with a one-way ticket to South America.

None of them waited until they felt ready. They took the next step with what they had, and they let somebody walk with them while they took it.

You can start over too, brother. Today counts as day one.

Every man in this article had a night when he wondered whether he’d ever get up again. DeJoria with a note and a toddler. Gardner in a locked bathroom. Harvey in his back seat. The Rock wondering what kind of father he’d be. Garry Junkuhn reading a school email with his son’s new last name.

All of them got up.

You will too, brother. One move at a time. Now go make your first one.