You’ve Got to Read This Book is a compendium of 55 individual’s stories of life-altering events. Jim Guy writes about discovering Buddhism and acquainting himself with its foundational principles.

Not that I was interested in religion. I was an agnostic—with an attitude. I had been raised Methodist but had let it go as a teenager rejecting what I considered a shallow understanding of reality. I didn’t buy it—the set-up George Carlin describes as “the invisible old guy in the sky” who rewards or punishes humankind for good or bad behavior.

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There was no such thing as God. For the rest of his life, [my father] had no use for religion—preferring to face the stark reality that this world was spinning on its own without the benefit of a kind and loving guardian to keep things on an even keel.

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Sitting on the edge of the bed in the hotel room, I began to read The Teachings of the Buddha. I was introduced to the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. The First Noble Truth, “There is suffering in the world,” resonated inside me as if I had been struck like a bell. The deep simplicity of this statement felt like a solid place to rest, to begin. I had experienced all too well the truth of it. There was nothing here that smacked of rewards or punishments, sin or saintliness; only a calm acceptance of present reality. I read the next three: There is a cause to suffering. There is an end to suffering. There is a path out of suffering.

Jim Guy is the chief marketing officer of Cambridge Investment Research, Inc., a national broker and dealer serving the needs of independent financial planners, headquartered in Fairfield, Iowa.