Book excerpt: If a writer wanted to create a classic American character, he could hardly do better than to look to Jim Miller's extraordinary eighty-plus years for inspiration. Born in the midst of the Great Depression, Jim was an indifferent student who grew into a passionate and lifelong learner, inventor, and problem-solver. A high school dropout and blue-collar father of six before he was thirty, he never shied away from hard work. Whether heading south in his middle teens to work on a commercial fishing boat off the Florida Keys, strapping a .38 pistol to his waist when lobstering on the lawless waters of Long Island Sound, or founding companies that, over the years, have earned in excess of a billion dollars, Jim Miller always said yes to opportunity and made his own luck along the way.Here, in Jim's own words and those of his family, friends, and colleagues, is the story of a remarkable American life. Alternately funny, moving, and jaw-dropping in its twists and turns, Nothing Bad Ever Happens chronicles Jim's approach to life ("Nothing bad ever happens, only missed opportunities") and how it helped him manage every setback with optimism and grit. It's the story of the risks Jim and his family took through the years to make a better life for themselves--and the unbreakable bonds that held that family together through thick and often very, very thin. In scenes set all across the globe, from New York Harbor to the Gulf of Mexico, from the North Fork of Long Island to London, Japan, Panama, and beyond, a portrait emerges of a man whose creativity, optimism, and boundless capacity for hard work allowed him to seize opportunities where others saw only peril and the likelihood of loss. Over the years, Jim Miller has built several fortunes, raised a loving family with his wife of sixty years (the beautiful Barbara), and created enough stories to fill a fair-sized book.This is that book. This is the tale of a life well lived.