Do you know Lester Young? No, not the jazz saxophone player — the convicted murderer. His story is one of the most inspiring I've heard in years.

At age 19, Lester killed a man during a drug deal gone bad. The judge sentenced him to life in prison.

Behind bars, Lester's life changed when the prison chaplain gave him a copy of "As a Man Thinketh." A reluctant reader, Lester resisted opening the book. But once he did, author James Allen's allegory of the mind as a garden captured Lester's imagination. Each of us is a gardener; we plant and nurture the seeds of our own future.

Soon, other convicts asked what he was reading. They began gathering around him in the prison courtyard. Eventually, Lester found himself lecturing to 300 fellow inmates in the prison chapel.

Nearly two decades later, a review board paroled Lester for good behavior. Now a devout Muslim, he runs Path2Redemption, a foundation devoted to helping ex-cons reenter the world as productive and upstanding members of society.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Lester sought out the family of the man he killed and reconciled with them. Recounting his story on my podcast, Lester is the only guest whose story ever brought my co-host to tears.

You might reasonably ask: How could parents or siblings ever forgive the man who murdered their son or brother? In a way, they didn't. Rather, they were able to recognize the profound truth that Lester Young was no longer the person who committed that horrific crime. He had become someone else entirely. Consequently, he offers a glowing example of the current addition to the Ethical Lexicon:

Metanoia (met*a*noi*a/ met-uh-noy-a) noun

A transformative change of heart.

A change in one's way of life resulting from penitence or inspiration.

You've doubtless heard what may be the most insidious phrase in popular speech; you may have even said it yourself: "I'm the kind of person who ..."

Those six words utterly negate the most transcendent of all human qualities: the ability to improve, to grow, to adapt, to transform ourselves into something more than what we are.

The power of self-determination is the root of what we call the growth mindset. Popularized by Carol Dweck in her celebrated bestseller, the concept is hardly new. King Solomon alluded to it 3,000 years ago in his proverb: "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands, and your poverty will stalk you like an assassin."

Comfort leads to contentment; contentment leads to complacency; complacency leads to apathy. Ever so slowly, our thoughts, attitudes and actions calcify until we become impoverished of motivation, creativity and the mindset that produces metanoia.

The willingness to envision transformative change explains why Netflix flourished where Blockbuster Video perished, why Fuji film prospered where Kodak collapsed. On the most elemental level, however, success arises naturally from the changes we bring about within ourselves.

After becoming the youngest woman in history to win a U.S. Championship title at age 13, ice skater Alysa Liu stunned the skating world three years later by announcing her retirement. She found the cost of competitive skating too high, and she longed to enjoy a normal teenage life of school, friends and hobbies.

Later, as a sophomore at UCLA, she rediscovered her childhood passion. She returned to the ice and, this March, won international gold. Ms. Liu's metanoic vision of a more balanced life led her away from being a champion skater. Her renewed vision of personal fulfillment then led her to pick up where she left off.

Few things in life are more painful than regret; few things are more rewarding than looking back at how far we've come after a long and challenging journey. Our vision for ourselves inevitably changes over time. What doesn't need to change is our commitment to become the best version of ourselves, to experience metanoia by creating a better life for ourselves while contributing to the creation of a better world.

To see more from Yonason Goldson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Sandy Millar at Unsplash