Andy Andrews

Andy Andrews is an American author and speaker whose work centers on a single idea, which is that a person's actions produce consequences far beyond anything they can observe.

He was born in Alabama in 1959 and lost both parents by the age of nineteen, his mother to cancer and his father in a car accident. He has described the period that followed as homeless, sleeping under a pier and in garages, and it is the account he returns to as the origin of everything since. During that period he read biographies borrowed from a library, looking for what separated people who recovered from circumstances from people who did not.

He began as a comedian, opening for musicians on tour, and moved into corporate speaking, where he has worked for decades with large companies and has spoken at the request of four United States presidents.

The Traveler's Gift, published in 2002, is his best-known book, a novel in which a man in crisis is sent to meet seven historical figures who each give him a decision to carry. It reached the New York Times bestseller list and was selected for a national television book club.

The Butterfly Effect, published in 2010, is a short illustrated gift book built from a talk he had given for years. It traces chains of consequence backward, from Norman Borlaug's crop research and from Joshua Chamberlain's decision at Gettysburg, to make visible an asymmetry most people never notice: you can partly see what caused you and you cannot see what you have caused.

Historians would object to the specific attributions, since every link in such a chain had thousands of other inputs. The underlying claim does not depend on any particular chain. He has published widely across fiction and nonfiction and lives in Orange Beach, Alabama.