Nobody Escapes Life
We are all subject to the undeniable fact of life that we do not control everything. As a result of that, there will inevitably be a multitude of external factors that will affect our lives on a daily basis.
Some are directly connected to our actions. For example, you could spend hours planning a difficult conversation with a colleague at work, but when you deliver it, you still somehow make them feel insulted. You could go to do some heavy deadlifts in the gym and injure your back. Or, you could make the wrong decision at the wrong time and cause a tragic accident.
Others of these external factors are things you would never expect to happen. Your spouse could have an affair. You could eat clean, exercise, and do everything perfectly to maintain your health and still be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Or, you could wake up at 4:30 AM planning to get ahead of the day while everyone else in your family sleeps, but instead your kid wakes up right behind you.
That’s life. That’s existence as a human being. The world isn’t orbiting around you, reading your thoughts and molding itself to your ideal picture. And there’s no escaping it, just like there’s no escaping the fact that you need air to breathe.
One of these moments happened to me when I was in Afghanistan. As a combat engineer in the Marine Corps, I specialized in the detection of improvised explosive devices(IEDs). Any time, throughout the course of our missions, that we discovered areas that we thought would contain an IED, I would use a hand-held metal detector to find a safe path through that area and guide the rest of my squad through.
On July 22 of 2010, my squad was on a mission, and we discovered one of these areas. As would be routine, I stepped forward to do the job that I had done dozens of times throughout that deployment. However, on this particular occasion, the end result was anything but routine.
Roughly half-way through the danger area, as I was performing my work, I was immediately teleported from standing up and swinging a metal detector to being on my back and screaming for my life. I had stepped on an IED.
After roughly a minute, my body and mind regained control of themselves and the screaming subsided. I was then able to reactively contemplate what my future was going to be like. I figured I could say goodbye to the Marine Corps. I was never going to set foot in a gym ever again. I saw myself being a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I saw myself being taken care of by my mom like I was a baby for the rest of my life.
I didn’t like what I saw at all. So, I turned to these two Marines that had just finished saving my life, and I asked them to kill me. I asked them to put me out of my misery. Naturally, they refused as they loaded me onto a stretcher, carried me to a tank, loaded me in, and gave me another shot of morphine after which I went unconscious.
I didn’t wake up for two days. Forty-eight hours later, I woke up in a hospital bed in Germany. It felt like I had been asleep for a thousand years. I could only lift my head an inch off the pillow. No matter how many times I blinked or rubbed my eyes, they wouldn’t focus. And the room was spinning slowly in a circle.
But even though I was barely conscious, I had one vividly clear thought: my mom is going to be crushed when she hears the news about this. So, I turned to my nurse and I asked her to find me a funny, or stupid looking hat that I could wear for when I got back to America. She looked back at me as if these were the words of a person incredibly high on Morphine, which I admit I was. However, my drug-addled mind had a simple objective. I figured if the first time my mom saw me when I got back to America, if I was wearing some kind of dumb hat, she wouldn’t be able to help but laugh. And in doing so, she would make herself feel just a little bit better.
Of course, they couldn’t find a funny hat in a trauma hospital in Afghanistan, but two days later, when I got back to America, there my mom was with a pirate hat to give to me. So, even though it wasn’t in the way I intended, my message was delivered: mom, I’m going to be okay.
You Have a Choice: Your Attitude
We are all also subject to a second undeniable fact of life: There is only one thing in life that you can control, and that is yourself. So, when one of these external factors injects itself into your life, along with it comes a choice. And that choice is, how am I going to perceive my future in light of what has happened?
The good news is, it’s pretty simple because you really only have two choices. You can see your future as being ruined. You could say to yourself, “well, things aren’t going to go exactly the way I planned, and now I have all these obstacles in my way, the universe must be against me, so what’s the point of even trying. Everything is ruined.”
Or you can choose to see that, while it may not look exactly how you envisioned it originally, your mission still exists, and it can be accomplished. And, in fact, all of these obstacles that are in your way resisting you can, in reality, help you become more capable of accomplishing your mission and they can actually help you expand that mission to be more impactful, more meaningful, and more rewarding than it would have been otherwise.
And the difference between those two views is what we call your Attitude.
So, you show up to the gym and it turns out that you’re unable to do the workout you wanted to do in the exact way that it’s written with the sets, reps, and rest you spent all that time planning out. You can go, “oh, well I can’t do the workout right, so what’s the point of even working out, I’m just going to go home. And you know what, maybe on the way I’ll pick up a caramel macchiato with a couple extra pumps of sugar.” Or, you could say, “okay, this is an opportunity for me to work on something else. I can practice adapting.”
Or when you wake up at 4:30 and your kid wakes up at 4:31, you can see that as ruining your entire plan for the morning, then be kind of irritated and in a bad mood while you’re spending time with them that morning, or you can see that as an opportunity to play a few more rounds of Shadows(my son Harry’s favorite game), and build the relationship with your child.
When I was laying in that blast crater in Afghanistan, I had the first attitude. And I wanted to be dead. I asked people to kill me. Because my attitude was all about how I wasn’t going to be able to have a good life anymore.
But, by the time I woke up in the hospital, I had the other one. And during my time in the hospital, I saw how I could turn this unexpected injury to my advantage. I found out about the Paralympics. And ultimately that led to winning a bronze medal in 2012. But even better, as a result of going to the Paralympics, I met my wife Pam.
But, something else unexpected happened. Rowing, while it was awesome, didn’t bring me the meaning I wanted. The greater purpose. So, I thought, “how can I use this to my advantage? “
I figured I could use my consistent training to launch a bike ride across America. So, in 2013 I did that and raised 125,000 for charity. But, again, something unexpected happened. Somehow, the bike ride didn’t feel fulfilling. So, I asked myself, “how can I use that?”
As it turned out, the Paralympics were only two years away at that point, and a new sport was being introduced: Triathlon. So, I thought I could use my bike ride experience as a launching point to compete in the Paralympics again but in Triathlon. Unfortunately, I failed miserably, as I didn’t even come remotely close to even getting in the top five of a single race.
But, what I learned during that failure was that I was a pretty good runner. And I also ran the Marine Corps Marathon as part of my training. More importantly, during that time, I noticed the perception around Veterans had been shifting. From that of the noble hero to that of the broken hero. It seemed like every Veteran character I saw in a movie, or a tv show, or even songs and news stories, they were only being portrayed as being constantly haunted by what they had seen in war, and constantly on the cusp of implosion. And that didn’t sit right with me. Because it didn’t represent my story. It didn’t represent the story of the vast majority of my friends, and it didn’t represent the story of the vast majority of Veterans. And I didn’t want me, my friends, or any Veteran to be seen as victims.
So, I took ownership of that problem and I set out to create a story about a Veteran who went overseas, experienced some of war’s worst traumas, came home, and thrived from it. Became stronger because of it. Instead of being destroyed by it. And my way of doing that was to run 31 marathons in 31 consecutive days in 31 different cities. And in completing this Month of Marathons, I turned what was the darkest moment of my entire life into a life more meaningful than I ever thought possible, even before my injury.
Attitude is the Foundation
Every action you take in life and every decision you make is driven by the way that you see your circumstances. Your position. Your capabilities. Your possibilities. Your attitude. Attitude is the foundation of everything you do. If your attitude is, “my life is ruined, I can’t do this, my dream is dead,” you’re going to take one path. If your attitude is, “I will have to change my plan, maybe I can figure out another way, I can still do something meaningful,” you’re going to take a different path. And only one of those paths leads you to accomplishing your mission.
How Do You Own Your Attitude?
So, how do you do it? How do you cultivate an attitude that will drive you forward through all of these unforeseen events?
The first step you need to take is accept the truth of your situation. The old path is gone. It’s unavailable. But you still have a mission. And there are almost infinite ways to accomplish that mission. Every human being’s mission on Earth is to have a meaningful and enjoyable life. That’s the commander’s intent of life. And if you recognize that, then all that you have to do is find a new way to accomplish that mission.
Next, you have to ask yourself: How can I, from my current circumstances, help the people I care about the most in my life? What do they need that I can provide? Then, help them. Give them what they need. My mom needed me to be okay. If I lost both my legs and climbed into a hole of despair and never came out and just wasted away the rest of my life wishing on what could have been, my mom may have never recovered from that. But if I lost my legs and I moved on in pursuit of meaning and happiness, then maybe my mom could, too.
There is always something that you can do to help the people you care about. I was in a hospital bed. High. Hallucinating. Eating through a tube. Peeing into a bag. Pooping into a bag. Barely conscious. Barely able to speak. Barely even alive. And I still found a way to help my mom. So, figure out what you can do. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. From the hospital bed, I didn’t see all that would happen as a result of me asking for a funny hat. I saw one small thing I could do. I tried to do it. And that small act started the snowball rolling down the hill. If you want to have a better attitude, you want to be a better leader, build relationships, make any change in your life, find one small thing you can do to help people and start doing it.
Third, you need to put your ego in check. When something bad happens to you, that is the ultimate trump card, the ultimate excuse to let your ego drive everything. It will make you think, “something bad happened to me. It ruined my life. I have all these challenges now.” And nobody’s going to say anything because they agree. Something bad did happen to you.
But the fact is, no matter how bad something that happens to you is, you’re not the only one that’s affected by it. You know what’s worse than losing your legs? Having your child that you love more than anything lose theirs. So, my injury was never about what happened to me. It was about what happened to my mom.
If I had made my injury all about me, I never would have asked for that funny hat. So even in the most dire circumstances, do not let your ego take over because it will blind you to the ways in which you can still help people. Even if you have a terminal diagnosis. What your family needs for the rest of their life is to have seen you face it with strength. To have been told by you how much you love them, and how much they meant to you. And if you focus on yourself, you won’t see that so that you can give it to them.
That is the attitude I want you to cultivate. That no matter what happens in your life, or throughout your day, or in one small moment, you say to yourself, “I am going to find a way to lead, and I am going to find a way to help people and stay on the path.”
Attitude is a Skill
Having a good attitude, just like leadership, just like about everything in life, is a skill. It’s something that you have to practice and get good at. It requires constant awareness. When something happens, you have to recognize the choice that you have. It requires you to detach and ask, “which attitude moves me closer to my goal?” And choosing that one. Then, You have to take action. Then, you assess how it went. Learn the lesson. And repeat. 100, 1,000, 10,000 times. Until eventually, you get to a point where something happens, and there isn’t really even a choice to be made. You only see the one option. Your son follows you into the kitchen at 4:30 and when you see him, you just go, “oh, awesome, let’s go play shadows. I’ll do these household chores later.”
I honestly can’t say that I did the hat thing in a calculated way. I didn’t say to myself in the hospital bed, “you know what I need to do right now is have a good attitude.” It was instinctual, it was primal. That is what we want you to ultimately develop with attitude/leadership mindsets/skills. Make the right behaviors your first instinct. Like all aspects of leadership/life, you have to first begin by practicing it and being constantly aware and having the discipline to choose the action, the attitude that is going to move you closer to that end state.
Because a good attitude doesn’t just manifest itself. You have to create it. That’s what taking ownership of your attitude means.
Conclusion: Start With Attitude
Not everyone is going to experience something as extreme as stepping on an IED and losing both legs above the knee, but everyone will experience some sort of disruption to your life on a variety of different scales. You get fired, you get divorced, it rains when you were supposed to be doing something outside. And yes, sometimes, losing limbs, or losing loved ones. And in all of those circumstances, no matter how traumatic or mundane, the first thing you need to take ownership of is your attitude. Because that is how you can turn anything that happens to you in your life into an opportunity to help people. And when you help people, you’ll find meaning that can not only change your world. It will change their world. It will change the entire world.
