Dan Waldschmidt's Blog, page 2

You Get To Choose If (But Not When) You Are Successful.

Success isn’t automatic; but it is guaranteed.

Just like the laws of nature and science, success is an exact and very consistent outcome.

What you do turns into the results that you experience. That much is guaranteed. What’s not easily known is when that’s going to happen.

It’s been said by many philosophers that as humans we dramatically overestimate what we can do in a given day but underestimate our ability to achieve seemingly impossible things over a lifetime.

That is all too true. In truth, you’re not wired to be good at predicting when your awesome actions are going to lead to epic results.

The problem is that your brain is smarter than you think it is. And not in a good way.

It’s ready with excuses and plausible explanations about why the laws of success aren’t meant for you. Why you’re different. Why you should give up and quit because nothing is working.

You might not want to hear it, but success isn’t measured on your timeline.

You don’t get to determine when the boomerang you’ve thrown reaches your hand again.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot you can do to influence success.

You can try harder or work longer. You can leverage the influence of others, borrow money to move faster, and enroll mentors to help you avoid costly mistakes.

What you do and who you are have a direct impact on your success. But you don’t get to decide the exact day and time for your success.

You don’t even get to decide what your success exactly looks like.

What you want and what you get always end up being a little bit different. And usually in ways that are more magical than you can imagine.

Take wealth for example. It is wildly appealing to dream about building the next Facebook app — where as a 20-something-year-old you can put together a platform that turns you into one of the world’s richest people.

That sounds awesome. It’s just not realistic. It’s not logical. And it is directly in contrast with how success works.

You’re not going to be a millionaire in your 20’s. Or your 30’s. Or for most of your 40’s. Did you know that the average age of a millionaire in the developed world right now is almost 50 years old?

Why? It takes time to get the experience you need and to find the purpose you have to have in order to achieve epic results.

And more importantly, the timing of success is something that you don’t get to control.

And the more you try to control it, the less successful you will become.

When you try to force success on your own terms you find yourself chasing scams and shortcuts and activities that might have worked for somebody else but are completely ridiculous for you to pursue.

Success is guaranteed. Remember that.

Doing the right thing matters. Just be patient while it’s happening.

But how can you be patient? Especially when the world feels like it is crumbling in pieces all around you. When you can’t see the next move. Or even the next few steps.

But that’s a bit of frustration and chaos that you can fix. You just have to move to a better spot. A higher spot.

See, the higher you are, the further you can see.

I am reminded of this every time I go trail running. During a long ultra marathon, you find yourself twisting and turning through the trails to make it to your destination. Sometimes stumbling. Falling over rocks and sticks.

You can’t run too quickly because what you’re stepping on is uneven and sometimes unsteady. More importantly, you usually can’t see too far in front of you.

Sometimes just a few feet is all you get.

And then as the trail bends and climbs, you see a little bit more. But every once in awhile you make your way to the summit of a mountain ridge.

And looking out between the gaps in the trees you can see for miles. And it’s beautiful. Especially if the sun is just right as it hits the trees.

It takes your breath away. And not just because of how it looks — but because of how far you can see.

There is freedom in a bigger vision. You don’t have to guess. You don’t have to twist and turn.

You can see the path ahead of you. And sometimes even the finish line. Success.

Now, if you’re running a race, you still need to make it to the finish line. But knowing where that is and how far you have to go gives you the confidence to put in the effort.

That’s true for running. That’s true for relationships. That’s true for building wealth, raising kids, developing confidence, or for achieving any other goal that matters to you.

That is true for success. No matter you think of it. The higher your perspective, the further you can see.

When you’re running through life kicking rocks and looking at your shoes, you’re find yourself discouraged and frustrated. Feeling helpless and discouraged.

But when you get vertical, everything changes. So how do you get vertical?

Hire a coach or therapistRead a book or take a coursePut in some exerciseSurround yourself with new people who inspire youSpend 5 minutes to meditate

In truth, it’s probably not any one of these things.

It’s a bit of all of them.

And together, they give you the vertical you need to see more of the path in front of you. To see success.

So when you find yourself tripping over rocks, discouraged by your path through life, take a moment to ask yourself a simple question: “How would this look from above?”

Know that success is guaranteed.

But plan your life for a long journey. Not a short one. Stay fit so that you can weather the storms that come your way.

There isn’t anything you can’t do if you persist. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you get to choose when success happens.

The post You Get To Choose If (But Not When) You Are Successful. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

How To Find A Way Or Make One.

“Inveniam viam aut faciam.”

That was supposedly Hannibal’s response to his generals’ advice that crossing the Alps by elephants is impossible. It means: “I shall find a way or I shall make one.”

Call it hustle or the grind or doing whatever needs to be done — it’s up to you to figure things out. Rarely does life bring you a rescuer.

Great athletes train their muscles to respond with extreme precision even when the rest of their body is fatigued. A great golfer will often practice a particular swing hundreds of times per day and thousands of times over a year to create a memory for the muscles that make that swing work.

As the golfer perfects the tiniest of details that allow him to place a golf ball wherever he chooses, the muscles that flex and twitch in that process are strengthened.

The better the practice, the better the performance.

Over time, the same muscles are exercised and strengthened. And the golfer develops a subconscious superpower.

Even when tired and stressed, his muscles take over automatically and do what they have been trained to do. He doesn’t need to think about it. He doesn’t need to obsess about it.

He doesn’t need to wonder what’s going to happen. It is almost automatic.

The same is true for the Olympic pole vaulter, a seasoned Southern Baptist preacher, the right forward on a championship soccer team, an elite sales professional, and an amateur runner. 

Deliberate practice creates a subconscious superpower. When things get tough, the body puts on auto-pilot what it has trained and prepared and planned to do.

Which is why it is so important that you develop the right muscles. The right automatic response.

How you practice and what you practice becomes your go-to move when you’re under extreme pressure. 

When things get tough, and you’re backed into a corner, you’re going to respond automatically. 

Despite how self-aware you think you are or how intellectually agile you might be, when things get tough enough you will automatically revert back to muscle memory. 

One of those muscles needs to be hustle.

Fred Smith, a brilliant business thinker, was given a failing grade by his Yale professor because his idea for FedEx “wasn’t feasible”. Today that idea has become a massive corporation that employs 400,000 employees and generates $50 billion per year in revenue.

R.H. Macy, who had a dream to “Be everywhere, do everything, and never forget to astonish the customer”, went broke seven times trying to make that a reality. His department store would be a permanent fixture in New York City.

Robert Goddard, perhaps the smartest astrophysicist in the world, engineered two hundred failing ideas for rockets before he got one to fly into space. His mistakes cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Henry Ford, who transformed business innovation, went bankrupt five times before his automobile manufacturing idea started working. His creditors took everything from him along the way.

J.K. Rowling, the highest-selling author of modern time, shopped her book thirteen times before a publisher would take a look at the first Harry Potter book. That series of books would end up selling 450 million copies.

Hard work. Tenacity. Determination. Resolve. Sweat. Blood. And tears.

You won’t make it if you don’t know how to grind. You won’t come out a winner if you don’t know how to hustle. If you aren’t committed to doing whatever it takes to achieving greatness.

When you face repeated failure, you have to hustle.When you get told “NO”, you have to hustle.When you face financial ruin, you have to hustle.When success is unforeseeable, you have to hustle.When conventional wisdom says “it would never work”, you have to hustle.When you are tired and beat down, you have to hustle.When no one believes in you, you have to hustle.When you have nothing else to give, you have to hustle.

Like an elite performer, your default decision in the middle of trouble to hustle and grind is what determines your ultimate destiny.

“Inveniam viam aut faciam.”

“I shall find a way or I shall make one.”

For Robert Peary, it was his life motto. And the words inscribed on his tombstone.

In 1881, he joined the US Navy Civil Engineers Corps, a job that sent him to Key West, Florida on one of his first assignments to do the impossible — build a new Navy Pier that other smarter, more experienced engineers said couldn’t be done.

Most would’ve balked at the request, citing other engineers’ experience or environmental conditions.

For Peary, it was a chance to prove himself and launch his career.

With a bit of ingenuity and hard work, he pulled off the impossible—and saved the US Navy over $675,000. He found the way.

After that, they sent him down to Nicaragua to serve as the chief assistant on a surveying expedition — where he became obsessed with the idea of becoming the first man to reach the North Pole.

But he realized that to be the first, he would have to be different. Radically different.

So in 1886, he convinces his superiors to let him take an extended leave of absence to journey into Greenland to prove America’s superiority on the global stage.

On his first trip across the tundra, he broke every rule in the book.

Peary studied the ways of the native people at a time when experts were convinced that the Inuits lacked any practical Arctic know-how, despite having lived there for generations.

He learned to hunt for food while traveling, instead of ignoring the local animals.

He understood the value of animal skin clothing, wearing deerskin parkas, bearskin pants, and sealskin boots.

He would make a way on his own terms.

He and his team built igloos as they went, instead of carrying tents, to reduce the cargo weight they’d have to transport.

He formed an elite dog team to pull the team’s sleds, instead of having his own men pull them like every other explorer.

He walked in front of his team, charting the path forward instead of driving the team from behind.

And his radical plan led him to be the 2nd man to cross the entirety of Greenland.

But in the late summer of 1891, an accident almost ended his life as he ventured further north. An ice block wedged under the rudder, lurching the ship to one side, pinning down Peary–and snapping both of his shin bones in his right leg.

The doctor said to pack it up. His exploring days were over.

They turned the ship around and headed home to let him find time to heal.

A few months later, he decided to compete against both his own men and Eskimos in a snowshoe race. He won.

Robert Peary would not go down without a fight. “Inveniam viam aut faciam.”

After six more years of exploring and preparing and planning, he gathered a team to help him claim the North Pole for the United States.

This time, he’d attack the North Pole by an entirely different means.

He would sail as far north as he could, trek to an abandoned outpost in northern Canada called Fort Conger, and then make their final push for the North Pole across the ice covering the Arctic sea.

His right-hand man Matthew Henson knew it was a risky plan, but Peary, racing against a Norwegian competitor with the same plan, pressed on regardless.

He and the team finally stumbled into the dilapidated wooden shack that is Fort Conger.

They were so close to success they could practically taste victory.

Sitting next to the warmth of the fire, he had, as he described it, “a suspicious wooden feeling in the right foot,” so he pulled off his boots.

Eight toes had developed frostbite. His legs were dead white from the knees down.

His toes needed to be amputated. Soon.

As he lay in a cot just a few hundred miles away from the North Pole with his dream and his toes gone, he scratched a phrase into the wooden wall: “Inveniam viam aut faciam.”

It was his lifeline to the North Pole. The one thing he could cling to. It was the fire that burned in his soul and kept him alive in the frigid Arctic.

After a month stuck at Fort Conger, the weather finally cleared and Henson led the team south — back to the ship with Peary strapped to a sled. He had crippled himself.

Again, the doctor told him his adventure days were over. 

But he wasn’t accepting that.

In May of the following year, he went further north than anyone else ever. And he did it on frostbitten, toeless feet.

He had to turn back though. It was another failure.

Five years later, he made his seventh trip to the Arctic circle with state-of-the-art transportation, an all-new strategy, and an all-new crew.

The Roosevelt, designed by Peary for this journey, could cut through ice with a 30” steel hull–the first in the world to do so.

He sailed the Roosevelt up to Ellesmere Island, putting him 300 miles closer to glory than any of his previous trips. He only had 450 miles to go.

He planned to cover those miles over the frozen Artice ice with a radically new system: 6 teams with right-hand men, 5 sleds, and more than 15 dogs per team would leapfrog each other and build igloos and set up supply outposts.

The plan involved each team dropping out one by one to make way for the 6th team, Peary’s team, to dash to the North Pole.

It was a genius plan. But nothing went right.

Temperatures regularly stayed in the -50F range. Sheets of frozen Artic water smashed together creating 50 ft high walls of sheer ice that Peary’s men had to hoist their massive 500lb sleds over.

But when the blocks of ice didn’t smash together, currents ripped them apart — stranding Peary from the rest of his team.

They were forced to turn back. Without supplies and their support crew.

They only made it back to the ship by eating their sled dogs, forcing the men to haul the sleds themselves.

It was disastrous. Peary was done. He quit.

He returned home to his family. The dream was over. For years, he would be a professor. His adventures were behind him.

Until he heard of others planning to make it to the North Pole.

He decided that he wasn’t going to let anyone else take what was his.

So in August of 1908, at 52, Peary made what he called his “last and supreme effort.” He determined he would get there or die trying.

So he loaded up the Roosevelt once more and set sail for Ellesmere Island.

The first day after they arrived, as they set out on the frozen Artic blocks, the sled broke down for Peary’s right-hand man Matthew Henson.

After spending a day fixing Henson’s sled, they noticed a dark cloud on the horizon — there was a huge gap in the ice ahead.

Overnight, the gap closed enough for Peary and his crew to navigate from massive ice block to ice block to get across the Artice water before they could continue.

Just days later, another huge gap opened up in the ice. This time, it was a quarter-mile wide and extending as far as they could see.

There was no crossing this one.

So they waited. And waited. And waited. For days, they encamped by the break, able to see the other side, but unable to get to their goal.

After days of waiting, the ice blocks closed enough for them to cross.

On April 1, 1909, Peary took  Henson and four of his best Inuit drivers and 40 of his fittest dogs in a mad, last-ditch sprint for the North Pole.

Five days later and a quarter-century after his first attempt, Robert Peary set foot on the North Pole. He had made a way.

After his death in 1920, the US Congress posthumously awarded him official congressional thanks, an honor once formerly reserved only for war heroes.

Teddy Roosevelt Jr, the son of President Theodore Roosevelt in whose honor Peary named his famous ship, said of the great explorer, “To me, Admiral Peary’s life is epitomized in the splendid lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’”.

He was a man wholly consumed by a mission. His purpose was unwavering.

He got knocked down. He lost friends in pursuit of his goal. He was critically wounded and suffered staggering hardship. He went broke trying to figure it out.

Yet he continued.  Unwilling to sacrifice his goal.

That could be you today.

You’ve been knocked down. You’ve been hurt. You’ve lost things that matter dearly to you — friends, health, money, and respect.

“Inveniam viam aut faciam.”  That’s your mission. Find a way. Or make one.

The post How To Find A Way Or Make One. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

You Will Change. How You Do Is Up To You.

The world has changed. Your work has changed. Your life has changed. You are going to change.

Have you ever noticed how your rate of change is directly related to your level of urgency and intensity?

We often talk about changes as being hard. We often comment that success is difficult.

But success isn’t as challenging as we make it. It directly matches your level of intensity. Your degree of urgency.

If you need to change bad enough, you will. Almost automatically. Instantaneously. Overnight. Without question, excuse, or impediment.

If you have to change, you will.

It’s that gray area of life where you know that you need to change that you find so difficult to navigate.

Those areas where you know you need improvement but just aren’t motivated enough to take the steps necessary to achieve that improvement.

You talk about success as if it is something you actually plan to achieve. But then you act as if your life doesn’t need the change in order to get different results.

You’re happy to do things differently as long as you don’t have to go too far out of your way to achieve that change.

As long as you don’t need to do hard things.

If you can keep doing what you’re doing and only take a minor step to the left, all the while achieving breakout, life-changing, multimillion-dollar success, you’re willing to do that.

But if you have to shut things down and turn things off — that’s a bridge too far. That’s too extreme. That’s going too far off the reservation.

Which is the irony of the situation entirely.

If you don’t change when you can, you will be forced to change when you must.

You will have to change when you don’t have the resources and time to do it right.

And you’ll miss out on the magic of progress.

You will change on your own terms or you will wait until life forces you to change and that’s never pretty. Or comfortable. Or fair.

It’s sheer survival. Animalistic intensity for another breath.

All along the way you’ve had the intensity you’ve always needed. You just have to use it when you don’t need it.

You have to change even when life isn’t forcing you to change. You have to grow and evolve and be better even when you cannot change and still be okay for a while.

Change now, while you’re in control of your destiny.

Don’t force life to kick you in the gut before you wake up and take notice.

Speaking of changing, have you ever noticed how easy it is to change when you need to change?

You might spend 50 years screaming ‘bloody murder’ about how you’ll never eat green leafy vegetables, but once you’ve had a heart attack and the doctor tells you that you’re at high risk to have another one, it’s pretty amazing how quickly you decide you want to change.

Cold turkey. Overnight. It happens instantly.

Because it’s a mindset change.

The vegetables didn’t change their taste, and your taste buds didn’t magically evolve to appreciate the uninspiring taste of healthy food.

The only thing that changed was your desire to live. Your ambition to hold back the looming consequences of your actions.

Changing isn’t hard. Needing to change is very hard.

And then some days it’s not hard at all. It’s the only option in front of you. Like right now.

But there is a difference between making a change and changing.

To make a change, you just need to alter what you do one time or another.  In one instance — at one moment in time — you trade what you are used to doing with something different.  

That’s how you “make a change”.  You do it each day without thinking much about it.

Sometimes, you don’t even need to demand change of yourself in order to do something different.  Circumstances can force you to change.  Lack of money, a need for acceptance, or a new belief system can influence you to make a change.

Changing, on the other hand, is an internal process that you control entirely. It’s a new set of attitudes, intentions, and motivations that you deliberately cultivate.

You can make a change without changing.

You could do something different on the outside and still be the same person that you used to be on the inside. You can change the tactics that others see, but still be the same short-sighted person in your mind.

The truth is that each of us want to change in some way.

You want to be better at something. You want to be a better person. Each of us. At one thing or another, you want to change.

But changing is hard because it demands a new mindset, more courage, and new opportunities for you to fail. And you don’t want to fail.

And since changing feels a lot like failure most of the time, it’s easy to decide to make a change here or there and hope desperately that it turns into changing.

Changing is deeply emotional and so very hard to do.

That’s the secret to change. And changing.

You know that it’s time to take life seriously right now.

Starting right now, use each moment you have as an opportunity to be a better version of you. Push the limits of what you think it’s possible.

Change. Be changing.

The post You Will Change. How You Do Is Up To You. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

The Courage To Continue When You Feel Cold and Dead Inside.

He was alive. Or at least it was a dream. A good one to have.

Beck Weathers peeled his face off the frozen ground. He painfully blinked the ice out of his eyes. He couldn’t feel his hands. They were frozen.  He couldn’t feel his feet. They were frozen, too. 

The only warmth he felt was from the urine filling his snowsuit. And that was only temporary. Soon, it would be frozen too. 

As he put one foot in front of the other, Beck didn’t know he would lose both hands. He didn’t know he would lose his nose.

All he knew was that he had come back from the dead. And he needed to get back to his family. It was his driving obsession.

Beck spent most of his adult life battling depression. It was his dirty little secret. When he met his wife, Peaches, he didn’t even share it with her — and she was supposed to be the one he shared everything with.

In college, when the darkness would set in, Beck would just keep to himself. Or he would ride his motorcycle way too fast around curves in the dark. The rush of adrenaline would stir something deep in his soul.

Then he found the gym.

He could exert all his frustrations and doubts into lifting weights. He never considered himself an athlete, but he liked the way weightlifting made him feel. 

After college, when he was a doctor, he traded the weights for running. He didn’t need any equipment — just a pair of shoes and some empty road. It soon became an obsession.

When he wasn’t working, he was running. Or he was boating. Or 4he was reading up on some other “thing” he could do to get his mind away from his life. Away from the darkness he felt all around him.

Beck went to work every day with a smile on his face. He pretended like everything was OK. But for long periods of time, it was never OK. His depression made everything hurt.

One day, he accidentally got introduced to hiking on a trip with friends. He and a few of his friends were supposed to wake up early and attack the mountain. But they awoke to find the day cold and wet.

Everyone else decided to skip the hike — but Beck found it exhilarating. 

Soon, his hikes became longer. And more difficult. Before long they turned into full-blown climbing adventures. Ascending the peaks of the tallest and most treacherous mountains in the world. 

Beck’s life became a torrid rush of adrenaline. Work. Workout. Go on a climbing adventure. Work. Work out. Go on a climbing adventure. Work. Work out. Go on a climbing adventure…

Little did he know that his life was about to change

A year later he found himself at the base of Everest. Surrounded by other extreme mountain climbers. Beck considered himself amateur next to the company he would keep for the next few months.

Even though he had been working out rigorously for the five months prior, he still felt inferior to the others.  Maybe this was too much of a challenge for him.

But he would remember the day.

It was May 10, 1996.

Beck would never forget. His life was about to change. Forever. 

The wind started blowing and snow was raging up the mountain causing whiteout conditions and trapping Beck and dozens of other climbers on what was known as the Death Zone of the mountain. 

The Death Zone was the part of the mountain right before the summit.

Climbers went from camp base one, to camp base two, to camp base three, to the death zone, to the summit. They had to get down from the summit as fast as they could and beneath the death zone because the human body was not meant to withstand the altitude and it would start dying. 

The hike up Everest was littered with bodies that had tried to reach the summit and failed. There is no way to get the bodies off the mountain because of the altitude and the danger, and since it’s so cold, they are just preserved on the mountain.

Beck and the other climbers walked by them as if it were an everyday sight. Which, by the time they reached the Death Zone, had become an everyday sight. 

Beck was stuck in the Death Zone with his fellow climbers until midnight. Miraculously, the storm passed. And his guide Rob Hall woke him up from his tent and told him it was time to go. They would climb while it was clear and reach the summit by 2pm.

Beck got up and got ready and left with his group.

But it was dark and he had been suffering from night blindness for years.

Add to it the freezing cold temperatures and Beck had to take it slow. As the sun rose, Beck’s vision gradually cleared and he could see. That is until he wiped his eye with his ice-laden glove and lacerated his cornea. 

Beck’s common sense kicked in and he decided the climb was over for him. He told his guide Rob to go ahead without him. If he felt like he could catch up he would.

Rob told him he had thirty minutes to figure it out. If he couldn’t start hiking in thirty minutes he needed to stay put so Rob would know where to find him on the way down and they could go back to camp together. 

As nightfall came, climber after climber had passed Beck on the way down. Some even offering to help him off the mountain. But he had promised Rob he would stay put and wait for him. And so he waited. And waited. Without shelter. As another storm ravaged the mountain. 

Beck was wearing three pairs of gloves which was par for the course.

They had been instructed to remove two pairs of gloves and place their single gloved hand inside their coat to warm it up in the event it was terribly cold. So Beck tried that. 

He got two of the three pairs of gloves off his hand, before he could get his hand inside his coat to warm up, a gust of wind came freezing his hand, literally, and blowing both pairs of gloves out of his other hand. His hand immediately started burning. 

Beck knew what frostbite felt like. He had felt it before. And this was nothing like it. It didn’t hurt at all. But maybe he was too cold to tell.

He laid down to wait for Rob. But he was never going to show up. 

Rob Hall died on the top of that mountain trying to help another climber. 

As he waited not knowing Rob’s fate, Beck started to freeze to death. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. It was warm even. He had a sense of floating and then gently fell asleep.  

His face froze to the cold ground below him. 

Other climbers came and left him for dead even though he was still technically breathing. His eyes were glazed over. His hands were grey and black with frostbite as was his nose and a couple places on his cheeks. 

Nobody tried to save him. On Everest, a man in his condition might as well be dead already.

“AND SO BECK LAY ON THAT MOUNTAIN ONE MORE NIGHT AS HIS WIFE WAS TOLD HER HUSBAND WAS DEAD.”

Even Beck thought of himself as a dead man. 

It was the sun that brought him back to life. Woke him up. 

In the glow of the sun when Beck opened his eyes, he saw Peaches. He saw his daughter. He saw his son. He saw his purpose. 

And he stood up. Or at least he tried to.

Every time he tried to stand, he would fall. Pain would sear through every inch of his body.  But he knew he was only an hour hike from the camp. He had to try.

The ground was uneven. Making every step a possibly fatal one.

But he persisted. And he made it to camp, trudging in like the walking dead.

The others looked at him as if they were looking at a ghost. 

Beck was taken into a tent and warmed up. No one could believe he was still alive. Even when they called Peaches to tell her, they didn’t expect him to live much longer.

Peaches hoped for the best. And when hope wouldn’t do, she sprung into action. She began calling every politician and government official she could think of. Working together they orchestrated a nearly impossible rescue for her husband, the man she had planned on divorcing. 

ORG XMIT: Seaborn Beck Weathers, center, answers questions during a press conference Thursday at DFW. He was joined by his son, Beck, and his wife Margaret [ Peach ]. Weathers suffered severe frostbite in an aborted attempt to climb Mount Everest.

AN IMPOSSIBLE SURVIVAL ON THE WORLD’S HIGHEST SUMMIT

It took Beck over a year and 11 surgeries to heal from his trip to Everest. He lost one hand at the wrist. Four fingers on his other hand and had to have his thumb recreated with bones and skin from other parts of his body.

His nose was reconstructed in a more unconventional way. It was reconstructed upside down on his forehead. Once it was fully formed it was moved into place, where it looked as natural as it ever would. He endured constant pain and constant antibiotics. 

By then, Beck didn’t care about his missing hands. He didn’t care about his new nose. He didn’t care about the pain. All he cared about was learning how to love his wife and kids the way they deserved. It took him almost dying on a mountain to figure out what was important to him. 

Over the years, when asked if he would do it again, Beck answers with a resounding, “Yes.” 

“I WOULD DO IT AGAIN. THAT DAY ON THE MOUNTAIN I TRADED MY HANDS FOR MY FAMILY AND FOR MY FUTURE. IT IS A BARGAIN I READILY ACCEPT.”

You don’t have to wait until you are peeling your face off the frozen ground and trudging your way in below zero temps to safety to figure out what’s important to you. And you shouldn’t.

You know what you should be doing. And there’s no better time to start than now. 

So get started. Take one step today towards what matters.

You might be banged up and feeling half-dead inside. But happiness is worth the fight. 

The post The Courage To Continue When You Feel Cold and Dead Inside. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

39 Choices You Are Making That Prove You Are Already In Control Of Your Life.

It can seem like a lot of life is outside your control. Most of the time — no matter what you do — you can’t force other people to do what you want them to do.

You can’t instantaneously impact nature or economic trends. You can’t control the weather or the decisions that are made by other people in authority over you. You can’t force life to give you what you want.

And if you think about that for too long, you’ll find yourself perfectly convinced that you don’t control your life.

But that’s a lie. A dangerous lie

The longer you focus on things that are outside of your control, the more depressed and hopeless you’re going to feel.

It’s inevitable that you’re going to give up. Quit. Decide that life is too unfair for someone like you.

But the truth is that for everything in life you can’t fix, there’s another bigger part of life that you can fix.

Which makes you almost infinitely powerful, if you believe it.

Look around you. Those fixes to your problems everywhere:

You can’t control the weather, but you can control that you live in a place where you mostly enjoy the weather.You can’t control the decisions that you’re boss makes, but you can control how long you work for that boss.You can’t control how much you weigh right now, but you can control what you eat and how you exercise from this moment forward.

What you focus on most determines how successful you become.

Your thoughts and dreams and aspirations are a direct result of what you spend your time obsessing about. And the truth is that you are already in control.

Don’t waste the power you have.

You are already in control of your mind



You get to choose how you talk to yourselfYou get to choose how you talk about yourself to othersYou get to choose if you give someone else the benefit of the doubtYou get to choose whether you think positive or negative thoughtsYou get to choose how often you replay the bad things that have happened in your past.



You are already in control of your body



You get to choose when you choose to competeYou get to choose where you channel your emotionsYou get to choose how much you exerciseYou get to choose how much effort you put into the work you doYou get to choose if you make getting sleep a priority or not



You are already in control of your career



You get to choose what you say “YES” toYou get to choose what you say “NO” toYou get to choose how well you prepareYou get to choose how much information you get before you make a decisionYou get to choose how you structure your dayYou get to choose who your friends are



You are already in control of your wealth



You get to choose when you walk away from a goal.You get to choose the expectations you put on your lifeYou get to choose how much you enjoy the good things you have in your life right nowYou get to choose if you allow negative things into your lifeYou get to choose what you learn from your mistakes



You are already in control of your emotions



You get to choose how you react to othersYou get to choose what you do with envy, anger, anxiety, and sadnessYou get to choose how kind you are to othersYou get to choose how much time you spend trying to convince people you’re right.You get to choose what you do with your regretsYou get to choose if you put yourself in someone else’s position before reacting



You are already in control of your actions



You get to choose where you liveYou get to choose how much attention you give to othersYou get to choose which commitments you keep and cancelYou get to choose if you try something newYou get to choose if you are honest or notYou get to choose when or if you decide to quit



You are already in control of your growth



You get to choose what books you readYou get to choose when to ask for helpYou get to choose when you learn something newYou get to choose how quickly you try again after you fallYou get to choose when you choose to judge other peopleYou get to choose if you say what is on your mind

And millions of other choices you get to make each day. Each minute. Each second.

No one can stop you if you don’t want to be stopped.

So don’t be stopped.

Change up things. Do something different. Choose better.

The truth is that you will still have the same annoying problems you had the day before, but you’ll have a valuable new perspective. New creativity.

The reality of life is that what you expect from it is up to you.

It’s natural to feel disappointed and discouraged at times by what’s going on around you.

If you have half a heart at all you’re going to be bothered when nice, kind people suffer.

Don’t let your experiences break your expectations.

Don’t let bitterness turn you into a skeptic. Don’t let depression immobilize your ability to change the world for the better. Don’t be naive, simplistic, or willfully ignorant.

Expect less of life to happen to you. Work on making life happen for you.

Remember that you are already in control.

What do you want to do about it?

The post 39 Choices You Are Making That Prove You Are Already In Control Of Your Life. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

Progress, Pain, And The Pursuit Of Impossible Goals.

Progress is supposed to hurt. That’s why we call them “growing pains” — not “growing pleasures”.

When you stretch yourself, you hurt yourself. But you also build your muscles and develop new strength.

Pain means the possibility of gain.

When was the last time you cried because of the pain you were feeling? This isn’t about you being too soft, it’s about you having the guts to deliberately put yourself in situations where you are likely to get hurt.

If you think that seems absolutely ridiculous to you then maybe you’re not trying hard enough. Maybe you’re too comfortable.

Maybe you are one of those people who talk a big game but don’t have the guts to do the hard work that being successful demands.

This isn’t about calling you out. It’s about you realizing how fear and pain make you avoid doing hard things — how the memory of getting hurt makes you procrastinate the important painful things that lead to your success.

The truth about hard things is that they’re hard. They will feel hard every step of the way.

Pain hurts. Progress hurts. Success hurts. Ask Kieran.

Like so many other 10-year-old boys, Kieran Behan went into surgery for a small tumor discovered on his leg. It was a routine surgery, performed thousands of times across the United Kingdom.

Cut out the growth — and stitch up the wound. Today, of course, was to be no different.

Except it was.

As the surgeon cut around the edge of the tumor with a sharp scalpel to remove it, his hand slipped — slicing through the nerves in his leg, causing catastrophic damage.

Young Kieran was left wheelchair-bound. The agony from his damaged nerves caused him overwhelming waves of pain.

The doctors told him he would never walk again. His psychiatrist told him to accept the worst.

His young days of gymnastics were over.

His friends and family tried to level with him by telling him  “he could kiss his dream of competing goodbye.”

But Kieran wasn’t having any of it: “It just drove me on; I wanted to prove them wrong. They were saying it was over but I wasn’t having it.”

After 15 months of relentless effort to re-train his leg, Kieran finally returned to Tolworth Gymnastics Club, in southwest London to get back in shape for the run of his life.

His promising career was back on track.

Kieran knew how this story would go. He had suffered a traumatic injury, recovered against all odds, and was now destined for world-class gymnastics feats, possibly even the Olympics.

It was an impossibly inspiring story.

A story Kieran was ready to write and prove everyone else wrong. But it wasn’t meant to be.

One training day, as he was working through his usual high bar routine — like he had thousands of times before — he made one wrong move.

His hand slipped.

He smashed the back of his skull on the bar and crumpled to the ground. Unconscious. And unresponsive.

His dad raced him into the emergency room where the doctors discovered extensive damage to his brain and his inner ear.

He was back in the wheelchair. And faced new problems.

In an instant, he went from spinning impossibly fast off the vault, powerfully holding positions midair on the rings, and tumbling gracefully through the air in his floor routine — his best event — to relearning how to sit up straight.

For three years, he would work on human skills most take for granted — trying to just re-learn the basics. Like walking.

For three long years, his parents would encourage him, telling him “he could do it”, then run out of the room to sob over the state of their son.

For three years, he struggled to remain conscious, passing out thousands of times from the brain damage caused by his fall.

After a year of hard work, he returned to school.

He faced relentless teasing over his disabilities as he struggled to get around with a cane.

He spent countless hours in his gymnastics training center trying to catch a ball rebounding off the wall to relearn hand-eye coordination, while his teammates tumbled, twisted, and flew through the air around him.

Painfully slowly but surely, he began to relearn the sport he had fallen in love with so many years before.

By 2009, he was back in full-swing, gunning after the 2010 European Championships.

And again tragedy would strike. He blew his right ACL in a training exercise. And then 6 weeks before his biggest competition, he ruptured his other ACL. All of his work to come back to the sport he loved was wasted.

Nothing had worked in his favor. He wanted to quit. He even contemplated suicide.

Instead, he did what he always had done in other situations like this. He pushed through.

And in 2011, he pushed hard enough to compete in the Challenge World Cup Series.

In September, he won bronze in Slovenia for his floor routine.

In October, he took silver in Croatia. Same event.

In November, he won gold — Ireland’s first — in the Czech Republic. Same event.

But those medals were not without a cost.

Since Kieran wasn’t officially sponsored, he had to figure out his own way to get to these events. He, his family, and his friends did whatever they could: bake sales, personal donations, anything to get him around the globe.

His hard work didn’t go unnoticed. The Irish Sports Council gave him a €20,000 grant to fund his quest for Olympic gold at the 2012 London games.

But that money couldn’t stop him from twice slipping during his floor routine, the event he thought was rock solid. He ended up disqualifying himself from the finals.

“I was in no man’s land, and I was lonely not knowing where my career was going,” Kieran Behan would remark, looking back at the event.

His meager support forced him to work construction with his dad.

And when that wasn’t enough, he coached the younger kids and cleaned the gym each morning so he could spend another 35 hours a week in the gym perfecting his dream.

All that sweat paid off in 2016 when he made it to the Rio Olympics. This was his moment.

It had slipped away in 2012 when he fell twice on the mat — and he wasn’t about to let it slip away again this time.

Halfway through the qualifying round to make it to the finals, he was in a good position. His dream was finally starting to become a reality.

But it all came down to the floor routine, his strongest discipline.

If he could nail this, he’d be in the finals and one step closer to Olympic gold. He’d need to score higher on this than in any previous round.

He started the routine the same as he had a thousand other times in practice. Hands raised, outstretched in a “Y” like every other gymnast. He stepped with the left leg that had given him so much trouble, then started racing diagonally across the floor before bounding into the air, rotating at an inhuman speed, quickly landing, somersaulting again, leaping once more into the air, rotating and sticking the landing. It was flawless.

Except for his left knee. This time, he blew his meniscus, the soft lubricant between the shin and thigh bones.

But there was one problem. He still had the rest of his floor routine to complete. He had busted his knee on the first move of his strongest routine.

“As soon as my feet touched the ground on that first tumble and the knee went, I just knew that it was about survival and just getting through the rest of the routine,” Kieran thought.

He twisted, tumbled, and flipped his way through the routine, adrenaline helping him the rest of the way through.

But his coach had to help him off the mat. He was disqualified. Again.

Sent home without a medal or even a spot in the finals.

When asked about his future after Rio, he shared candidly, “I don’t know anyone that’s had the journey I’ve had.”

His story is still being written. Why? Because Kieran refuses to quit.

That same spirit pulled him back into the gym where he smashed his head earlier. That same tenacity pulled him back from the edge of suicide. That same raw grit carried him through his final routine and continues to push him onward today.

He simply refuses to quit. Despite the pain. Despite the heartbreak.

Gritting through the pain because he knows the long-term pain of quitting is far worse than the short-term pain of pushing through his recovery.

His “workaholism” and “perfectionism” — traits most people write-off as faults, flaws, and failure — drove him through the pain and agony to the Olympics. Twice.

There’s a saying among elite ultrarunners: “If it doesn’t suck, you’re not doing it right.”

Just because you are hurting doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong move. It’s easy to make easy choices. But easy choices just leave you fat, broke, and lonely.

Believe in your heart that the harder it gets on the outside the tougher you get on the inside.

Life will kick you down mercilessly if you let it.

You don’t have to enjoy the pain to enjoy the rewards — but you do have to endure it.

You might have to cry, bleed, and fight your way through the dark times, but your mission is worth it.

It might not be Olympic glory, but it’s glory none the less.

So stick it out.

The post Progress, Pain, And The Pursuit Of Impossible Goals. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

Fast Horses, Bankrupt Living, And What To Do When You’re Feeling Paralyzed By Life.

Problems come at you so fast some times that you can feel completely paralyzed.

Your brain is overloaded. Overheated. Overwhelmed.

Emotions are flying. Fear, frustration, and panic seem to be hiding behind every corner. You’re confused. And not sure what to do.

And the truth is quite simple. You are not alone.

Every day, horrible problems happen to good people attempting great things.

That was the story of Kate and her bankrupt family.

In the late 1960s, a young Kate Tweedy watched her mother struggle to manage a Virginia horse farm that had been in her family for generations.

It started a dozen states away with her and her mom living in Colorado.

Her grandpa had made a series of horrible business decisions leaving the family stables financially crippled. The family attorney called Kate’s mom, Penny, pleading with her to get involved before they had to file bankruptcy.

And so thirteen months later, Penny Tweedy took over the Virginia farm and hundreds of thousands of red ink. If the debt wasn’t bad enough, the fact that all the best horses had been sold made the business of birthing champion racehorses almost impossible.

Almost. But entirely impossible.

Despite dozens of creditors asking for past payment and shareholders trying to force her to sell her farm, Penny hung on.

It was crazy. Out of 800 racehorse owners around the world, she was one of the only women. Despite the odds, the lack of horse talent, and her experience ever having done this before, she worked tirelessly.

In 1970, a horse was born in her stables she named Deo Volente (or “God Willing”). But the Jockey Club, to which all thoroughbred names must be submitted for approval, didn’t like it.

They said “NO”…

They also disallowed the names: Scepter, Royal Line, Something Special, and Games of Chance.

They rejected them all.

And like of things over the last few years, Penny just kept trying.

And so did that horse.

Three years later, that horse without a name, born on a farm without any talent, to an owner without any money, put on a five-week performance that the world will never forget.

That horse, we now know as Secretariat, destroyed all challengers, winning the Triple Crown of horse racing with staggering ease. And he just never stopped. When he died at 19 years old, he had won all but 1 race in his entire lifetime.

And his secret became clear years later.

When doctors examined the horse after his death, they uncovered a shocking secret.

Secretariat’s heart was twice as big as any heart they had ever seen before.

What made the difference?

One simple thing — heart. It was Penny’s heart. And Secretariat.

Call it resilience. Or passion. Or the unwavering belief that you’ll figure it out eventually.

Whatever you label it, you are going to need it.

Because life is going to come at you non-stop. And it might even be because you did anything wrong.

Besides all of Penny’s personal issues with obsessed family members and impatient creditors, the world was itself teetering on the edge of insanity.

There was still a war in Vietnam. Nixon and the ensuing Watergate Scandal were about to splash onto the front page of newspapers. The American oil crisis was looming. And the Olympics were destroyed by the assassination of Israeli athletes.

It wasn’t just Penny Tweed and her horse. Everything, everywhere seemed like it might be crazy.

And yet, in spite of the paralyzing drama and fear, the confusion and uncontrollable circumstance, what worked wasn’t brains or experience or logic or a better plan or education or money. It was determination and will and spirit and courage.

It was quite simply the one thing that you can never buy.

You have to choose it.

You’re not a horse and not a horse owner. But frankly, that doesn’t matter. You’re writing your own story. And the same lessons apply.

What you do matters. The choices and decisions you make have a clear impact on your future.

Your outcomes aren’t some accident or the result of mysterious karma.

The things that are happening to you right now might be the direct result of your actions and attitudes in the past. But maybe not at all. And even if you do find yourself facing the uncomfortable results of poor bad decisions — the choice you face next doesn’t really matter,

The truth is that your actions in the middle of chaos and fear dictate your future.

To change your future, change what you do next.

If you want something that you have never had before, you must do something you have never done before.

But just doing something different isn’t good enough. You have to be a better person. That starts by thinking better.

Regardless of what you do, what you think about most you ultimately become.

So if you allow negativity and fear and rage to drive your decisions, your future will be full of misery and frustration.

Having heart is one of those “thinking better” choices.

And it’s an option for you in a million different ways.

It takes heart to forgive people you’ve been holding a grudge against.

It takes heart to learn something new when going through the motions seems good enough.

It takes heart to get up earlier tomorrow and read a good book or learn a new skill.

It takes heart to find a mentor who will hold you accountable and push you outside your comfort zone.

It takes heart to trade your entertainment time for physical exercise.

It’s the small things that matter. Small things that you can get started on right now.

You need heart to make it past the rough stuff in life. Because fear and confusion and feeling paralyzed are pretty much impossible to deal with outside of that.

Giddy up.

The post Fast Horses, Bankrupt Living, And What To Do When You’re Feeling Paralyzed By Life. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

12 Inspiring Videos To Keep You Motivated When It Seems Like Nothing Is Working.

Inspiration is one thing you lose just after you stop looking for it.

Here’s the hard truth about achieving big success — you’re not the first person attempting greatness. And you’re certainly not the first person to think about giving up along the way.

Doing anything amazing requires massive amounts of focus, effort, and human resolve. Whether you call it inspiration, motivation, or the will to win, you’re going to need lots of it along your journey.

If you don’t have a collection of things around you that inspire you, you’re going to find yourself struggling to stay productive. You’ll find yourself giving up, slowing down, and quitting before you reach the finish line.

When things get bad, and you get scared, it takes you remembering that people doing great things have always faced scary times. And you staying motivated is all that hangs in the balance between success and failure.

Here are a few awesome bits of inspiration to change your mindset and get you empowered to take the next step forward.

1 – Being Broke Isn’t The Same As Being Broken.

You are never out of options . Life isn’t as bad as you think it is. You might be broke — but that’s not the same as being broken. That one breakthrough you’ve been asking for might be a phone call away.

Steve Harvey shares a story you have probably never heard before. It’s a story that probably sounds remarkably close to something you have going on in your life. No matter what you have going on in your life, your best days are still ahead.

2 – Stop Trying to Win. Instead, Be A Warrior.

You might think that you are in the business of making money, closing deals, drafting marketing that gets clicks and opens, or landing that new promotion. But really, you are in the business of being a warrior.

Your mission is to train for battle. To be ready to go to war for your dream. The Spartans knew this better than anyone. Remember that it only takes a few strong warriors to change the course of history. Be one of those people.

3 – The Odds Are Meant To Be Broken.

Just because no one has ever done it before doesn’t mean that you won’t be the first. What matters is that you try. You’ve heard the expression that it’s the “size of the fight in the dog” that matters.

History has proven this battle after battle. And Braveheart is the ultimate story about beating the odds. You deserve everything that you are able to earn for yourself. Sometimes that means you drive ahead even when the odds aren’t in your favor.

4 – Getting back up is the most important skill to master

Being a tough guy isn’t about punching the enemy in the face. It’s about being punched in the face, knocked to the floor, and getting back up. Resilience is massively important. So is courage.

Rocky is the ultimate teacher of sticking it out. You have to want success more than you want to not fail. You are going to get knocked down. It’s going to happen. What are you doing to cultivate your will to win?

5 – Massive progress comes in inches.

Getting to where you want to be isn’t about massive lunges forward. It’s about clawing for the inches of progress all around you. If you want it bad enough, you’ll do whatever it takes.

Success demands relentless improvement. And you don’t have to be special to improve. You just have to be willing to die to get from where you are right now to where you want to be. This speech about inches will teach you everything you need to know about the importance of forward progress.

6 – Miracles are for everybody. That means you.

Getting lucky isn’t just for the movies. It’s a possibility for you. You are the miracle maker of your own destiny.  When you train and train and train and learn from your mistakes, you put yourself in the position to achieve epic levels of greatness.

Don’t expect it to be easy to automatic. But you should make it a habit of betting on yourself. Keep trying. Keep pushing. This is your moment. Expect a miracle — and work your ass off to achieve it.

7 – Life doesn’t need to be fair for you to be awesome.

Even the best people get treated unfairly. It’s going to happen to you. You are going to push towards success and find people standing in your way unnecessarily. It is in these moments that you need to push harder. Drive longer. Obsess more.

What you do has the chance to not only change your life but inspire all those who watch you achieve greatness in spite of the storm. Stop expecting fairness and persist in spite of what happens to you.

8 – Just because you have a pulse doesn’t mean you are living.

Being alive isn’t the same as living. Going through the motions isn’t the same as making progress. The truth about life is that you can achieve anything if you put in the time and effort to see it through.

No matter where you are in life right now — even in the worst of personal situations — you can have it all. But you have to start working towards it. Giving up won’t get you anywhere.

9 – Heart beats talent most days.

Tragedy and failure happen to us all. Life hurts. There are times you don’t think you can make it — especially when the things you love the most get ripped away from you. Don’t give up. Don’t back down. Don’t walk away.

Remember that heart wins a lot of battles. You might be beaten down, but you are not beaten. Reach down inside yourself and find the heart to continue. You got this. Have heart. Find that special something that makes you powerful and unleash it on your goals.

10 – If you want it, go take it.

Stop talking and start doing. Stop spending so much time getting ready to get ready, and just get out there and take it. You don’t need permission to do what needs to be down. You just need to get out there and do it.

You only have so much energy and creativity in your life. Use it to conquer — not sitting around planning to conquer. It’s simple. If you want something, go get it. The story of Achilles in the conquest of Troy is truly a masterpiece of simplicity: “If you want it, go take it.”

11 – What you do with your life can change the world

You are changing the world. What you do changes your future. Whether you like it or not, your actions have a direct impact on billions of people who come behind you into this universe. Isn’t that amazing?

You aren’t a nobody. You are mighty. You are without limits. You are a noble warrior. So act like it. All the time you have spent improving and battling is going to pay off big time. Gladiator, perhaps better than any other movie, makes this abundantly clear.

12 – Don’t let anyone talk you out of being awesome.

Just because other people doubt you, doesn’t mean that you should doubt yourself. Be the cheerleader of your destiny. Believe that you are destined to achieve greatness; even if it hasn’t happened yet.

By the way, even good people can stop you with their criticism and skepticism. Ignore the haters. Ignore the un-believers. Just do whatever it takes to get to where you want to be. Be in pursuit of your own “Happyness.”

Progress demands inspiration.

You’re going to face failure and consider quitting. You’re going to be told that what you want to achieve isn’t possible, and every part inside of you is going to want to believe it.

Some day soon you are going to wake up exhausted and in desperate need of a reason to keep fighting. Save this article for when you need it most. Share it with your team. Send it to a friend who is feeling distraught.

No matter what you do, don’t do nothing. All great people have faced hard times and cloudy days. Insist that you persist.

Choose to keep moving forward. Nothing can stop you when you decide that you are going to keep going.

The post 12 Inspiring Videos To Keep You Motivated When It Seems Like Nothing Is Working. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

Lessons On Not Quitting From 60-Year-Old Man Who Took On The Nazi Army.

There’s no special skill to not giving up. You aren’t born with any special genomes that automatically make you less likely to quit.

The truth is that every day you face tough choices and scary obstacles.

On one hand, you have all the things you want for yourself — money, happiness, fitness, friends, and fulfillment.On the other hand, you have a million different unforeseen problems that will challenge you and shake your faith in your ability to keep going — critics, failure, lack of resources and experience, and fear.

The more you think about it, the less likely it seems that you will actually end up winning. The more unreasonable it sounds that your goal is something that you can actually achieve.

If you listen to the crazy thoughts in your head, you will always come to the conclusion that it is a waste of your time and effort to keep investing in yourself when it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s never going to work.

You’re not the only one who thinks that way. Everyone does. 

Everyone you ever meet thinks about quitting.

What separates winners from everyone else is something very simple. Winners find a way to persist. They insist on forward progress. Even if it’s small. Barely noticeable.

They aren’t willing to throw it all away. They want more of “what could be” more than they want the pain to go away.

Perhaps no one illustrates this better than a war hero who changed the course of history with his relentless spirit.

“No.” That was the answer a young Norwegian named Lauritz Sand received from his father when he said he wanted to go to art school.

His father wanted him to become an architect.

But Lauritz resisted and launched his first art exhibition when he was 19.

It failed. Miserably. But he never regretted trying.

So relenting to his father’s wishes, he graduated from the Stockholm Technical School in 1899 — and then immediately joined the Royal Dutch East Indies Army.

Graduating from officer school in 1902, he spent the bulk of his time with a team of other surveyors, mapping local archipelagos.

It wasn’t conquest. But he was learning.

Four years later — after graduating from officer school, he left to strike out on his own, building and managing plantations across the world. Using his skills as an officer and more than a little stubbornness, he created a beautiful piece of paradise he named the Pagilaran Estates.

While WWI raged all around him and for almost the next decade, he made lots of money. Lots and lots of it.

In 1918, he founded and presided over the South Zuid Sumatra Syndicate. In short order, he went from rich to really rich. Lauritz had made a name for himself as a tenacious leader. A guy you could count on to turn your investment into tremendous returns.

It wasn’t just one day or one project. It was year after year. Idea after idea. Mission after mission. Business venture after business venture. Decade after decade.

But that old stubborn streak inside him kept flaring up. He was tired of just making money. He wanted to return to his home in Norway.

And so in 1938 at 59 years old, he and his wife Annie returned and settled in Bekkestua. It was quiet, and they were happy.

But over the years, the itch to travel and conquer and “build something” began to return.

He was in his early 60’s when Lauritz started to plan his next big move.

But all at once, Germany invaded Poland — and Lauritz canceled his plans to move abroad. Norway refused to enter the European conflict and declared neutrality.

Lauritz was safe. As long as he stayed out things. 

That turned out to be a tough choice for a stubborn guy like Lauritz. Even if he was officially retired.

Throughout Norway, pockets of resistance quietly began to push back against the Nazi occupation.

Behind the scenes, Lauritz threw himself into the fight.

He quickly became a leader among the resistance, becoming known for being “dynamic and outward, with temperament and inspiration”.

Those are fancy words to let you know that he was a bad-ass, old man.

He focused his efforts on covertly documenting German military outposts, using his cartographical skills from his time in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army.

He built an underground network of operatives to pass his documents to the Allied Forces in Sweden and England, dubbing it “XU”. He was massively successful in helping the Allies with important information like troop numbers and strategy.

But all of that was about to be undone by one of those operatives.

Her name was Laura Johannesen. And Lauritz would have never guessed that she was a Nazi spy. Through a series of meetings within the Oslo restaurant Theatercaféen, she learned how Sand ran the XU.

And used it against him.

A few months later, the Germans arrested Lauritz Sand. He was an old man. And the Germans were determined to break him. After all, he was a resistance leader with valuable intel.

But that turned out to be harder than they ever imagined.

Crack. They broke an arm when he wouldn’t give them any information.

Crack. They broke his other arm when he remained silent.

Crack. Crack. They broke both of his legs when he resisted turning on his friends.

When the couldn’t break his spirit, they sent him to be tortured by the Gestapo at Victoria Terrasse, the Nazi’s Norwegian headquarters. It was a painful, dark, and scary place.

You were sent there to die.

It was not uncommon for a prisoner at Victoria Terrasse to fling himself out of a window to commit suicide before he could be interrogated. It was horrible.

When Siegfried Fehmer, known for his brutal interrogation tactics, couldn’t break Lauritz, they sent him to an already overcrowded Nazi labor camp. He was more dead than alive.

But he refused to give them a single name. A single plan. A single bit of intelligence.

So they beat him again. And broke his body. Almost to the point of death. And then they treated him, so they could try to break him again. It was a calculated plan  — working to beat him and torture him so he wouldn’t die before divulging the secrets of the resistance.

In a strange twist of fate, his steely will became symbolic with Norwegian resistance. This old man with a stubborn streak was standing up to the entire German army.

An old man. A weakened man. A beaten man.  His determination gave the other prisoners hope that they too could hold out.

Eventually, the Nazis realized he would not relent.

There was nothing else that they could do that they had not already attempted. So they decided to execute him by firing squad.

They would put an end to this symbol of resistance. But that failed too.

Nine days before he was to be shot, the Nazis surrendered. The war was over. His torture was finished.

He had survived.

It is said he only told his captors one word: “Nei” (Norwegian for “NO”).

He would not divulge his knowledge of the resistance. He would not betray his fellow countrymen. He would not allow the Nazis to rule his country.

The answer was “NO”. “NO” now. “NO” later. “NO” every time he was put to the test. “NO.” “NO.” “NO.” “NO.” “NO…”

He would back down. He would not quit. He would not give in. The answer was “NO.”

Shortly after the war, he was knighted by King Haakon VII for his bravery and endurance.

Today, you will see a statute of Lauritz Sand in Griniveien, Norway as a testament to his incredible story of will. It is inscribed with a single word: “Nei.”

He understood the power of “NO.” The decision to quit was all his to make.

No one else could make him back down, slow down, quit, cry, or give up. That was completely his choice. Even in the middle of a torture chamber.

The same is exactly true for true.

No one can make you quit but you. It’s on you. Your decision. Your choice.

It does not matter what you are going through. It does not matter if life is unfair to you. It does not matter how old you, the color of your skin, your gender, job title, the level of your education, or how much money you have — or don’t have.

Giving up isn’t something that you have to do. Ever.

Let that soak in for a minute. You are right now exactly where you should be. You are completely in control of your life. You get to choose anything you want. You can create whatever you decide to create.

So own it. Believe it. Act like it. Change the world. Say “NO”.

And if you feel like quitting, do it tomorrow.

The post Lessons On Not Quitting From 60-Year-Old Man Who Took On The Nazi Army. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.

The Surprising Way To Know You Are Chasing The Wrong Goal.

You’ve got to want it. No matter what your dream is you’ve got to want it.

Maybe you want to make more money. Maybe you want to be in a relationship where you feel valued. Maybe you want to be happy.

It doesn’t really matter what you want. To get it you have to be consumed with desire.

Getting what you want can’t just be an option.

It has to be the difference between life and death. Like oxygen or water, it has to be elemental to your reason for living.

Let’s be honest. We all have goals. Some of them you say out loud and share with others. Some are so crazy audacious that you keep them inside. Locked away. And unsaid.

You’re afraid that you’re never going to achieve it, so why even spend the time thinking about it. Why let yourself be disappointed.

Staying motivated is a challenge that we all face.

And the same time, stress and burnout are at an all-time high in today’s business environment. And it’s safe to say that at some level you are going through the exact same thing.

It may not be today, but it’s been a day recently.

Everything seems to pile on you. Your money problems. You’re people problems. Your recent failures.

It piles on and on and on. Until at last, you find yourself suffocated. Like you can barely breathe.

With everything pressing down on you, you find yourself straining to find the will to take the next step. To do what needs to be done.

You want to want it but you weren’t sure how.

You know that where you’re at now isn’t a place you want to stay long, but you feel trapped. And broken.

Inside you, the dream of getting to where you want to be feels completely lost.

And the answer for you might be as surprising for you as it was for me.

A few years ago, I found myself on a stage in Dubai presenting a speech to wealthy business leaders who had flown there from Russia to learn the latest strategies for business growth.

As I was taking the stage, the person introducing me went off script a little bit and made the comment that I was an ultra runner, had claimed some records for running long distances, and that I was an extreme athlete.

After my speech was done, I was asked by the conference organizers to answer some questions from the business leaders in attendance. I was expecting to be asked about the marketing strategies I had presented earlier or the business insights I had delivered for the last two and a half hours. Instead, I was asked a peculiar question that I have thought about many times since.

A well-dressed businessman towards the back of the room was handed the microphone and he looked at me earnestly: “What do you do to stay motivated? I have goals. And I’m sure you have goals. What do you do if you want to be motivated?”

My response was automatic. I didn’t even think about it. And what I said surprised me a little: “It’s not about having more motivation. It’s about having bigger dreams. If you’re fire burns hot enough then you never have to worry about the flame going out.”

Instead of chasing more inspiration, find a bigger dream.

You don’t give up on things that matter to you.

You stand and fight for them. You find a way. But if you don’t need to win you probably won’t.

So if you want to want it but you’re not sure why you don’t, maybe you’re looking in the wrong spot.

Maybe it’s not about you lacking the motivation to take the next step. Maybe what you think you want isn’t really what you know you need.

You’re chasing the wrong thing.

The post The Surprising Way To Know You Are Chasing The Wrong Goal. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt.