Chapter 1: Hope and Belief
At 35 I lost my life. I found myself permanently bed ridden. My gut felt like it was rotting. My hands and feet were swollen and in pain just from the minimum effort of walking to the bathroom and touching my iPhone screen. Any movement of opening or closing my hands or moving my toes made me feel the friction of pain as my tendons slid through their tendon sheaths. I had neck and back pain with physical morphing expressed by my massage therapist as “what the hell?” every time they tried to massage the pain out. “What is that?” As they felt the hard knots and said “I’ve never felt anything like this.” “What is this?“ “What did you do to yourself?“
I would fall asleep at random parts of my day for a few hours from exhaustion. Except for a few minutes a day I would be in a bout of exhaustion that made it hard to talk. The only way I would communicate is whisper. I had moved back with my parents. My father was dying in the other room after a 5 year bout of fighting colon cancer. I knew death was close about a month away for him. He was devoured by the cancer and the chemo. I felt physically akin to him.
I had lost ALL faculty, all control of my life. I would wake up to sheer anxiety and near panic with my heart racing. My only wish to a God I did not believe in was to give me a chance to try. A chance to try in life - because I had lost the ability to express effort to impact my own existence.
I had finally found an answer. My blood work showed I was pre-diabetic and positive for ANA and RNA antibodies. This means my immune system was constantly attacking my very own tissue. Hence all of my symptoms and suffering for the last 20 years. If Wolverine's superpower was that he could heal quickly - I had the opposite. My own body was constantly attacking and breaking me down. I was diagnosed with Mixed Connective Tissue Disease (MCTD) a combination of rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and scleroderma. I had my answer at least. A LIFE sentence curse.
My life was over. If I should have listened to doctors I would stay like this for the rest of my life. So what is HOPE? Because every door titled by the thing I believed in most, a combination of logic, reason and reality, was telling me I had hit a wall - one on every side of me, one that was prison made of my very own flesh. There was no straw to grasp on to. There was no glimmer of hope. This was my life for the rest of my life.
What I can tell you for certain is that human beings are a lot tougher then we believe ourselves to be. And it is in all of us. We are actually really hard to kill and it is in fact hardship that makes us think, adapt and grow. I was wrong. Even though every sensor in my brain and body was telling me this was slow death, torture and the thought of suicide became not an emotional knee jerk reaction, but a logically sensical conclusion - against all odds, reason, “supposed science” - I was wrong.
I say this now just 5 years later - where my health is not only vibrant, but I also became a millionaire (liquid - not assets) in the meantime. Un - fucking fathomable.
So trust me when I say do not be the one to shut off the possibilities and even despite your urge it is key to have an open mind because we live in a world where 8 billion of us are solving problems concurrently. Now with AI the extent to what may be possible continues to explode with exponential abandon.
Your ability to make progress in your life will be based on the model of the world you have in your brain. You can not help having a model. The only question is whether it is accurate to the ”real” world or not? Is it grounded in logic, reason, reality? if so you will be able to pull the levers to make progress. If not you will forever be grasping at things in the darkness and suffering in pain as you hurt yourself in the process.
We are not born with this insight of the real world - and sadly some never develop it. But it is our special gift. Our super power as a human being. This is why in so many ways I see death or the amnesia it causes as such a tragic circumstance to our existence. There are MANY benefits to being reborn with a clean slate - however we need to get better as a species in passing on the worthwhile things that we do figure out. Hence this website for my kids and all of the worlds children.
In short - every decade is like a new life that can be completely different then the one before And the closer you get to having an accurate and realistic world view the easier and faster you will be able to transverse the world.
I am left remembering a Tony Robbins quote - “Human beings overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.”
The more accurate your world model is in your head the faster you can make progress. Having consumed content by hundreds if not thousands of successful minds I began to see a pattern. Whether you are a world class basketball player, tennis player, musician, scientist, business man or women - it appears as an extension of the same thing. It is your brain integrating to a part of reality such that you master it's nature over time. I see science - the process of testing reality to understand the real world in order to shape it in every aspect of success and life.
So cultivate your world view. I know it’s confusing as the human brain and experience almost as if comes from nothing. But suffice it to say for REASONS grounded in the very fabric of what we consider reality - near ANYTHING is possible - perhaps our dreams and even beyond.
