I was born with a malformation of the internal organs, and after surgery at seventeen and three years healing the scars before I stepped out into the world, I carried a great deal of a feeling that something about me was simply lesser.
Once I was working, a manager called me unfit for society, and I started living my life on the assumption that “I can’t do it.”
Guided by the people I met, I finally jumped clean out of the salaryman shell and went into growing people together, visiting schools and companies to speak — and there I saw a great many students knocked down by a teacher telling them “you can’t do it.”
That sight was exactly the same as what I had lived through myself, and exactly the reaction I got when I said I was entering Peking to Paris. The same wall: denial, giving up.
The “peg” of denial and giving up
I often tell the story, in talks, of a circus elephant chained in place. I saw it for myself on a trip to Thailand.
On a huge site, elephants were kept chained up to entertain tourists. They never fled even when the chain was let go.
A wild elephant is, in fact, tremendously powerful and could easily rampage and knock down everything around it and escape — and yet, chain removed, it simply stayed where it was.
People are the same: kept being told no, and you become bound by the fixed idea that “I really can’t do it”, until you stop even trying to pull out the small peg holding you.
Let’s take on small challenges
Looking back, my own private life has been one small challenge stacked on another too.
Does skydiving really change a life?
I had heard that phrase often, and always wanted to try it. Did skydiving actually change my life, once I tried it?
A challenge you have never done carries fear with it. But the fear only lasted an instant once I jumped — and after that, there I was, flying through an enormous blue sky. I came to think it is not skydiving itself that changes a life, but taking that one step into action.
Through the live broadcast of this great challenge, the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, sharing the failures and the setbacks along with everything else, I want to show what it looks like to push back against the fear of failure and the world’s denial, and keep driving to the very end.
Right now, showered with so many “you can do it”s and “it’ll be all right”s, I believe in myself, certain I will make this happen.
Thank you, always, for your support.