The Jordan Harbinger Show - 333: Isaac Lidsky | Eyes Wide Open

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

Isaac Lidsky (@isaaclidsky) is the only blind person to serve as a law clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court. He's also an entrepreneur, he was once a child actor on a popular '90s sitcom, and now he's the bestselling author of Eyes Wide Open: Overcoming Obstacles and Recognizing Opportunities in a World That Can't See Clearly. What We Discuss with Isaac Lidsky: Why Isaac Lidsky considers going blind in his twenties a "blessing." How Isaac's personal vision grew sharper even as his eyesight faded. How our brains construct reality based on our own mental models -- some of which we can control. How to reframe seemingly negative luck and events to work to your advantage. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/333 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! The NewsWorthy is on a mission to help people enjoy staying informed with a fast, fair, and fun approach to the news in less than 10 minutes a day, courtesy of host Erica Mandy. Get new episodes every weekday at 4 a.m. here or wherever you find fine podcasts! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. I want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave, and we want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, you'll be right at home here with us.

Today, one from the vault with my friend Isaac Lidski, author of Eyes Wide Open. He's the only blind person to serve as a law clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was a child actor unsaved by the bell, among other things. We'll discuss how going blind in his 20s was actually one of the best things that ever happened to him and how his personal vision grew even sharper even as his eyesight faded. We'll also discover how our brains construct our reality based on our own mental models, some of which we can actually control. And we'll learn how to reframe events and luck that seem negative to work to our advantage.

If you want to know how I managed to book all the guests for the show, it's always about networking. That's the name of the game, and it's been that way since I started, honestly, back in my law firm, 15 years ago. I'm teaching you how to create and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits. check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in great company.

All right. Here's Isaac Lidski. It's funny. I never really thought, one day I'm going to interview Weasel from Saved by the Bell. Well, it's funny when I left L.A. I never thought I was going to be interviewed again. Yeah, I guess it seems like you went from child actor. in commercials to everyone knows who you are to, oh, I got to get a regular job now, I guess.

Yeah, LA was fun. It was, you know, it was a neat experience to be sure. But right around the same time that I moved out there to do Save by the Bell is when I was diagnosed my blinding disease. So obviously I had a lot more going on than just kind of going out there to do the sitcom and, you know, moved on pretty quickly. Tell us the story of how this came to be because it seems like you were, okay, child actor living in Florida. You get the biggest gig of the 90s, saved by the bell. and then you're on top for a minute, and then it's like, oh, by the way, you're losing your vision? How did that all play out? Yeah, so, you know, when I was 13 and one of my three older sisters started having some issues with her site,

so we all went to the sort of neighborhood ophthalmologist office, and one thing I went to another, and he told my mom that she had to take us all to this sort of retinal specialist at medical school downtown, and off we went, and after a grueling day of testing that the expert came in and told us that We had this rare eye disease that causes progressive loss of sight and ultimately blindness, and we'd go blind. And he said, there are no treatments, there's no cures. I can't tell you how long it's going to take. We really don't know much about the disease.

Good luck. Geez, quiet car ride home, I assume. Yeah, that car ride home was awful. I was terrified, and my mom was trying out to cry without much success. My sisters were crying, and I was trying to figure it all out. And what's amazing to me is, you know, looking back, I knew during that car ride home, I knew that blindness was going to ruin my life. I knew it was going to be the end of independence

and achievement for me. I knew it meant I was going to live this kind of like small, sad life. I didn't think any woman would ever truly love or respect me because I couldn't imagine sort of loving or respecting myself and on and on and on, but these were lies, right? These were the sort of fictions of my fear, but they didn't feel like things I thought, right?

They felt real. I felt like something that I just knew. And that was tough. Right. So it's a nightmare coming true here. and you're never going to fall in love. I'm going to be a burden of my family. I'm never going to have kids.

A lot of catastrophizing from the sound of it. Exactly right. Or there's another term psychologists use, which I love, awfulizing. Yeah. That's what our fears do. We fill in the sort of void of our ignorance and the unknown with the most awful possibility.

But at the same time, then you take the car ride home and you show back up and it's like, hey, here's this awesome job that every kid in America who even dreamed a little bit of reaching the stars, you have it. you're the it guy, you're in all the little teen magazines, and I'd imagine people are taking pictures with you at the mall, and you're just thinking, this is all going to come to an end.

It almost makes it worse, right? Because if you just had a regular life, it's like, oh, okay, this is terrible. But now you have, in theory, this amazing life, and you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yes, you're right. I mean, in some ways, it was worse. I experienced sort of the blessings of my life, you know, with the perspective of these are the things that I will shortly lose.

It was almost like a preemptive morning, you know, the loss of what had been promising to be a pretty fun and cool and interesting life. You know, it left me feeling a real sense of urgency. I really moved on from L.A. in a hurry to squeeze as much as I could into my life to do as much and accomplish as much as I could before it was too late. Was it kind of, I need to go see the Grand Canyon? Or what are these things that you're trying to cross off the list before the clock runs out? Well, I mean, sort of all the above, there were definitely things I wanted to say. or experience or do, but also, you know, I wound up skipping my senior year of high school, having already skipped a grade or two along the way. So you graduated college at 19.

I did this tech startup for a couple years feeling like you had to get the whole internet boom and had to make some money quick. Went back to law school at Harvard and kind of raping to get a lot under my belt. Going to law school is not something I would do if I had limited amount of time. I went to law school. I don't think I would go back even if they're like, you have a hundred more years to live. Well, let me spend three of them reading legal documents from 1865. My dad was a lawyer. He's retired now. And I always want to learn to think like him, so always want to go to law school. But also, I had long had this dream of clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court, and you kind of got to go to law school first. Yeah, that's for sure a pre-requirement

for a clerk in the Supreme Court. And you're the only blind person to serve as a law clerk for the Supreme Court. So that works in your favor. So when you're clerking for the Supreme Court, are you reading these legal documents in Braille or are you listening to them? How's that working? I am listening to them. So there's great software and technology, screen reading software, got some help from the Supreme Court Library to get stuff digitally when it wasn't available otherwise. I did a lot of listening. Burned up the years. But an amazing thing happens when you lose a sense, like we were talking about earlier, you start to develop the ability to kind of get more from your other senses. So I speed up the sort of playback rate at which I listen to documents or websites or e-mails.

or whatever. But bottom line is, I can read, quote, unquote, a lot faster now than I ever could with sight. How fast can you read compared to, if we're looking at, say, 3x on Audible, are you like at 5x or something? I mean, you must be really well practiced at this point. So the average person, the average American English speaker, speaks 150 words a minute. The average English, American English reader can read about 300 or 350 words a minute. I can listen to somewhere between 700 and 725. Oh, wow, that's fantastic. So you can listen twice as fast and change,

then most people can read with their eyes. That's correct. Wow, that's super useful. Yeah, it's awesome. It's funny, if I had like perfect site tomorrow, I don't know that I would change the way I read documents. If I had discovered audiobooks and figured out that I could have maybe even gotten through legal documents from listening,

I would have been such a better student because I lose all kinds of focus. my eyes lose track of the page. I'm not a bad reader in terms of I know what the words mean or something like that. I don't have a learning disability in any way, but it was just so hard for me to stay focused looking at the same thing. I grew up in front of a freaking television,

which didn't help, but listening, I can listen to something and retain so much more. And this is something I unfortunately discovered, probably when I was 34 instead of 14 or 10. I can see why that would just be super useful. So you've discovered a whole lot of things after going blind where you're thinking, actually this is even better than when I was cited.

Obviously, this curse, this nightmare, ultimately proved, in your words, to be a blessing. There's absolutely no question that losing my sight, the way that I did, this sort of bizarre, progressive way that I lost my sight, turned out to be among the best things that ever happened to me in my life. There's no doubt about it. A lot of people hearing that right now are thinking, okay, that's just something you say when you have something that you can't avoid. No, I know, and I would probably say that, too. I'm not this like, ooh, Shangri-la, you know, everything is wonderful and then happiness in and all that.

But very sort of practically, objectively, realistically, I know that the insights I gained, the knowledge I gained by losing my sight has helped me to achieve immeasurable joy and fulfillment and success in my life. I literally saw firsthand as I was losing my sight the awesome and empowering ability that we have, the way our minds create the realities we experience. We can front obviously circumstances beyond our control, but how those circumstances manifest themselves in the way we experience our lives is entirely within our control. And it doesn't always feel that way,

it doesn't always seem that way. But I saw that very clearly as I lost my sight and it changed my life. And how old were you when you actually fully lost your site, more or less functionally lost your site? Early 20s. Okay, wow. So you graduated from college,

not law school, to be fair, but college. And then after that, it was just, okay, now I can no longer read, as well, see as well, I can't drive anymore, all those things change. Was it sudden? Was it like, okay, I'm at the point where I can no longer do these things, or was it a long slog? Long, drawn out slog, and it's hard to say exactly when it started or ended, and it's hard to pinpoint milestones. The best way I have to explain is if you picture like a Jumbotron screen at an arena, that screen has millions of bulbs, right, that sort of collectively create the image

you see. The photoreceptor sales at the back of your eye, the sort of the back of your retina are kind of like those bulbs, you know, they fire in response to light and sort of send all this information to the back of your brain. If you imagine watching my life as a movie on that Jumbotron screen, then imagine that the bulbs start to break sort of randomly over time. That's kind of what it was like. So at first, you might not even notice it, then might become annoying. Certain parts of the screen will randomly have a higher concentration of broken bulbs and the more problematic. Other parts of the screen might be less problematic. And as images are moving across the screen, you can imagine recognition dawns and things sort of come into existence. And then sometimes the guesses

your brain, the guesses your mind is trying to make, make some sense of the information you're getting like, turn out to be wrong. So, you know, objects morph into other objects. And it was this very bizarre experience. But like I was saying, I saw that. The experience of sight itself is this masterful illusion that our minds create for us. That implicates so much more than just information from the eyes. I mean, it involves conceptual knowledge, memories, opinions, stuff and yet it feels so real right it feels like passive and objective and truth right you open your eyes and there's the world we even say seeing is believing that contradiction that fundamental contradiction was pardon the pun eye opening for me all right yeah well i can't do that you can do that

yeah you know it was a revelation let's say we create our own realities and then believe it experience it does truth we do that in so many aspects of life beyond sight. We do that in the way we perceive our strengths and weaknesses. We do it in the way we think about success and value in life. We do it in the way we imagine others perceive us, the self-limiting assumptions we make about ourselves, the way we can sort of feel lucky or unlucky, and all these things, it's not often obvious. But whether we like it or not, whether we believe or not, in every moment, we are choosing who we are and how we want to live our life. To go back into a little bit of neuroscience, we'll dip into this, we see with our brains and

not our eyes. And that's a funny thing for us to realize. And I'm learning more and more about this. But basically, going back to what you'd said earlier about how a lot of times the predictions that your brain are making are incorrect and things like that, what scientists have found, and you probably know a lot about this as well, is that there's a lot more bandwidth going from the brain, one area of the brain away from the eyes, than to the eyes or something like this. And I know I'm explaining this wrong, but basically the concept here is that your eyes get a lot of input,

but it's 10% of what you think. And the rest is your brain predicting where things are going to be, which is why there's so many weird little mistakes or something can startle you or you cannot see something that's right in front of your eyes, like the gorilla walking through people

passing the basketball kind of example. Your eyes see it, but your brain is going, this isn't fitting the model I'm creating right now, so you actually, even though the info is getting to your eyes, your brain is just ignoring it. You're absolutely right. So our retinas, our eyes can send a tremendous amount of information back to our visual cortex, right? It's like something like as many as two billion pieces of information. And that goes back to the visual cortex, which, what we were saying earlier, is about a third of the brain by volume. That visual cortex is linked to all sorts of other

areas of the brain. And by the way, it's active doing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with data from the eyes. Like when you're dreaming, dreaming, you're literally playing your dreams in your visual cortex. If you think about an elephant, the elephant detectors of the visual cortex, the sort of networks of the brain that are associated with the concept of an elephant, will fire. And here's one for you in terms of visual illusions and stuff. So think about like the blind spot or whatever. We have this optic nerve. It's basically a dense cable that goes from the retinas to the back of the eye. Well, there's a blind spot. There's a part of your retina that has no photorecept yourself. It's not doing

anything because that's where the cable is, so to speak. But your brain has developed the ability over time to just filter that right out. Every visual experience you have by definition is virtual, is artificial. Think about it another way. The retina is two-dimensional, or at least the retina is recording two-dimensional information. Where do you get three dimensions from? You get three dimensions from the visual cortex from the brain. Experiencing how amazing the brain is in creating this immersive experience of sight, getting a peek behind the proverbial curtain as I lost my sight, and then starting to see all the unintended and sort of bizarre and unfortunate effects that happen when you sort of degrade the data. Like I keep saying, it really was just a

profound realization in my life that made me question all sorts of other ways. I was assuming to be immutable truth, things that really were creations of my own mind. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger. harbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.

com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now, back to the show. And the example you give in the book is really interesting. It's at the pygmy and the buffalo, can you tell that real briefly? Because I thought that was a great illustration of how our models basically dictate what we can actually see. Sure, so there's an anthropologist called Turnbull who spent some time with a pygmy tribe in a dense rainforest where, you know, the inhabitants of the rainforest had no experience with seeing across long spaces, large open spaces, so to speak, everything's really dense and kind of compacted. And one day he took on a member of the tribe as like an assistant.

And one day they were driving and kind of reached a rare open clearing. And there were these large buffalo on the horizon. And to his assistant that's pygmy who had never had sight across a large open space before, he saw them as ants, like right nearby and went to like try to grab them. He thought they were some kind of strange insect. And Turnbull explained to him, no, no, those are large animals far away. And let me show you, they hopped in the Jeep and started driving towards them. And as they did, of course, the Buffalo started to appear larger and larger.

Another experience that a member of the tribe had never had. And he, you know, became very uncomfortable and thought that there was witchcraft at work. So his visual cortex never developed the sort of linkages with the sort of conceptual understanding, large distance and how sort of size, you know, changes over distance. And that wasn't there. The data from his eyes was no different than any, you know, average person. But once it got back to the visual cortex, there was no linkage. with a network of sort of conceptual understanding to tell him what to make of that experience.

So even a human baby who sees something far off in the distance whose, I don't even know what age, can tell that something is far away. But this adult man who'd grown up in the jungle and had maybe never seen anything on a horizon ever, couldn't tell that the buffalo was on the horizon was actually a large animal that was far away. He actually saw it as actual size.

His 3D depth perception basically halted at, I don't know, 20 meters or whatever distance in the jungle that you have to deal with, regularly, which is incredible. The fact that he had never developed that mental model, and yet his eyes were perfectly functioning, here illustrates the concept of our entire reality of what we see is dictated by the mental models available to us in our brain. That's right. This is not just sight. This is across the board. We are built to infer, to predict, to assume. The brain builds up a vast database of experiences and develops logical networks to reason from those

experiences. And it's obviously very useful and very powerful, and it's great in many respects. But that sort of fundamental aspect of the brain can also do us great harm. But, you know, we're blessed to be aware of it. And if we want to be aware and intentional and recognize our role in shaping our own realities, we can do something about it. You mentioned that we play memories and dreams back through the visual cortex. How do you process memories that you have after losing your sight? How is it different from memories that you processed before? So when you probably remember seeing Kelly Kapowski from Saved by the Bell when you were younger and being like, yeah, I would like that introduction. But after losing your site, right, how are those memories

processed differently? And are they still, do you still visualize things just as you did when you could see? Yes, I still visualize things. It may sound odd, but I'm a very visual person. So I dream in color and in, you know, images. And I'm often visualizing things in my mind, conceptualizing and visualizing things. Touch becomes a great substitute for the eyes in terms of getting information about something's appearance, its shape, texture, et cetera, based on that information, I can start to visualize things. But yeah, I mean, there's no data coming in from the eyeballs, but that visual cortex that developed from when I was born through into my late teens and early 20s, you know, and kind of had the normal experience of tuning itself up with data from

the eyes or whatever. That, you know, that's still there. Wow. So the visual cortex still hard at work with just no data to change things, or getting data from some other place. I mean, I guess that's a neuroscience question and not really our department. But yeah, of course, it's still getting data. It's part of the brain. Yeah.

So you'd mentioned that site isn't designed to give us an accurate perception. It's designed to further our evolutionary goal of survival and reproduction. And you said that that can run us into trouble, and I definitely understand that. Our minds are a lot less concerned with getting it right than they are

with getting it useful so that we don't die or whatever. You give a brilliant analogy in the book about how the desktop, the GUI, Windows, MacOS, whatever you're looking at, even your smartphone, what you see on the screen is not an accurate reflection of what's really going on inside the computer. You're not really dragging an app from one part of the iPhone to another part. It's just a visual representation of that. This reality that we construct really only exists in our minds, and then we just turn around

and believe it to be the objective truth because why wouldn't we? It's our perception of things, and it's not. And I think that that's fascinating in that you essentially had to come to face cold reality in that your objective truth could not be real because you're still visualizing things and yet there's no data coming in from your eyes. How did you deal with that? Because that's a weird sobering realization that none of us really ever get. It's a tremendous realization. I wish I could take credit for it. It's actually Dan Hoffman is a brilliant scientist who has done all this work to show this evolutionary purpose of sight is to be useful not to accurately represent the world around or whatever. So his metaphor is, picture an icon of a blue folder on a desktop. The data that

that icon is meant to represent, is it in any sense blue and located in the bottom right of the physical computer? No. Nothing about the desktop tells you anything about what's actually going on the computer, but it's like super useful. And it abstracts away all sorts of stuff you don't need to know. Well, that's what our brains are doing based on the data we get. While we're on the subject of the data that we get, we have this thing we call the visible spectrum. It's the sort of spectrum of wavelengths of light or electromagnetic radiation that our eyes respond to. And a bit of hubris, us humans call that the visible spectrum. That visible spectrum comprises one 10 trillionth, one 10 trillionth of the range of electromagnetic radiation in our world. Our eyes respond to 110

trillionth of the light that's out there. Then our brains abstract away, you know, all sorts of build up this sort of complex virtual world in an effort to guide our behaviors so that we survive and procreate and all those things. And yet we walk around thinking that we know what the world looks like. The notion of what the world looks like is itself, it's absurd. Right. It's essentially the objective reality that's out there is all this, I don't know, it's like an episode of Star Trek where one person is perceiving this beautiful beach and the other person sees a rocky desert landscape that's dangerous. And the things that we perceive all these visible colors and light and patterns and surfaces that feel smooth or feel soft, all that is is our brain constructing an image of different pieces of

input, which is why our super comfortable house and bed looks totally different to some kind of eel that can only see in the water based on electrical signals. Yes, that's exactly right. We feel that what we're quote unquote seeing is out there, and it's just not. It is what is in our brain. Right. It's completely constructed in the brain. And I just think that's super interesting because as your site failed, you had to build other ways of interacting with the world. So how did that process look and feel and work for you? You gave an interesting story in the book about how you knew where the restaurant bathroom was that I thought was kind of incredible.

I replayed that a bunch because it just showed you that even you were surprised by this concept of your brain figuring out how to see without your eyes. Yeah, I was pretty startled. I mean, that was my wife, Dorothy and I went to dinner with another couple in a restaurant that none of us had ever been to. and, you know, we waited for the table a little bit, and then we were kind of led to the table along kind of walk and sat down. And the woman we were with said she needed to go to the restroom and asked if, you know,

anyone knew where it was. And Dorothy said, oh, I bet it's probably in that sort of back corner over there. Visually, that's where she assumed it would be. That's kind of what made sense. And I sort of blurted out, no, that's not where it is. You know, remember about halfway down the bar, we made that right turn into that sort of narrow hallway. You know, and at the end, we made a right turn.

If you had made a left instead and gone down the stairs, you know, that's where the bathroom one. And everybody was like, what are you talking about? Yeah, how do you know? And I was like, what am I talking about? So I had gotten all sorts of information along the way. You're need to see to know you're in a bar. You know, generally, you walk to a restaurant, you're going to a room. It's crowded room. It's loud. You hear drinks being poured. You hear snacks. You kind of know you're in the bar. Turn into the hallway. It feels narrow. I mean, narrow spaces have a, the air pressure is different. The reverberation of the sound is different. You know you're in a narrow space. We got to the Hall, I made her right turn, I heard a woman's sandals slapping against stairs as she was kind of

walking up the stairs or whatever, and heard a toilet flush sort of down below. So the day of the information that I got to tell me where the bathroom was, it was nothing remarkable about that. What was remarkable to me was that as sight seemed so effortless, right, you just kind of open your eyes and there's the world, these other ways that I was sort of working to sort of capture information about my environment or whatever, I realized then that they were starting to just as natural. Originally, it took a lot of conscious effort and thought to listen to the environment, think about it, draw logical conclusions. Memory was something that took a lot of conscious effort to remember the layout of a room or the layout of the restaurant, you know, all those things that I

devoted a lot of time and effort working on sort of developing those skills. But the brain is just so awesome. You know, we are infinitely adaptable. And, you know, over a matter of years, not that long. All those sort of conscious effort became sort of natural and just as passive as sight. How do you know if you're not walking into the women's restroom by a mistake? So I have walked into many women's restrooms by mistake. And then you just go, it's all right. I haven't seen anything for years. Yeah, exactly.

And then people are figuring out, I'm like, look, first of all, I can't even see you. So everything is cool. Yeah, I would imagine, and do you use a cane to get around? I do. So it's pretty self-explanatory pretty much right away. I would imagine for anybody who sees you walking in while they're applying makeup or washing their hands, they kind of know what's going on. I make my best reasonable effort, and when it's just too hard to tell, sometimes nature calls.

Sure. Yeah, sure. Your book is essentially, it's not just about adjusting to the world being sightless. You talk about how your personal vision grew sharper, even as your eyesight faded. Tell us about that process, because it's easy for a lot of people, or would be easier anyway, to just kind of go, well, you know, your earlier prediction was right. You're screwed now and everything's downhill from here. So, settle in for long days of listening to Netflix or something like that and just forget about it. Forget about all your ambitions. Yes. When I realized our power to shape the way we experience the world and to shape our lives, to shape our reality,

for me, it was then crystal clear that I have a choice to me. And having realized this, having seen our power, it's also, you know, our responsibility. So if I wanted to choose to abdicate that responsibility, to feel myself a victim, to feel sorry for myself to wallow in sorrow or whatever, I could make that choice What I was not going to let myself do, though, was lie to myself and pretend that it wasn't a choice. Accountability became a pretty important feature of my life in brutal sort of honesty and introspection, because if I'm at work creating the life I experience every day, every moment, I'm going to do so with awareness and with intention and with purpose as opposed to sort of living by happenstance or, you know, as reaction. And it's not easy. I don't mean to suggest, again, this isn't like a moment where all clicks into place and, you know,

oh, you're up on some mountain. It takes effort every day for me, a lot of effort, and some days I'm better out than others. But it's certainly worth it. Yeah, I would imagine. At some point you asked, what reality am I creating for myself? And you've got these key concepts

that you mentioned in the book, ask yourself what reality I'm creating for myself, and you mentioned accountability as well. Tell us how this process works and how people can apply it for themselves. Because even if somebody's not losing their vision right now or has already done so, there are people that are in their mind,

certainly in a very similar situation, their careers falling apart, their marriage is falling apart, or some other health challenge. I think there's a lot of people who find themselves in similar shoes. Oh, absolutely. I did not write the book, and I would not have written the book, you know, to talk about myself or blindness or even sort of disability. This vision that I gain, which I call living eyes wide open, is for everybody. That's what has me so sort of passionate about it and so excited about it.

Because, like you say, we all face awful circumstances. We all have fears. We all have disabilities, maybe not in the sort of precise legal definition. I was lucky to have lost my sight in a way that I did to sort of view these insights, this sort of vision. The vision itself really has nothing to do with blindness. So where do we start with asking ourselves questions like, what reality am I creating for myself? If we don't need to have a watershed moment like going blind, how does this process work? Are you journaling this? Are you sitting down and thinking about it?

Or does it come to you gradually? Sure. So, I mean, first and foremost is brutally honest introspection with yourself. So what does success mean to you? What does value in life mean to you? How do you want to be spending your time at home or at work? What kind of spouse do you want to be? What kind of parent or child or sibling or friend do you want to be? They're tough questions, but man, they're pretty important questions, right? And then to the extent that the life you're living differs from your answers from those things. that you'd like to choose for yourself. It's the recognition that the responsibility is yours to do something about it, if you so choose. In the book, I try to go more specifically into sort of particular sort of themes.

There's a chapter on how to confront fear. There's a chapter on perceptions about sort of strength and weakness and sort of confidence and vulnerability and all that. And the chapter about luck. There's one about sort of ongoing effort and struggle in the face of a challenge. and I try to offer sort of concrete ways that my vision has been helpful to me in certain nuances or aspects of life. However, you know, the core of the ideas is pretty straightforward. Who do you want to be and how do you want to live your life? You are answering those questions

every moment. You might as well do it intentionally. Right. You're doing it through your actions and if you're not thinking about your actions, you're doing it unintentionally. Yes, exactly. You're doing it with your actions, with your words, with your emotions. You are the master of your reality. I mean, again, whether you like it or not, your life is not happening to you. You are creating your life. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show.

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We really appreciate it. And now back to the show. How do you hold yourself accountable for your choices? How did that process get started for you? I think a lot of people do think life is happening to them. And there's got to be a point at which you brace yourself. If you need to stick your hands out and you go, I'm going to slow this train down and take charge here. But that can't be easy to just suddenly do that.

Because usually, of course, when we decide we need to do that, that's when we're spiraling so far out of control emotionally or logistically in our lives that our accountability seldom comes and we're, sitting there going, man, everything's going so well for me right now. I just have to step back and take some credit for this. It's usually not that situation. I'll tell you a story. Give you an example. When my wife Dorothy and I decided we were ready to have a child, she naturally conceived triplets. When the triplets were born, the question arose, am I going to participate in changing diapers and in feeding them their bottles? And sort of doubly challenged as both blind and a man, I could have very easily gotten out of that, gotten off the hook, and I could have told myself, you know what, dude, you're blind, just give yourself a break. But, and here's where

the accountability comes in. I said to myself, okay, is it possible for you to change divers and feed the babies? Of course it's possible. We can figure out some sort of practical solution to do it. Is it going to be overwhelmingly burdensome? No, probably not. At the end of the day, it probably won't be that much harder than it is for a sight of the father, right? Well, is it important to you? You it's something that you as a father want to do, participate in your children in that level of care when they're... Yeah, it is important to me. All right, well, if all those things are true, it's a really bad choice to say, hey, I'm going to beg off diaper duty because I'm blind. Right, because then you're just letting yourself off the hook for one hard thing and you might as well

do it for the next. Yes, you are lying to yourself. In that situation, I would have been lying to myself. And the problem with these sort of self-limiting assumptions that we develop about ourselves. The things that we tell ourselves we can and cannot do is they propagate and they sort of grow in severity. And today, it's changing diapers and tomorrow it's going out to dinner one-on-one with one of my kids and who knows. And then, you know, these things take root and breed. Again, the core of this whole eyes right open vision really is this awareness of the decisions, the choices you're making in every moment. Is this a conscious process for you or at this point it seems like it's probably unconscious? But how did you get started doing it? It's a conscious process.

And it's a process that requires discipline and commitment. Let's take fear, for example. I still confront fear. There are still times when I'm afraid, right? We all face fear. Well, fear is so pernicious because just like we experience this world of sight as something that's sort of true and objective, our mind can create sort of all those awful scenarios of our fears, the lies of our fears.

We can feel those to be just true, irrefutable truth. That's how I felt in the car that day on the way home from the diagnosis. So concrete, specific ways to kind of see through that fear. One big one is I always ask myself a couple questions whenever I sort of start to feel afraid. The first one is, what precisely is the problem that I am confronting? Broken down into its smallest, most discreet form. Right now, today, this moment, what precisely is the problem? Not overwhelming doom and gloom, some awfulizing some huge scenario out there in the future.

Second question is what precisely can I do about it? The emphasis on the eye there is important. The way that our fears perpetuate themselves, the way that our fear kind of keeps us on the sideline is we very often kind of manifest heroes and villains in our lives. People we see as in control of our fate and we want to celebrate them or blame them, credit them, pray to them. And really, that's just kind of a con. It's the way that our fears keep us on the sideline, keep us from sort of taking control from breaking the spell. So another thing that I'm constantly doing in my life is I'm on the lookout for heroes and villains. Those are figments of our

imagination. They do not exist. Finally, I believe a lot of life is about momentum and progress. just keeping momentum, keeping motion, keeping progress going. You will not get from A to Z in your life if you do not get from A to B. There's just no way around it. The world's going to change a million times between A and Z. You will as well. Until the day you die, there is no Z. Those are a few ways concretely that I endeavor to mitigate the force of fear in our lives

because fear, like I said, can really be corrosive. How did all of these skills and all these realizations come into play when you decided to start or acquire your business, because we haven't talked about yet, is that you run a large construction company that you bought after all of this went down, instead of just tapping out and going, I've done a lot and I'm just getting by now, you actually decided, nah, I'm going to make my life even more complicated and buy a business. Well, that's not exactly the way I'd put it. Again, accountability to what's important, you know, in your life.

So here I was, I had a great stretch in law. I got to represent the United States and federal appellate courts, which was awesome. The Supreme Court clerkships were amazing. Loved all that. And then, you know, I kind of wound up making the obvious choice and going to work for a big law firm and got a huge signing bonus and the money was great. Now, I should say, for folks who find meaning and success and practicing law, who enjoy it, that's great.

There's no problem with it. My problem was that I wasn't one of those folks. I was pretty miserable practicing sort of a big law firm law. It was important to me to spend as much time as I could with my children and then with my wife. You know, we were at the time we were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with infant triplets, a dog and a cat, right? So none of that looked good. Working 90 hours a week wasn't a great plan for me. And so I wanted a house for the yard so I could play with my kids and I could have dinner with my wife. Again, accountability, right? So if that's what you want

and the life you're living doesn't resemble the life you want, then you've got to do something about it. Well, it seemed like a good idea to buy a small business that was kind of getting along, treading water, so to speak, and to try to turn that small business into an excellent company of my own. So I partnered up with my Harvard College roommate and we looked at businesses all over the country. He kept his fancy day job in the world of finance, but I left my fancy day job behind and moved to Orlando, Florida to take the helm as the CEO of our residential construction company, ODC Construction. Again, the plan was a humble one. It was to develop better quality of life for my family and find a career for myself that I enjoyed that I could explain to my kid and

that I would find rewarding. So you acquire the company and everything goes smoothly. dot, dot, dot the end, right? Sort of. So a couple of Harvard guys by a residential subcontractor in Orlando, you know, what could possibly go wrong, right? Yeah. A lot of things went wrong.

You know, we realized about three months in that the financial data we had meticulously analyzed was really nonsense. It was kind of garbage in, garbage out. Nobody really had any idea how the kind of business was doing overall or even on a sort of job-by-job project-by-project basis. You know, it was a mess.

And worse, it was hemorrhaging money. It was sinking like a stone. About three months in, it looked like we were going to lose the business. And, of course, in addition, losing the business, I had put every single penny the door thing I had into the company. My roommate, Zach, I put most of his. And then we had to sign all these personal guarantees for bank loans and for vendors and stuff.

So it looked really grim. It looked like we'd be filing for bankruptcy. And I actually had a conversation with my father-in-law and my wife about whether we could move in with my in-laws and our then-year-old triplets. That was a lot of fun. Oh, man. Yeah. It was a really, really tough time.

And in the midst of all this, my mom tells me that she has squirled away $350,000 in cash, like physical currency, that she's just been saving here and there over 40 years. And she passionately insists that I borrow it to save my dying company, which was, in a lot of ways, it made things even more difficult, right? even harder because then I actually had a decision to make, could I possibly take my mom's money? I wrestled with that decision for a few days, which was a really interesting and challenging time for me and ultimately decided to have faith in my team and our vision for the industry and have faith in some of our customers who indicated they would stick by us. So we took the money and then we had ourselves a very different business, right? We had ourselves a pretty dramatic turnaround situation. I stopped drawing a salary, others in the business, took reduced pay. We were hustled

every day doing the deeds that had to be done. And that took about a year. A year is really quick in a turnaround, but also having taken your mother's $350,000 in couch cushion money would be pretty good motivation because you can file bankruptcy yourself. You can even move in with your in-laws, but you can't lose your mom's life savings. That's exactly right. That was good motivation. Also, Dorothy has always had a remarkable faith in my abilities and has supported me to no end.

And here I showed up one day and said, hey, consistent with my philosophy on life, I don't want to be a fancy Harvard lawyer anymore. I want to, you know, go into residential construction in Orlando. Like, are you with me? And she said, sure. So I definitely wanted to vindicate her faith. First and foremost, I should say, I'm blessed to work with a phenomenal team of people that really stepped up and transcended and thrived. And heck, it even started to become fun after a little while when we saw a way out. And, you know, now we've built a business that we are immensely proud of.

and it's just been a heck of a journey. What are the things that you mentioned in the book that, of course, circles in part around the turnaround in your business is the concept of luck and how everything looks like luck. If you zoom in on the timeline, maybe on the one hand of poker,

I think is the example, the analogy you give in the book. Can you break that down for us a little bit? That's a really interesting concept. I think a lot of people could be served by that. Yeah, so the quotes attributed to Thomas Jefferson, this is something in effect of,

I'm a big fan of luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. We can have a tendency to sort of misperceive the force of luck in our lives at least a couple ways. So we think that luck is sort of good or bad and can sort of neatly be sort of divided into the two categories. The reality situation is, you know, who's to say, I mean, events are events.

And what we do with them, what we make of them is what's important. So I think a good example is, you know, me losing my sight. Was I unlucky to go blind? I wouldn't say that. I would say in some respects it was one of the luckiest things that happened to me. But more importantly, who cares, lucky, unlucky, whatever. You know, those are just event. we tend to minimize our own role in our lives when we focus on these sort of labels of lucky or unlucky.

The second way that I think we get lucked wrong a lot is events can be neatly categorized as in our control or out of our control. And the truth is often blurry or gray or nuanced. And we generally underestimate our power to impact events in our lives. I like to sort of tell this story in the book of imagine a casino's owner and chairman of the board, billionaire guys standing behind the roulette table and here you are on some, you know, big winning streak and, you know, you got a hundred times more money in front of you. And then when you started, you risk it all on red and it's red and now you've doubled your money again. And the casino's CEO, how unlucky am I? And, you know, throws a fit and he's miserably unhappy about it. That seems preposterous, right?

Well, why is it preposterous? It's reposterous because the casino has a business plan that guarantees returns on hundreds of thousands, not millions of fins and deals and pulls the slot machine and whatever like it's not about any one hand or any one role of the dice the same is true in our lives but we fail to see it we throw a fit about that one spin of the roulette wheel when our blessings are compounding all around us i think that a nuanced understanding of sort of the force of luck in life is very worthwhile especially when we can look at it like a timeline and when you zoom out on the timeline you end up with the ability to create your own luck steer the path Whereas if you zoom in on any one hand, it always looks like luck.

So there seems to be a fundamental difference in the way that people who view themselves as having an internal locus of control and being in control, they're looking at the timeline, they're including luck, they're including this aggregate of everything over a long period of time, whereas people who view themselves with an external locus of control where they don't control things or maybe looking at each hand individually, each event independently, and thinking, this is lucky or not. Yes, exactly right. And I talk about it more about it the book,

but I think poker is a great example of that, particularly the game of Texas Holden, which I absolutely love. There's this question is Texas Holden, you know, the poker game predominantly luck or predominantly skill. The answer really depends entirely on perspective. If you look at the game of Texas Holden

as one hand, 10 players at a casino table or whatever are dealt, the two cards and you play one hand, and that's it at the beginning and ending. Yeah, it's a good argument to be made that it's predominantly a game of luck. But I have no doubt that Texas Holdom is, in truth, predominantly a game of skill. When you look at the people who consistently

win tournaments, consistently wind up at the World Series of poker, develop their game over time, develop strategy, and hone their craft, there's just no questions. There are people who are better or worse at Texas Holden. And then at the end of the day, over time, playing Texas Holden, skill matters a lot more than luck. Now, does the best Texas Holden player have a bad beat? Where that one card that was super unlikely to fall falls and they lose the hand, absolutely. Of course it happens. The same happens in life all the time. We have bad beats, but that doesn't mean it's a game of luck, right? It doesn't mean, by the way, also, that we play the hand wrong. I think this is something that we really do ourselves a disservice when we try to judge the quality

of our sort of decisions or actions or behaviors with reference to the results obtained. And that's just totally backwards. Like, all the time, people make good decisions with the right intentions and the right motivations, and it doesn't work out. If it ultimately doesn't work out, You can't go back in time and say the decision was wrong or bad. Just it didn't work out. But we beat ourselves up mercilessly all the time for good decisions that didn't work out. Of course, the opposite is true too, right? We make bad decisions that pan out, and then we like to tell ourselves that we made a great decision

or we saw things that others didn't. That's not fair either. So as we wrap up here, this might be a really hard question, but would you go back to being cited if you also had to give back the lessons you got from going blind? No, never. Really? That's not a hard question at all. That's so funny, I was like, this might be really tough.

Maybe we'll have to pause. Not even a second. No, I'm telling you, I am so blessed. The life that I live is phenomenal. Family, personally, you know, as a man spiritually, a business, and it's directly a result of this eyes wide open vision. I wouldn't want to live my life any other way. Isaac, thank you so much, man.

This has been amazing. Big thanks to Isaac. The book's title is Eyes Wide Open. Links to his book and his shows and everything else he does. will be in the website in the show notes. Please do use our website when you buy books. That always helps support the show. Also in the show notes, there are worksheets for each episode.

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