The School of Greatness - 529 Stay True to Yourself and Conquer Any Obstacle with Kyle Maynard

Episode Date: August 28, 2017

"That light inside of you needs to be shared." - Kyle Maynard If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/529

This is episode number 529 with New York Times best-selling author and extreme athlete, Kyle Maynard. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Maya Angelou said it best, you may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats

so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it. I am so excited about our guest today. It's from my good friend Kyle Maynard. And for those that don't know who Kyle is, he was born without arms and legs, but he lives without excuses. And even though he doesn't have, you know, these limbs to

be able to hold on to things and walk and run, he still climbs mountains. He still cage fights. He still plays football, wrestles. It doesn't hold him back from living an incredibly amazing life. And I wanted to share his keynote that he gave a year ago at the first Summit of Greatness. All right, guys, make sure to take a screenshot of this. Tag me on Instagram story, on Twitter, on Facebook. Let me know that you're watching this or listening to this right now and share with me the biggest takeaway you have from this episode. Tag me over on Instagram. I try to reply to everyone if I can on your Instagram story. So without further ado, let me introduce to you the one, the only Kyle Maynard. I'm so grateful for you. I'm grateful for you being here.

You create this experience. It's not just speakers hear. It's the energy, the attitude, the environment, your passion, your drive, your mission. I've been feeling it from the back of the room, feeling it in the conversations that I've had. I'm so grateful for that. Because I have needed that awakening in my life. And I'll share with you, I'm going to share with you guys a story that

I've never, never shared before. Parts of it, you know, kind of leading up a little bit about my life and experiences and to where I've been now. But truthfully, you know, and I connected so much to what DJI just shared because I've realized, and I've known this for a while, but I started speaking when I was 18 years old. I did my first speech a month before I graduated high school. Scared out of my mind. And I couldn't use a lectern, right, like everybody else, because you'd hear this voice and not actually see anything. And so I would hide a note card under my leg for my notes. And so I would, it was a note card, I would have to lift my leg to go and look at where I was in my story.

And I hated it at first because it was so hard, it was so scary, right? After a while, I'm close to probably a thousand events now. After a while, I'm close to probably 1,000 events now. And I'm still incredibly, incredibly grateful for it, but I've also realized that I've stayed safe there, stayed what's comfortable. I can go in front of a crowd now of 10,000 and not have my heart rate elevated. And that's not a great thing, right?

Because I think that that nervousness sometimes cues us to believe that that like we're doing something that's outside the comfort zone as as I already talked about going into the unknown and so the reason why I say that like this experience made me so so thankful so grateful it really got me to think I've been thinking and sort of ruminating on these ideas of what is that next chapter, that next thing. But so much of it had to do with what can I contribute to you? My message, really, to most of the groups that I work with, whether it's a company or a school, would be this no excuses message. And it's a powerful one because we all make excuses. I wrote a book called No Excuses. And yet's a powerful one because we all make excuses.

I wrote a book called No Excuses. And yet, I mean, there's still a laundry list of excuses that I go and make, that you make, that Lewis makes, that anybody in the world makes, right? It never ends. But truthfully, for people that aren't exposed to this world of personal development, that can even be a really intense dose to start with. But you guys get that. You're

here. You realize that you are a creator in your life. And so now I know it's, you know, what can I go and share that would, especially, you know, when Lewis goes and gives me the honor of giving this closing keynote, what would resonate? And I knew to trust the process, right? To trust that that would emerge. And it was amazing how it really emerged last night in a conversation I was having with Antoine and some of his dance crew. And yeah, an excuse that I made was I wasn't getting up to go and do the dancing at 6 a.m.

So there's one. But I was having this conversation with Antine and his dance crew and in particular a new friend taylor and uh so she we're she's 17 years old and she was like talking about things like mentors and i was like at 17 years old i had no idea what a mentor was i told her i was like like mentos is that what you mean, no idea what those words mean. And, but she's sort of, you know, having this conversation and, like, not knowing where that path goes. Is it schools, other things? I hope she's okay with me sharing this story. I don't, I don't really know. But, so, the, anyway, so we're talking about this, and Antoine, I think, you know, trying to sort of help her said, you know, you shouldn't say I don't

know so much, right? I was like, I actually thought about this and it was like, my core philosophy was around the idea of I don't know. My whole life, my whole journey up to this point has been around this concept of not knowing. Because it is truly the second that you know something that you put a limit and a boundary around it. And it is only by not knowing that you can truly have this sort of true discovery

of what's possible, what's available to you. Otherwise, I mean, our world is a world of trying to seek knowing and certainty. And not knowing is really where all, I think, so many of the answers lie, because that's where all the discoveries lie. And it's a 3,000-year-old philosophy. It was shared in the Upanishads. Have you ever heard of that? It was the ancient yogis, you know, through movement would go and write these practices down. It's now the formation of what became Hinduism. But really, at the time, they didn't know what they were kind of doing.

They were just using these movements to go and create an idea of this internal self-awareness. And one of the things that they said is they talk about Atman, the soul, the self, and Brahman, sort of like the ultimate sort of God, basically, right? The universe, whatever, what have you. And it was sort of this process of discovery, but you could, with the Atman, with the Brahman, they say that it is unknown to those who know it. And it is only known to those who don't know it, which is sort of a riddle. But if you think about it, how many of you have had that thought in here? Maybe you don't know what's going to happen after this. I would venture to say you're in the right frame of mind if that's you. Be open to it, not

knowing. Embrace it. And what happens with that is an amazing journey unfolds if we accept it. One of the greatest, two of the greatest influences of my life, Emerson and Joseph Campbell, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Campbell. So they, there's these two defining quotes that I sort of like have always tried to live my life by. Emerson said, do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. And Campbell said, he said, you know, so I think about that. I'm like, okay, where, okay, if I'm not going where the path may lead,

if I am going where there is no path to leave a trail, where do I go? What's my true north? What is my sense of direction? And Campbell said, follow your bliss. Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were previously only walls. And the thing is, what Campbell sort of discovered, I'm sure some of you are familiar with his work, but he really, he looked at all of these different traditions throughout the world. He looked in, you know, in the deep jungles of Africa, in these tribal tales that were told, in Siberia, in the, you know, the tales of the people told there, in these myth tales that were told in Siberia, in the tales of the people told there, in these mythological tales, in these creation stories, in these different things.

He looked at the modern, sort of the bigger religions in the world. He looked at the Incas and Greek mythology. All of these stories, whether it's The Little Mermaid or Star Wars, they hold this sort of similar structure. It's the hero's journey. And all of you are on it at some point. We're all on our own grand hero's journey, whether we even

acknowledge it or not. It's a human story. And it really begins with the idea that you start out in the ordinary world. Everybody's got their own ordinary world, and at some point you hear this call to adventure, call to something greater. But the common theme is every hero refuses that call at first. You refuse that call until you hit a point where you cross the threshold and you start on your journey, you start on your path. And that's when the tests, the trials, allies, enemies show up. You know, you can imagine like the Rocky montage here, right? And so at a certain point,

and this is the central theme of what I wanted to go and say here is not knowing that is going into the unknown. And it can be scary. Not knowing because we give up so many things. We give up our sense of security. We give up our sense of self, our own identities, what we've identified with. We go into the unknown to go and discover things. And what happens there is that is the magic. That is the juice of where all this lies. And there is this central theme that you've heard throughout the weekend, that at some point, all these speakers have really shared this idea of being broken.

And Lewis, physically, in his story, was one of being physically broken to go and create this. All of us in different ways, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, in these different ways. Campbell calls it the innermost cave, and almost when the hero faces death. So my mom and dad, when I was born, my story really begins with them. They had no idea I was going to be born with a disability. I was born in 86, so the ultrasound technology was a lot different then. And they were really young.

My dad was 22 years old when I was born in the Army. My mom, she's 25. She was working as a temp secretary. So they were young, first kid. Moms were going to secretary. Dad was getting out of the Army about three weeks after I was born. I was born at Walter Reed Army Medical where now many of our amputees that have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan come home to go and do their rehabilitation.

And born there at first, it was very confusing. It was a confusing, you know, hard, just emotionally, just like tumultuous time for them. They didn't necessarily know. I mean, you imagine, you know, I don't have any kids of my own. I have a baby niece now, and I can only imagine, you know, what they went through, sort of not having any ideas. Before the days of Google where you could go and type in the name of something and go and figure out that other people have lived a successful life. So there's a lot of fear there. And early on, though,

they tried to seek mentors and people that maybe had a similar condition as what I was born with, and they didn't even really know what caused it. And they still, to this day, don't have any idea. And they stopped looking for answers, though, realized it didn't matter. It was what it was. And they made a decision that they weren't, you know, the most important decision in my life, that they were not going to go and treat me any different from any other kid. And in doing so, it's easy to go and say, but it's really, can be difficult in practice. Because even something as simple as, you know, like having me learn how to go and eat by myself. I used a prosthetic spoon to go and eat at first,

and I could use that spoon to go and scoop up food. But a lot of times we would forget it at home. We'd go out to a friend's house or a restaurant and not have it there. My mom or my grandma would go and feed me. And my dad had to tell me, he's like, look, you guys have got to stop. Like, he has to go and learn how to do this on his own. And there's going to come that time where he's not going to want mom and dad, like, just, or mom and grandma hanging out behind him, like, feeding Like, oh, here's a bite, Kyle. So they had to let me fail a lot, dropping it

like a thousand times. I don't really have any memory of this experience, but they let me go through those failures and eventually just go and figure it out. And that spoon is kind of really a small metaphor for what my entire life has been now, where it is, you know, now in a day-to-day, you know, there's not really that many adaptations or things that are different. For instance, like, you know, use a pretty typical, normal iPhone, all of that. You know, drive a fairly minimally adapted vehicle. It's an Acura NDX. It's just got lifted pedals, extended pedals. It's a normal steering wheel. Grab the steering

wheel with my arm. And sometimes I've thoroughly freaked out my friends answering my iPhone and That's always a fun time. In my apartment, you wouldn't really find that many different things. There's not really any adaptations. The only real difference from your apartment is I put the silverware on the bottom drawer, which is very confusing for people trying to find it sometimes. But things are pretty normal there, pretty typical. It could have turned out way different, though.

I know that. I know that given the exact same circumstance, if they had made a different choice and treated me as if I were disabled, I would have seen myself that way. The circumstances in our life do not define us. The circumstances that we're given, the challenges that we're going to be given,

it is so much, so much more of how we go and handle those things, what we go and do with it. And they literally pulled the ultimate Jedi mind trick on me. And it was like, you're not disabled. Like, I believe that. It was not, like, I didn't identify with that. I didn't even know the name of the condition until I was like, I read about it, that a guy wrote the story for me in men's journal and called it something. I was like, whoa, that's cool. I didn't know. And because it was like, they knew that the power of language and that like, they didn't want me to go in and identify with that thing. Because again, it's like that limitation, that constraint, but they didn't know how it would go and work out. So again, coming back to this idea of like leaning into that unknown, they don't, they didn't, you don't,

no one always know, right? And none of us in this room, in this day and age, and in any time in history, we have no idea what could go and happen to us in the future. We have no idea what could go and happen to the economy. We have no idea what could go and happen with terrorism. I mean, there's some really hard stuff in the world, right? But at the same time, it's how we go and deal with it. And you guys are awake enough to be able to go and be that, those leaders out in the world to help other people deal with the same thing, which is why it is so important that you do it, that you don't hold yourself back. But in that moment, invariably, you will have to face that cave.

And you will probably have to face it time and time again, whether that comes in a divorce, whether that comes in a physical injury or disease or cancer or whatever it is. There are people in this room right now, invariably, that are facing things way harder than anything that I could imagine, because 99.9% of the biggest disabilities are ones that you can't see. Everyone on this planet has a disability, but I can't necessarily look at you can't see. Everyone on this planet has a disability. You can't, but I can't necessarily look at you and see yours. In some ways, now at this stage in my life, it's a big advantage for me to have like an outward facing challenge. I didn't always see it that way though. And I think that as a kid, I used to beg and plead

and pray. And I think that one of the bigger moments of facing this cave occurred to me at 10 years old. Eight to 10, I really started to become more self-aware of my disability. Wondering questions like, am I really going to have to live at home with mom and dad forever? Are they going to have to take care of me? Am I ever going to have a job? 95% of this was like, am I ever going to have a girlfriend? Am I ever going to have someone like a woman that would see me as equal? And I remember really becoming aware of this and struggling with this. And getting to a point where I was ready to just almost give up on my life. Not want to live.

10. It's crazy. There are ten-year-olds out there today that are thinking about that decision. And so for me, the one big moment that made a difference here was I brought a flyer home from school and told my mom that I wanted to go and play football. And my mom and dad, my dad was kind of the dreamer, my mom was more the realist in the family, so my dad's like awesome, cool, and I'm like yeah I'm gonna be the quarterback, you know. And my mom's like you know you might be the water boy in the team, they'll find a place for you, and I'm like no mom, spiral touchdown's, and so I came to the tryouts and the practice and I ended up like, my mom, I convinced her to call the coach and just see what he said. Came to the tryouts and I was,

ended up, they asked me if I wanted to do the 40 yard dash in my wheelchair or how I was going to go and do it. And I just jumped out of my chair and lined up with the other kids. And, you know, coach blows whistle, take off like bear crawl sprint, like fast as I can. My shirt flew off over my head. So we're doing shuttle runs back and forth and all these things. And I'm thinking like after that performance, they're definitely making me the quarterback. So I chose number eight to wear in my jersey. And first day of practice, they told me to go and line up as a nose guard. I had no idea what that meant. But defensive line, offensive line, defensive line, I'm right there in the middle, you know, line up right across from the guy that's going to go and snap the ball between his legs. I didn't know what was

going to happen when he did. He didn't know either, come to find out. So he snapped the ball, and it was my teammate practice scrimmage game. He just stood straight up. Come to find out. So he snapped the ball, and it was my teammate, practice scrimmage game. He just stood straight up. So I thought, that was my chance. I just dove under his legs and took my helmet and knocked it in the quarterback's legs, knocked him over, got the sack, first play.

So. I came home. I came home. I remember after that, my dad is out of town on a business trip, and him being that dreamer, I call him up, super excited, made this act, first play, you're not going to believe it. I was like, I'm really good at this stuff, come to find out. I'm pretty sure I'm going, I'm done with youth football. I'm going straight to the NFL.

And the, it was amazing first process. That was a practice game, but the first real game that I went and played in, I was really nervous, and my coach pulled me out of the warm-up, and he had a conversation with the other coach, and they're talking before this game, and the other coach tells him, and I understand now completely why he said this, but he said, you know, you're letting this disabled kid play football on your team. He said, don't worry. I'm not going to be cheap when you put him in the game, so I won't call any plays that run the ball anywhere near him. I'll just run the ball to the outsides. My coach was a pretty intense guy, Tom Shy was his name,

he brings me over out of the warm-up, and he tells the other coach, he says, tell Kyle the same story you just told me. And he does. And he says, I dare you to test him. Points him at him, I dare you to test him. And I'm a little bit more nervous now. And at the time, too, the running back on the other team, I mean, this kid was like, I was 11 years old, like 60 pounds.

This kid's like 6'2", beard, biceps. He comes crashing through the hole on this very first play. I grabbed, like, the way I'd tackle people is I'd smash it into their legs as hard as I could, my helmet, and grab hold of their legs and just held on for dear life. And I brought it, we brought them down. That that series of events, though, was my first dose of having purpose and contribution. And, you know, finding my why, right, at 11 years old. The reason why in that riddle that, you know, that Atman, the Brahman, it's unknown to those who know it,

is because we can't have, like, we can't think about two things at once. We can't have, like, two experiences at once, right? And so if we're fully in flow, in the moment, we're there. And it's only when we think about that we're there that we lose it. But those type of moments, in that making that tackle, was my first experience where it became one. moments, and that making that tackle was my first experience where it became one. And all of a sudden, it started to loosen the grip on that doubt and that fear. And other things started happening, right? So, you know, I don't have time to share all of these stories, and I kind of want to get to the story that I haven't shared yet. But I was a wrestler. Long story short, I lost every match for a year and a half. Ended up, though, winning,

beating my first kid. My dad basically tricked me into sticking around. He said, look, everybody loses every match their first year in wrestling. He said, I didn't win the match my first year either. He said, but when you sign up your second season, you'll win because you'll beat them. The funny thing was, too, when I was interviewing my dad's dad, my grandpa, for my book, I was 19 when I wrote the book, so wrestling was kind of the main theme of it, and just my experience in life, my family stories and things like that. But I was interviewing my grandpa about my dad's experience. I was like, what was it like for my dad when he lost all those matches that he told me about? Did he want to quit too? And I found out that whole story was a complete lie. And I've literally based my entire life off of that lie.

And I've literally based my entire life off of that lie. But I started winning. And all of a sudden, I started winning a lot. Senior year of high school, I won 36 varsity matches. I beat the state champ from Alabama, state champion from Louisiana, went to the Nationals, placed top 12 in the nation in my weight class. It was my first exposure of doing big media stuff and HBO, real sports. And there became this sort of debate of whether or not, at that point, I was unfairly advantaged over everybody I wrestled,

which was an interesting transition. I just say they weren't around for that. But there was some merit to it, I understood. I mean, it became focused on the weightlifting, became really strong, learning how to use my mind, different things. It was in the weight room. I could only lift like five pounds on each arm. When I started, I would strap a cuff around my arm and then chains and ropes and stuff and lift weights. My favorite lift is off my back,

doing a modified bench press, butterfly press. Anyway, it started with like five, ten pounds and progressed. Ended up doing my best ever lift in 2009 when I was training to do an MMA fight and lifted 420 pounds. So it was not necessarily, as I was sharing with Jen last night, not something I recommend doing because I couldn't move my left arm for like a week after that, and that created some problems when I was trying to like get up to like go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. So I had a lot of these experiences, right, of over and over again, these different things, whether it was even, you know, emotionally, the biggest thing of dealing with a disability

when I was a kid was just learning how to go and reach out and shake somebody else's hand. Everybody that I met here, you guys have known, when I met you for the first time, I reach out and I go and shake your hand. It's a lesson that my grandma taught me in the grocery stores. She was my biggest teacher ever, and we would go up and down the aisles of the grocery store. And Grandma Betty. And we, we you know we practiced like somebody was standing in the aisle of the grocery store they became like our target and she would push the cart up next to him and she'd say hi my name is Betty and then I this

is my grandson I'd say hi my name is Kyle I'd be four or five years old I'd reach out and I'd shake their hand and she told me she didn't people hear your voice and they see your face and they shake your hand, they'll completely forget about the disability. And it's become true in a sense. She also told me too, I would ask her grandma, like, why did this happen? And she said, Kyle, I don't believe God makes mistakes. You were born the way that you were for a reason, and someday you'll be able to find that out. And so life in a certain sense, in a roundabout way, is kind of becoming a discovery of that, right?

But it's the same discovery that you are on, because I hope that you don't believe that there's any difference between me or you and your ability to go and impact the world, that you have everything inside of you to go and do the same, to go and reach people on a profound level. And that light inside of you needs to be shared. And I know and I get that there's sometimes that fear of sharing that truth and sharing what that is. It's so critical in the world today that we need that. Again, getting to the story that I haven't shared, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and that was pretty cool. And I actually thought after that, I'm never

climbing another mountain again. They say, though, the best mountaineers have the shortest memory because every trip sucks. But it's amazing. It's beautiful. It's just like 95% it sucks. And that 5% is awesome. So what happened, you know, I started focusing on other things. I ended up, I moved out to San Diego. I pursued, you know, I'm still speaking a lot. Pursued, I trained and fought in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championships for a couple years. I got to go and train with some of the top team, one of the top teams in the world, one of my heroes. And I ended up, I fought this last year in the World Championships, and I trained my butt off every day.

It was like five hours training a day. And I'd done really well the year before. I ended up making it to the quarterfinals of the World Championships, and I lost by a split decision, like referee decision. And it was like, if I had won that, then I would have meddled in the worlds. And so I trained and trained and trained, and this is it. But at the same time, I was taking on a lot of stuff. I was thinking about merging my existing brand, basically me, like Kyle Maynard, with like a bigger training company, a couple. I was sort of looking at two different of the larger

training development companies, sort of hitching that star to a wagon, you know, and looking at these different things and working like 40 hours a week on a top of like training out like, you know, 40, 50, 60 hours a week some weeks. I was speaking still full-time and training. It was like so focused, and it was over the course of this time, my grandma, Grandma Betty, was battling a grade four glioblastoma brain tumor. And so I would go home to Atlanta in between every possible second I could have, and I would go and sit by her hospital bed as she was dying. And she passed. It was, my birthday is March 24th, and she passed. She lost her powers to go and speak. My mom was saying, she doesn't want to kill on your birthday.

Like that. We were so tight. And so, she passed March 27th. The Jiu-Jitsu Worlds were in May and I just buried myself even more in the training. And I did. I fought. I lost in the first round. But I had an advantage. It was 10 minutes over. I spent the next 10 days on the couch. It was just like all this grief sort of

came back in. And my buddy knew that I was in a rough spot, and he convinced me to go with him to Sweden. I went to Sweden for like three weeks, and I just kept traveling after that. I just kept wandering different places. You know, Santa Cruz for a while was just kind of just going wherever I kind of felt I was just wandering. I was just lost. I quit posting on social media.

I quit, like, connecting with, quit calling people back. I quit texting people back. Just really became very insular there. I said no to a lot more things. I started, frankly, it was just more, like, short-term hedonism and pleasures, like, seeking, like, sex or, like, you know, like, parties or whatever sort of, like, was that whimsical thing that I could go and pursue. And I knew that, like, and I just kind of quit, like erased everything else. Because I realized too, it was like, I don't want to spend my life in a conference room. I want to do that.

Why am I trying to merge with one of these like training, these huge training companies? Like that's not what my life is for. I just gave it up. And in a great way, it was a great sort of experience and discovery. But I went through this process and it was like, I have to have like my awakening. And so that became why I decided to go and take on Mount Aconcagua. So it's the highest peak in South America. I knew that I needed this thing. I didn't know why, but again, Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss. I knew that I could go back to that. I could trust that. I could go to the mountains. I could go and find what I needed to go and find. And this

amazing journey kind of unfolded that led me there. We showed up. I had an epic failure up in a smaller peak, a 9,000-foot peak up in Mount Shuksan in Washington State, but then it was like, yeah, it came, it was like really bad. It was terrible, a gnarly blister on my leg, and I'm like, I'm about to go and take on a mountain that's nearly 23,000 feet, and I just got my butt kicked by this 9,000 foot one. And we show up to the mountain, and all of a sudden, like there had been, we didn't even really publicize it. I didn't really want to make it like a media spectacle. It was not my intention. And all of a sudden, like, because we had to get the permits and kind of had to go and explain, well, there's this guy with a disability

that kind of wants to climb this thing. Then they started to go in, and the Argentinian government was like, well, actually, we have this initiative that we just started that we would like you to be the first honorary member of. And we are opening, like, all of our parks, finding ways to go and make them more accessible to people with disabilities. So, wow, that's pretty cool. And we were going to go to the office to meet one of their, like, ministers of tourism. On the way to the office, we're walking there, and there's this guy that's an amputee, and he had he's had a pan out to you know get that to beg and he said maestro i didn't know what that meant and my guide said do you know what that means i said no he said it means master like whoa and we show up to the mountain we get there and actually at first it felt really strong

i had some rough days going into it but you know it was like i got there i'm feeling strong we're going along and i came i was pretty crushed on this this like fourth day though it was this we had to climb these penitentes, these ice peaks, these ice pillars, right? And the big ones, you try to go around. The small ones, you go over top. And I had these special crampons made for my arms and my feet. And just going through this.

And it's like this six, seven-hour day. I'm just totally depleted. This boulder about the size of a watermelon ended up going by my head at like 50 miles an hour. And all of these warning signs, I'm like, why am I here? This is crazy. This is stupid. This is not a good idea. I couldn't get my heart rate down that night. My resting heart rate was about 140 beats per minute. And that was the last night I could have gotten a helicopter evac. And I was like, at this point, I'm considering I'm so close to waking up my guide, Kevin, sleeping next to me. And I was like, at this point, I'm considering I'm so close to waking up my guide Kevin sleeping next to me. And I was like, because I don't want to be here anymore. And I will pay

any amount of money. I don't care. Take it all. Because if I'm dead, then what's it matter? But I had pictures of Grandma Betty. Started looking at him. And it was like, I can do this. So we rested the next day. I kind of expressed where I was and then came back and actually felt really strong. Cruising, we're making really good time, really good pace. We get to, we ended up, we're on the mountain for 17 total days, but our day before the summit was like my strongest day.

And I'm nearly 21,000 feet high, higher than all of these other surrounding peaks. It was breathtakingly beautiful. And I basically get to a point where it was like, this is our summit day, and we have to make it by this time window, otherwise we're not going to go and make it. And I found out that day that basically there was a guy in the group ahead of us that had just passed, had died due to the altitude. Again, it was called the spot, no joke, called the cave. guy in the group ahead of us that had just passed had died due to the altitude again he's like it

was called the spot no joke called the cave the summit day 6 a.m wake up brutal hike and i get to the cave i literally just like i was so depleted it was about noon six hours in and i've got another thousand feet to go the hardest part left of the climb, it's, there was these, the scree, the loose rock was sliding. Sometimes I'd take five or six steps and just slide back and just grinding to come up and just sliding more and just getting so angry and frustrated. I got to the cave and my body just went into full shutdown mode. I couldn't stop shivering. I couldn't eat anything. I tried to eat, like, half of the Clif Bar, and my body immediately started, like, rejecting it. Like, I started, like, throwing it up.

And, like, the day before, though, my guide, too, he had pulled out this snack that I hadn't gotten since my grandma had given it to me, like, 15 years before. It was this little vanilla wafery bar. I kept thinking about this. I was like, I can't stop. And thinking about that guy who said that, the maestro comment, I thought this is like, I'm so close you can see the summit.

I'm not going to stop. You know, my thousand feet up this ice wall, my gear is breaking, my crampons broke, all these things are going wrong, and it was just continuing to go. And this mantra I kept repeating in my mind, it's my go-to mantra. My friend Richard Mackwitz is a Navy SEAL. He said, not dead, can't quit. Just striking into the ice. He's like, not dead, can't quit. And I asked myself, are you dead? He's like, I knew if I heard that voice back, and I wasn't. And sometimes I didn't know. My guide, two o'clock, he tells me if we don't hit the summit by 4 p.m., you have to turn back. I don't care if you're 100 feet away. It's too

dangerous. Just inside, it was like everything to go that last 100, 200 feet, crossing through this ridgeline and ended up hitting the summit at 4.15 p.m. And it was everything I could imagine. It was a breathtakingly beautiful summit. It was like about the size of the stage. So at that point, I mean, I had to pee. I actually had to take all my clothes off to pee. And I was like, probably the highest naked person in the world. That's a record I care about. And we came back down, got to have this amazing press conference, and two other climbers, I'll never forget, hugging this girl who was also an amputee.

She hugged me so tight, I thought I'd give good hugs, and she blew me away. And she's going to go and climb the mountain next year. It's... But in that moment, in that cave, and I know I've gone over my time a bit, you, I hope it's not even maybe something that you're facing right now,

but maybe it happens five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, whatever your cave is, like you have in those moments, like when I say find your why, I don't mean like the things you can go and put into words. It's inside of you and things that are like, you cannot put into words and it will propel you forward. You just have to find it inside of you. Those are those make or break moments. And you all are too important to this world to not go out there and pursue that why. So thank you for you. Thank you for this experience. Thank you for helping wake me up. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. I love Kyle and his message and everything he stands for and what

he's overcome. So make sure to share this with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 529. Send out a tweet with the link posted on your Facebook page. Tag me on your Instagram story and use the swipe up link to share this out there again. lewishouse.com slash 529. And let me know what you thought about this. Let me know your most inspiring takeaway from this and share with me. I want to have a conversation with you over on social media more. So let me know your thoughts. And as Maya Angelou put put it you may encounter many defeats but you must not be defeated in fact it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are what you can rise from and how you can still come out of it i love

you guys and you know what time it is it's time to go out there and do something great.