We all need some sort of challenge. We all need something to push us to move forward. That was Marcus Aurelius Anderson. You're going to hear a lot more about his story today, but he is a mind set coach and inspirational speaker and the author of a new book called the gift of adversity.
This is a deeply meaningful conversation with so many life lessons woven into it. Specifically, we're talking about what adversity is, how we need to have our minds made up about how we're going to cope with adversity before we head it. We discuss the regret of wasting your potential and that the things that make people great don't happen by accident. Marcus also gives some really practical tips about how you can help yourself through the hard times by changing your mindset.
So stay tuned. Welcome to Head of Thrive. I'm your host Kate Snowwise. This is a podcast with people who are ready to step up and live a happier life.
It's for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life. It's a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don't believe we're here to merely survive. I truly believe we're here to thrive.
So let's get going. Adversity. I think it's a big topic that means a lot to a lot of people. It really does.
It's something that's universal. So you might as well get out there and start looking at it. What does adversity mean to you? How do you define it or understand it?
Adversity. It could be all kinds of different things. It could be that person in front of you and traffic that will not move over. It can be that person that's disagreeing with you over the simplest conversation.
But it can take all kinds of different ranges and all kinds of different volumes. So the main thing that I look at it is adversity is something that's trying to stop you from getting to the next point. So I'm sure that you're familiar with Stephen Pressville's book, The War of Art. He talks about resistance and he capitalizes resistance.
I look at adversity much in the same manner in my book. I capitalize adversity with an A because I feel that it is this almost entity that is trying to push us from being able to get to the thing that we're trying to accomplish. What happens a lot with people is we get into this habit of reaching into something and then once we commit to it, we hit adversity. And if we allow ourselves to back down away from it constantly, that becomes a habit.
And then once it's habitual, now you have almost this sort of victim mindset or this reaction or any mindset where you're not able to do anything. And so you're sort of paralyzed and stuck in a place or a mentality that doesn't allow you to be happy because you're afraid to do anything that may push back against you. So adversity is anything that pushes you from making yourself happy, making yourself successful, making it impossible for you to help somebody else even. And that's what adversity is.
That is such a good book, by the way. The War of Art is a phenomenal read. Oh my gosh. Coming back to adversity being anything that holds us back.
You mentioned it kind of being like gravity in the book as well, something that all of us experience. So you see this as universal. Absolutely. And if you look back in time, I mean, you look at the Dallas or the Costco Stoics or anybody that's anything that's been recorded, this is not new.
The human condition has always been in the situation where if it's the caveman days and I'm talking about the adversity of that saber to tiger when I'm trying to kill something to bring it back to the cave or if it's modern day where we're talking about how it feels like even our own mindset can be the adversity where people are allowing their thoughts to kind of defeat them from being able to move forward with those things. Diversity is like gravity. It's just inevitably, basically. So we're always going to run into it.
So once we understand that and once we understand that it's expected, then we can start looking at it in that manner. We can start looking at it almost like a compass where if we start seeing man, I'm running into something really difficult now. That means I'm on the right path. That's the way that we should look at it.
And I also want to point out that it is so imperative to have this mindset now. It's so imperative to make the decision now in a place of safety in a place where we're not stressed out or we're not under adversity because if we do not already have a minute of mind, once we run into it and once we're in the fray, that's when we have a hard time and we start doubting ourselves. So you have to have the made up mind that adversity is a gift that is something that will make us get better, that is a catalyst for us to move forward and to improve so that we can go up higher and higher and achieve more things in the long run. That is so awesome.
The gift of adversity, which is the name of your book, I love the way you frame it as an opportunity. Adversity is the opportunity for you to stretch, for you to grow, for you to take it higher. And it's a good thing when you hit it. It absolutely is.
It's, I mean, you're a coach. You understand what do we do a lot of times where the accountability for our client. So for better or for worse, adversity is the ultimate form of accountability. And it has a very brutal taskmaster.
So, you know, in my TEDx talk, I talk about that, how I say that the first he doesn't give a damn about your feelings. It doesn't care if it shows up unannounced or if it shows up when you're not convenient or when it's not inconvenient for you. That doesn't matter. It shows up.
It's here. We have to deal with it now at this point. And if we try to, you know, suck away from it, that already put this on our heels and now we're not able to move forward with our best to go forward. You have a pretty unique story with how you hit right up against adversity.
Can you tell us about your story? You were in the army. You joined when you were 38, which I think in and of itself is super admirable. But what happened?
Oh, goodness. At the ripe old age of 38 years old, right? They, when I got to basically train, they were like, who's this guy? What's he doing in, in, in a, in a, in a little background to that?
My father and my great uncle were there, my biggest male role models in my life next to, next to martial arts instructors. And my great uncle, Ronnie, he, he was in Special Forces. He was in Vietnam. He was a green berry.
He was a team leader, a squad leader. And he had passed away not long before my wife and I got divorced. And so that's a very devastating set of circumstances that approached me. And I was in chiropractic school at the time.
And then I was also bartending. So I'm pushing myself on taking 25 hours of doctorate level courses. I'm working 40 hours a week as a bartender, which. That's an interesting, stressful lifestyle in and of itself.
And then trying to maintain this, this marriage. And what I did is I did the classic blender of spreading myself too thin, not giving my attention to the things that were actually priorities and pushing towards driving through something faster. And when I did that, I ended up losing my, my marriage. That kind of knocked me down to a very basic level and it made me start examining things and made me start looking at my life.
I'd always wanted to join the military, but I was in college or I would go into something and there was always an excuse. There was always something in the way. So now I had no wife, I had no kids and I had about a year and a half till I finished my doctorate. And I thought, well, my window is now.
I'm going to do this. So I went down and spoke to the recruiter. At that time, 35 was the gap that was the, that was the very top of it. So I wouldn't be able to get in.
And as I sat down, he said, wait a minute, you know, talk to me. And I was just very mad at fact and said, you know, don't waste my time. If we're going to do this, let's do this. And through the conversation, he said, well, it looks like you're in shape.
It looks like you're motivated. If you're 38 years old, I can sign a waiver, but you have to explain to me why you want to do that. So I told him basically what I told you, he said, okay, well, it's your life. You know, I'll sign the release if you want to do it.
He was very surprised when I said that I wanted to do inventory because that's the most, you know, difficult, the most intense MLS or job that they have. But that's what I wanted. And I look back now and I realized that we all need some sort of challenge. We all need something to push us to move forward.
And I was being pushed in a lot of intellectual manners with my school. But I wanted something that was more kind of back down to brass tacks, which was kind of reenbracing that warrior spirit within me. So I joined the military at 38 years old and off I went to Fort Benning for a basic training. What was driving you?
I was searching for something. I was in chiropractic school, but then you got to chiropractic school. I went to university for criminal justice because I wanted to go into like an agency like the FBI, the CIA, because I wanted to do good. I wanted to catch the bad guys.
But as I would go through those, you know, you're in academia and I realized that they're not really teaching me anything per se to just fill me up with a bunch of information about what the subject matter was. But it wasn't really inspiring me or motivating me. And it's like I closer to finishing that degree. I thought, man, you know, I don't want to do this.
So I changed subjects. I changed majors and going into chiropractic school was a completely 180 turn because going from all these sort of like, I wouldn't say humanities, but this certain kind of degree path and then going into the direction where it's like a K-nogor taking biogramic chemistry and embryology and an epidemiology and an epidemiology. That was an additional amount of time. It really got me back into that direction of understanding sciences and understanding kind of way things came together.
So all of that kind of dovetailed into kind of what I'm doing now. I've been doing martial arts since I was 11 years old and there's always a philosophy sort of wrapped up with a martial art, whether we acknowledge it or not. And that's what I was searching for. I was searching for a meaning.
I was searching for purpose. And that's how I get closer to the end of that road. I would say, you know what, this is the one I'm looking for. And that's when you know, you start seeing all these people that are doing all these other jobs and they're trying to use that occupation as their definition of happiness.
And I realized that's what I was doing as well. And as difficult as the path has been, I'm glad that it's living in this direction because without it. I wouldn't have gone back into myself and found what's making you happy, found that purpose, found that drive. And as you know, if we don't have that drive, it's going to be a difficult road and it's going to be hard for us to get pulled in that direction.
If we don't have something that's truly worthy of our attention and truly pushes us towards what we're trying to achieve. I'm with you. I'm on the train. You're an infantry training.
And then something happens. Can you talk us through what exactly happened? Absolutely. There was no specific method of onset, but what happened was what we were doing in infantry, you're always carrying something heavy.
It's ironic. They say light infantry, but there was never anything that I carried that was less than 50 pounds. So light infantry was not, it was an obviously more on the sittilies. I was stationed in upstate New York.
I was stationed 30 miles south of the Canadian border. Very cold. This is in February. This is in the debt of winter.
They give 20 degrees outside. And I realized on hindsight, monthly enough to this, I had an Amazon, my hands and my feet. But I always said to myself, well, it's because it's getting cold or it's because we're out in the field for two weeks at a time and we're sleeping out in the elements. But eventually it got worse and worse.
It got to the point where when we would do say like a rock march, where you're marching with the stuff on your back, my feet would get numb. And I thought, well, it's because we're cold. But it got to the point where I was having a hard time. If we would take a knee, for example, you would take a knee and kind of face out, as they would say, because you're looking for an area to look for the enemy.
When I would have to stand back up, I literally would have to push off of my rifle and off my other hand to stand up because my legs weren't really firing. The week waking up to my incident, I took a shower hoping that I would get warmer after the exercise. And then as the day progressed, it got worse and worse. And then eventually I woke up in bed on a Saturday and I went to roll out of bed.
And my neck would kind of articulate that my body would not move. And at first I chuckled and I thought, man, I'm not going to go in the sore. And then the sobering realization sort of hit me when I couldn't move. And that's where that chiropractic training comes in.
When you start doing this self-eval, you say, well, you know, all these, the central quality that I'm experiencing then makes a person who's paralyzed. And there was no other option that I could have been at that point. And that's when I'm starting to freak out. Luckily somebody was knocking on my door.
They were looking for me and I screamed to the door and they came and got me. And that's when they rushed me to the hospital. And they, when we were at the hospital, they, they didn't MRI and they found out that the desk in my neck and C5 had ruptured. And a lot of people have bulging desk for ruptured discs, but a truly ruptured disc is a disc that actually explodes.
And when the disc explodes, it will push back into your spinal cord and your spinal canal. So if you look at a person like Chris, for example, he was paralyzed from C5 down that level. That's where I was at. So all that compression on my spinal cord was literally choking the life on me.
So they had to operate on me quickly because I was having a hard time breathing. I was having a hard time staying conscious. And so I go from not being able to march very well to within 12 hours being in the hospital, being told that, Hey, we're getting right to operate on you. And it was a whirlwind to say the least.
Not what you were expecting to be facing. How old were you at this time? It was a few days before my birthday. I was going to turn 40 years old at that time.
And so they go in and they do the operation. They operate on me and there's a point in the operation where, you know, you breathe in and you're doing the anesthesia and you get, they had to count from 100 down and I got to about 98. And then there was a very just cold, dark place that I was in. And then I just remember waking up and the ICU and I remember hearing the, the beating of the machines around me and everything like that.
So I was very confused. I was in a neck brace because I obviously couldn't move my neck anyway or my body for that matter. And I'm trying to put together, you know, was that a big dream? Was my A-wall?
Should I be in formation at that point? And the nurse just tells me, listen, you know, you've been through a lot, just relax. And that's when I started having to, and again, that was the following day was my birthday, my 40th birthday. I see you.
So that was a very sobering reality to wake up to your 40th birthday and wondering what the hell you're going to do with your life next year. What's going to happen? Like you talk about it in your book, The Gift of Adversity, you were divorced, bedridden, and uncertain about your future and every way. You didn't even know if you were going to walk again at that point.
So how does the next period of your life go? What do you come out of this operation looking like? Feeling like does your body work? Do your arms and legs work?
The, it was a very difficult time, as you can imagine. At that point, I wasn't sure what was going to happen next, obviously. And I was hoping this tote. What silly is I had such a deep-seated priority of being in the military and being preparing to deploy that the silly thing that was going through my mind was, well, I hope I get over this quickly because we're going to be deploying a few months and I have to make sure that I can get out there and go with my guys, which is silly.
But if you think about it, that's also the kind of priorities that we had to have overdo anything. Having said all that, once it became apparent that, you know, after a week and I wasn't walking and they tell me that if you don't walk in a couple of days, you're not going to walk. That means you have permanent nerve damage. That means it's going to be there for the rest of your life and for better or for worse, you need to wrap your mind around this.
That's a hell of a thing to tell anybody. And that's a big thing to try to digest. So I was in the classic denial stage. But when they got me out of the ICU and they took me back to the warrior transition unit there at my base, that's when I started realizing, okay, this is not just something that's passing.
This is going to be permanent. So I went into a very angry place. Being angry, the definition of depression is anger that has turned inward. And that's what I was doing.
I was mad at everyone around me. I was mad at anybody that would come in my room. The reason why I have such a disdain for Netflix and the reason why I say it's sort of venomously in my TEDx talk is because that was what they would pacify us with. They would, I was injured.
So they would prop me up in the bed. They would turn on Netflix and they would give me my meds and they would leave. And in hindsight, that's what all they could do, honestly. But I got to a point where they would come in and I just say, listen, I don't want any meds and I don't want the TV turned on.
I just leave them because I knew that at that point that I was in this horrible fight. And the only way that I was going to be able to get out of this was to go inside myself and being on a bunch of pain medications or being artificially intellectually pacified by whatever path is on the TV. That's not going to help me. I have to get down to brass tacks.
I have to ask myself the hard questions. And I couldn't get on the internet. I couldn't search on my cell phone. So I had nothing else to do.
So I went with myself and that's when I started really trying to make that progress to figure out what the hell I was going to do next with my life. At this point, what you're describing, you obviously feel pretty hopeless and like you've been dealt a pretty rough hand in life. Absolutely. How did you turn it around going that journey inward?
What happened on that journey inward? And where did you find some hope for your future? That's it's so funny. Okay, we we all had this idea that we're going to live to be 90 or 100 years old and we're going to be healthy until the day that we are on our deathbed and that we're going to be surrounded by friends and loved ones and we're all going to reflect about our beautiful conversations that we had or picnics, but it doesn't work like that.
The reality is you know, you and I could pass as we're having this conversation. So tomorrow's promise to know one and that realization hit me really hard because at 40 years old lane in a bed unable to move. I look back and I had regrets. I thought to myself, I thought about all the times I wasted all the opportunity that I had, all the potential that I had and I didn't actualize it because they say you don't know what you got to what's gone.
But the reality is we know how good we have it, but we just assume that we will never lose it. And that's what that's what happened to me. I lost everything that was worthwhile to me. I lost a huge male role model a couple of years before I lost this amazing relationship that I thought that I had.
I was on this path to be a doctor to help the world and here I am unable to do anything. And I felt like the universe was just slapping me in the face and saying, you know what, you have 40 years to do this and you've been messing around. So we're taking it away from you. And that's how I kind of felt.
I went through the classic, you know, why does that happen to me? What did I do wrong? And then I realized that it doesn't really matter what the justification is. What happens is right now.
And that's when I started looking at what was going on with me. The thing that gave me hope was I had to find something to be grateful for in the whole situation. And the first thing that comes to mind is well, you're alive. But in my mindset and that depression, because I want to take my own life if I could have.
If I was physically able, as a matter of fact, I was still trying to find ways to do it. I was thinking, well, maybe I can figure something out. When I was in that mindset, I figured out that being alive was not enough. I had to exist, but I had to have a purpose.
And when I started looking at myself, it was really hard for me to do that. But when I started looking at something outside of myself, when I started looking at something bigger than myself. So what I did was I stepped away from myself and thought, well, if I'd been injured like this, when we were deployed, I might have gotten some of my men killed. I may have gotten the helicopter that flew into the safety field.
So instead of being grateful for where I was, I was grateful for what my impact wasn't on other people. I was grateful that I didn't engage with their lives and nobody else died trying to save me. And once I was able to do that, once I was able to make that my cornerstone, I could build the rest of my gratitude from that. That's amazing.
So you found the one small thing that you could hold onto as being grateful for, which, like you said, was something that it actually wasn't the fact that you hadn't hurt anyone else through your injury that no one else had been affected by it. Did you purposely go on to try and foster gratitude every day from that point? Was that a decision that you made? It absolutely was because at that point, I literally had nothing else to hold onto.
And I, you know, I wallowed in that place. It was three months before anything positive happened. And the first month I was in denial, the second month I was in just extreme anger. The third month I was trying to figure out, well, what the hell am I?
There's got to be a lesson here. What am I missing? And I couldn't figure out what it was. And I went through and I traced everything back.
And that's when I came to that point of gratitude. And I know the gratitude is something that we all talked about and another way likes to lament about it. But being grateful is a choice, it's a motion, it's an action. So just saying, yeah, I'm grateful that I live here.
I'm grateful that I have this hot tea in front of me. That's not enough. You have to actually make it part of you. You have to personify what that is.
And once you start doing that, that's when you start having more impact, not only on other people, but yourself. So once I was able to be grateful for that, then I was starting to be grateful for the people that I have had in my life, for the impact that I made on them at that point, the more my gratitude grew, the more my motivation grew. And that's when I started seeing my adversity as a gift instead of a curse. And the minute that I started seeing my adversity as a gift instead of a curse, about a week and a half later, the fingers on my left hand started moving a little bit.
And it was not a lot, but it was more than what I had. And when you're in that position, when you're that desperate, you will do or try or think or feel anything to get some sort of response. So just to shift my mindset to be grateful. And all of a sudden I get this physiological response in my hand.
That's all I needed. That was the sign, right? You're like, this is working. This is working.
I get when you're lying in the spirit, unable to move why when you say that the start of the interview, making the decision that when you're up against the wall, that that is a blessing and you can get through it. It's important to make that decision before you are faced with it, because I get that, like, if you can just once you fall, once you hit adversity, once you're up against it, and you think this is an opportunity, I can get through it. That's got to make it easier. It does.
The, as I mentioned earlier, I've done March, March, March, March for people that were against a person or against a foe that was stronger or better arm. So you assume that the person you're fighting is bigger and stronger. So if I have a 250 pound guy that's pushing against me and I weigh 180 and I'm pushing back, I can't defeat him. If we just go force against force pushing directly into one another with contrary motion, it's not going to happen.
So what do I have to do? Well, I can keep fighting it and get pushed back. And that's what I was doing. I was fighting this adversity in my mind.
But I realized again, and this is after years of experience, I'm really surprised it took me this long to come to that point, but it's because I was so emotionally invested, obviously. When I realized that if I can just turn away from this and maybe cut an angle on this, so to speak, and allow this energy to come towards me and blend with it, all of a sudden now, I can go the direction that I need to go. Maybe this adversity or this adversary is pushing me somewhere that I need to go that I'm not aware of. And unfortunately, for all of this, it usually takes some sort of great adversity to force us and spur us on to the thing that we need to get done or to think that we act like we don't realize is there.
We all have that thing that we know we act like we don't know about it, but that thing that we're trying to avoid, whether it be a conversation, whether it be something to work, whether it be a physical act that we have to endure, we always try to avoid that because that's human nature. We want to take the easy way out. But that's where running to embrace adversity and learning to see it as a gift is important. And talking to you now, in hindsight, it's 2020, but at the time, leading up to that, if I didn't have that mindset before, I would probably still be in this very mad, very depressed, very angry state.
And if I hadn't have been able to have that prior knowledge, I probably wouldn't have been able to come to that mindset. Makes so much sense. Wasting our potential. I feel like that really does lead into it.
When you talk about some of the regrets you had and that frustration of lying there feeling like, I don't know what my future holds, but like you just mentioned, those things we know but we often avoid, is that potential sitting inside of us? It absolutely is. We were mentioning earlier about being on our deathbed. No matter who we are, there's going to be small regrets.
I understand that. You're going to wish that you did more things. But the idea is to take the time now and look at the big regrets that if something happened right now, and that's the other thing. Everybody thinks that, you know, I've had some people say, well, you know, if I'm going to die, then why am I going to worry about it?
They kind of have this short-sighted kind of pleasure-seeking mentality, which is not bad to any of us, I suppose, but you cannot live your life predicated on that. So imagine not that you're going to die necessarily, but imagine that if you woke up tomorrow, paralyzed from the neck down, what do you wish you would have accomplished with your life? What regrets would you harbor right now if your life, if you were unable to do anything other than what you're just laying in a bed existing? What would you wish you would have done?
By looking back at those things, you will put a lens and shine a light on the fact that these adversities are your potential. These are the things that you've been, because time passes, no matter what we do. It waits for no man. So the idea is to make these decisions now as opposed to going through and compromising, because once that first compromise decision begins, it cascades into a myriad of other compromise ideas because we made that first step to compromise.
So the idea is to go through now, what do you really want? What are you doing that you don't want to do right now? And how can we change those things? If we can default set ourselves back to that to where we always come back to that mindset, that will keep us from wasting a lot of time, from wasting a lot of potential, wasting a lot of energy, and wasting a lot of emotion in the long run.
Compromise. I want to talk more about that. Of course. How do we compromise?
Do you say it in your own clients? What does compromise look like in daily life? There's a lot of different kinds of compromise. So for example, if you and I are married and we're arguing about something, it's not necessarily about being right.
It's about loving that person. I understand that. And there are certain degrees of compromise. Having said that, there are certain things that we should not compromise on.
We should not compromise on our health. We should not compromise on our wellbeing. We should not compromise on delivering the best quality of whatever it is that we can, whether it be to our family, to our clients, to ourselves. So it's about priority.
It's about understanding what's actually important and understanding what's not important. And hacking away the things that are not important and not worrying about those things and focusing on all of our energy and the things that are truly important. If I'm more concerned about what football game is on right now or what this team is doing or what this person is wearing on Instagram, then obviously that is a distraction from what I should really be working on. What happens is you've already figured this out because of the amazing job that you do now with your clients, with your podcast and all the impact you make.
But once you have a burning purpose and once you know what that is, you don't want to be distracted by this. Everybody wants a life of distraction, but for me, I want a life that does not have a distraction. The time that we have is by night, but distraction is always infinite. So that's why we do not, we need to make sure that we're not compromising in the areas that are so important to us.
And again, once we compromise in that area, at least into this like, you know, tailspin of compromise after that. And before you know it, you, I don't want, I don't want somebody to end up where I was at with a 40 years old and maybe they're not paralyzed physically, but they're paralyzed emotionally or financially. Because they've made all these decisions and now they're married to a person they're not happy with. They're in a job that they do not like, if I can give the still the knowledge that I gained from my hardship without people having to go through that, then my job is done.
And I think so many people do get to that point, right? That's what I think I love about your story. As you say, that was brought bottom. Here I am, 40 years old.
And I'm wondering, what do I do now? How do we step up and start living more in line with what we want, what we're capable of, our potential? You mentioned in the book, one of the quotes I loved was, the things that make people great don't happen by accident. Do we have to start sacrificing?
We, we have to start sacrificing. And the first thing we have to do is we have to be really, really honest with ourselves. I say with myself, I am brutally honest, but that allows me to have ferocious optimism. But until I'm at that place of honesty where I'm looking at everything and looking at myself in professions and sports and all, once I'm at that point, now I can look really clearly and say, okay, well, here's a shortcoming.
Here's an area that I want to improve on. I look at the positive things as well, but I look at the shortcoming. Once we've done that, that's what allows us to start taking accountability and saying, okay, in the past, I have not done this very well. But we have to give ourselves credit and we cannot beat ourselves up in the process.
What seems to happen that I've run into a lot is people say, well, my past is defined in my future. It doesn't necessarily have to, but you should use that as a precursor to motivate you to move forward. If you feel that you haven't been successful, whether it be financially or spiritually or in a relationship prior, it doesn't mean that you're damned to fail in the future. But it does mean that we need to redouble our efforts and honestly commit to that with our whole-hearted mindset to get to the next place.
If we don't go and look at ourselves really, really harshly, and the way that we can do that is by having a coach or having a friend who doesn't pony punches and doesn't say, yeah, yeah, everything's great. When you have that friend that comes up to you and says, hey, you know what, you really messed up right there. Or you know what, you could be doing so much more, why the hell are you wasting your time doing this. Those are the things that are uncomfortable.
But again, that's what adversity is. It's not comfortable. It kicks you in the ass and it's supposed to. So I'm hearing this theme of self-accountability.
It's about stepping up and being accountable to yourself and saying, I expect more from you. You're going to, like you said, you're going to put some effort in here. Would that be fair to say? It absolutely is.
The reality is we all have huge amount. We have just wells of knowledge and strength and ambition and motivation that we never touch. And the reason why we never touch them is because the past to get there is through adversity. So once we hit that and once we see that adversity, lots of times we just turn around and we circle back.
We're like, well, I guess I'm not going to get that. But once you step into it and once you commit to it, we find out once we've gone through the adversity, when we look back on it, while it was difficult at the time, and hides how we look back and we're like, you know, it wasn't that bad. And we use that to make us feel stronger for the next time that we face it. So the same way we can run faster or the same way that we can look more ways or the same way that we can study and learn more, it takes time.
It takes repetition. So as I said, it doesn't just happen to you. Nobody knocks on your door like it's the lottery. What happens is we have to cultivate what we have.
We have to be really honest with ourselves so that we can be foreciously optimistic about the future and our potential and then act on it with all of our might because we don't know how long we have to do this. And we don't know how far reaching something that you and I are saying right now could be some means of other people. So what you're doing right now is influencing other people around you whether you think that or not. So whether it be a co-worker, a parent, a loved one, a spouse, a child, what you do is making a huge impact.
So take that sort of accountability, understand that you're incredibly powerful, and then act in that manner. So what I'm hearing is growth is painful sometimes. It's growing pains. I want to talk about a couple of statements that I saw in your book that I'm thinking you probably hear as excuses and awful lot because I hear them too.
I don't have enough time or I don't have enough money. I can't do that. I can't. Can we talk through those I don't have enough time or I don't have enough money statements?
What is your take on that? I love that one because I've said that one a lot and if I hear myself echoing that in my head right now then I kind of verbally chastise myself. No. It's like listen, the reality is this.
If somebody wants something, they will find a matter to do it. So it's not the people lack time because the people that complain they don't have enough time are the ones that are caught up on all of their episodes or whatever their TV series is most of the time. I don't actually watch any TV so I understand that. Exactly.
I'm the same way I don't have time to do that because I have other things that are more important. The same thing with money. People said they don't have enough money to do certain things but I mentioned on my book that if people would bring their lunch to work and they wouldn't buy a coffee, if they would save that money up, they would have enough money in three months to travel anywhere in the world, they could buy it anywhere. So it's not the people lack time.
It's not the people lack money. It's a day lack priority. So if you want something bad enough, you will find a way to make it happen. You will find a way to make it happen.
Again, these are classic things that we've heard before but I hope that I put it in the context that makes people understand. Your time to do these things, your time to live the life that you want to do is limited. So you have all the time that you need. You absolutely have it but you have to utilize every second of it.
You cannot sit there and squander and allow yourself this kind of black today's call mind and say, well, I'll always do it tomorrow because that's what I thought. And tomorrow I woke up paralyzed. Don't do that people. Don't do that.
Don't do that. I have to, I have to, I have to, I did Marie Follioleo's B-skull which I'm sure many of you have heard of when I first was launching my online business. And I paid quite a lot of money for it because I've really wanted to do it. And it was money that didn't necessarily have if I was objectively looking at the situation.
But I opened the first module and she said there is no such thing as not having enough time. And I was a stay at home mum at that point with two little children. Like one wasn't even one yet. My second one was two.
And I can remember I almost wanted to close down the program. I was like, I hate this course already. And if I hadn't have paid so much money for it, I probably would. I was like, here's this woman who doesn't have any kids telling me that you just have to find your time.
And it really ran me the wrong way. But I have to admit now I have launched a business. I have a podcast. I've done all those things in the last couple of years while having two small children.
And people ask me, well, how do you get it all in? How do you fit it all in? And you're 100% right when you say it's because I want to. It's because I have my eyes on the prize.
I know where I'm going. And so the things that don't fit in with that vision, I don't have time for those things anymore, which is truth be told. I go to, like I can remember I used to play groups and people would be talking about Netflix and about the best show on Netflix. And I'm like, don't even know what you're talking about.
So there are things that I have very consciously not given them. I'm not consciously not given the time for my life and TV has certainly been one of them. So if you're wondering how people do achieve things, I'm with you now. You prioritize the time you have and distraction is not really an option for me.
It's not that and we've settled this. So you and I also understand as entrepreneurs, I'm not trying to just yell at you and say, just do it or man, the grind. I mean, I'm not trying to wear it like a badge of courage. What I am trying to say is give yourself some self care, give yourself some downtime because we have to recover.
Make sure you're getting sleep. Make sure you're doing these things that make you physically better, that help cultivate that in you. And the time that you're not doing that, use those times as to the best of your ability. So like what you're talking about, one person may see you playing with your kids and say, oh, well, that's not working toward your business.
Well, in the grand scheme of things, your two children are much more important than your business. So you're showing that love, you're giving that gratitude, you're giving that attention to them because they are absolutely worthy of that and that is a higher priority than your business. But at the same time, you're able to utilize that time. And there's a big, big difference.
You and I were talking about Parkinson's Law. If we realize that we only have a certain amount of time to get something done, whether it be a minute in a day, hours in a day or days in a week or a lifetime, by having that urgency, it creates more effort. It creates faster results and it creates efficiency in our mentality and our actions. But if we just are wandering lax, basically, 30 years old, not married, no kids, living at home, playing, watching TV or Netflix or whatever it is, that's the person that has a hard time doing stuff, and that's the person that we see now that goes through that quarter-life crisis, the millennial that says, well, I got this degree and I'm $50,000 in debt and I don't know what I want to do with my life.
Well, you haven't done anything that's forcing you to adapt and get out of the pattern that you're incurring. And those are the people that have to go out and challenge themselves in some capacity. I'm all about the self-care too. I do watch Grey's Anatomy, everyone.
That's the one show I am still up to date with. All these years later. Absolutely. And it's been with you the whole time, so it's grown with you, right?
So it's like an old friend. It is so like an old friend and it's so soothing to my soul. Can you just tell us what Parkinson's Law is? As you mentioned in his book, and I was laughing before we got on the call because, truth be told, behind the scenes, I was running this right up to the wire to get information to Marcus for our preparation here and I said, I had never heard it called Parkinson's Law before, but wow, do I live by that law?
It's so true. And the thing is, some of the laws are self-evident, but nobody names them. So what we should do is we should just name it the Kate and Marcus Law, and then we'll get a lot more deep into the law. So what Parkinson's Law dictates is that essentially the more time you give to a person to accomplish the goal, the more time it will take them.
So, for example, if you tell a college student, hey, listen, you have to turn this assignment in in two weeks by midnight on this day. Usually it takes them two weeks by midnight on that day. But if you tell that person, listen, you have three days to get this done and it has to be done by 6 a.m. Magically, it's done in three days by 6 a.m.
Because that urgency, that deadline, that time frame is what they need. So there's a reason why it's called a deadline. Once you hit that line, if it's beyond that, it's dead. I mentioned deadline in my book because that's exactly where I was when I was injured like that.
So, by having a deadline, by keeping some form of accountability, by keeping something that we are actually, I don't want to just say accountability or deadline because if I don't respect the deadline, if I don't believe that there's going to be some sort of repercussion, then I will not have the urgency to act. So for my book, it's the exact same thing. We push my deadline back so that I can get more things done, but then all of a sudden, we pushed it drastically for it. So for three days, enough to it, I'm working with myself and my team, and we're working 20 hours a day to get this done.
And it's like, we're coming down to the wire. I don't know if we're going to have time to do this. You know as well as I do that there are all these little things that we don't think about the trip as well as these unknowns. So it's very difficult to get there.
But again, if I didn't have that urgency, if I didn't have that deadline, if I didn't have that commitment, I would maybe still be sitting there saying, yeah, the book will be on early 2019, keep an eye out for it. It probably won't be done, at least not in the kind of matter that it did this time. So just to be really clear, Marcus's book is available. You can find it on Amazon.
I'll be linking to it in the show notes. In terms of that deadline, just so you all know, that's exactly what I did do with Marcus. We're recording this podcast a couple of weeks out from release date, but because I had a commitment to you, Marcus, I got the preparation done, and here we are having this conversation. It's absolutely, I mean, that's it.
Deadline's get stuff done. If we do not have a deadline, then time means nothing. Oh, if we do not have a deadline, time means nothing. It's so good.
It's powerful, right? I ask everybody on here to thrive a bunch of little intermission questions, and they really just help us get to know you a little bit better. They're usually pretty fun, actually. So it's your turn, Marcus.
Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's do this. Are you a morning person or a night person?
I would say I'm a morning person. Unfortunately, I'm a night person. If I'm on a deadline, but the most point I would say a morning person, I sound like an old guy. I'm 45 now.
So if I can get to bed by before midnight, I'm happy with that. I don't need to be out till two or three in the morning. What is currently sitting on your nightstand? On my nightstand, I have a copy of Thickface Black Heart by Tina Chiu.
Oh. And if that's a phenomenal book, if people haven't explored that, you'll see smatterings of that mentality in my book as well as the book we mentioned earlier by Cressfield. So it's a really, I think it's an underutilized book. It's written in the 90s.
Mrs Chiu actually passed away not too long ago from cancer, but her mindset and her teachings live on through all of us. I think it's a phenomenal book. If you haven't checked it out, buy all of us do some. What do you like to do to nurture yourself?
There are lots of different things. I think physical activity is so important. There's so many studies that show us that just by being active, they can increase your, you know, change your internal criminal cascade and all of your neurotransmitters and all of that. So activity is quite important, whether it be walking, martial arts, lifting weights, running, whatever you do.
But I also think that meditation is key because I think it's about a balance. And I think a lot of people before they go to sleep, they have, right before they go to sleep with their head on their head, just the pillow, there's always this carnival that opens up and it's like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Look at all the stuff I didn't get done today. Look at all I got to do tomorrow.
All I forgot about this. Is that what's next? And that email. What happens is our mind is are trying to allow this pressure to decompress.
And if we can sit down and meditate or have some space where we allow our mind to do that, it will allow us to have a little more clarity later on. So it doesn't have to be a Wuboo type thing or you don't have to chant, but if you can just give yourself a few minutes of peace to kind of let everything go and not think about anything. All of a sudden you realize you have a little clarity and you're more efficient. I do that at the end of my day.
I meditate at the end of my days, but I have always and well, show it at night. I feel like if meditation isn't your thing, showering at night has always been the thing that has allowed me to just kind of wash the day away and have that moment of peace. I love it as a self-care activity. Nice, very cathartic.
Do you have a book that had a big impact on you? A favorite overall of these years? I would probably have to mention probably the Take-A-Black card or the War of Art. Take-A-Black card, I actually picked up not long after my divorce.
So that's probably why that impression was very powerful. I started trying to read Marcus and Reelius's writings when I was 13 years old. And the Fatal East, it was not an easy encounter because there were so many thou-hast and thou-arts and I couldn't get past the jargon. Reading Lao-Zous, Da-de-Jing, though, helped me a lot because that Taoism was sort of my gateway to help me understand stoicism.
And then I learned, it's just like anything. Once you recognize something, all of a sudden you see it everywhere. And that's what happened to me. And that's what allowed me to read this whole myself with the martial arts and push forward to the person that you're talking to today.
Do you have a favorite long journey in life? Somewhere where it was a life lesson that took you quite a long time to learn. And if you can think of one, what was it? Well, obviously my injury was a big one, but what it forced me to do is it forced me to relearn a lot of lessons and it forced me to re-evaluate things.
So what I've done now is every day, I try to disprove my beliefs. Every day I try to go through and I try to ask myself why do I believe that. So in my book, for example, it really is sad when a person, for example, we have to be able to absorb knowledge from any source, regardless, we can't shoot the messenger. So if a person, like let's say that we have a certain, you know, religious affiliation, political affiliation, belief system, whatever it is, and a person that's from the opposite end of that says something and it's powerful.
So for you, for example, when you open up that module and you had that woman tell you, hey, by the way, nobody doesn't have enough time. I mean, everybody has enough time. That made you mad. And lots of times the truth will make us mad.
Not because we disagree with it, but because we are pissed off, that it's being pointed out to us and we're like, man, they're right and I hate it, they're right. Lots of times it's easy for us to be aggravated, the person that pointed out to us. So what I do now is, instead of looking at something from the left or the right or from positive or negative or whatever the case may be, I just try to look at it from this higher lens and try to say, what is useful from this? What can I absorb from this?
I let the facts dictate my beliefs and not my beliefs dictate fact. And I found that by doing that, I have been able to make a lot more much bigger strides in not only myself development by helping others as well, and in my writings and my teachings and everything. Oh, that's so good. So you have this openness of mind now that you're pressed and have a wild heck.
Absolutely. If you tell me something and I disagree with you, but it's the truth and I can recognize it, it doesn't hurt you at all, okay? You're just trying to help me. And if I walk away and I'm all upset about it, I can't believe you told me that I had not done this.
I've used to know what my life is. Well, I've had people tell that to me also. They say, well, I haven't been through the economy of adversity, you haven't been through adversity. And I point out to them, I'm like, listen, first of all, adversity is not a competition.
It is not. It's not about who's gone through more. Because there are other people, like I talk in my FedEx talk, it's not about what's going to be something that we all face. So don't be yourself up and say, well, I haven't been through a lot more than what I will ever go through.
So it's about accountability and it's about having that perspective. The other thing is understanding that it's not necessarily about a contest that people are doing more and more, but it's about what's related to you. And that adversity is going to be something that we all face. So don't beat yourself up and say, well, I haven't been through the same thing you have to.
It's not about that. It's about facing your adversity and getting stronger from it. Seeing it as a gift, seeing it as an opportunity to learn, and then moving forward with that mindset. What is one thing in your day you can't do without?
Oh, goodness. Wow. I would say probably physical activity of some sort. I don't have to kill myself at 100 miles or whatever, but doing something to keep me active is what helps me stay.
And I'll say this too. The reason I do that is because again, when I didn't know if I was ever going to be able to do anything to my body again, I promise myself that if I have an opportunity to walk again, I will never take my physicality for granted. So that's what I try to do, and that's the thing that really keeps me moving forward. And then of course, that leads into meditation and everything else as well.
Yeah, I was just thinking that as we were talking through, I was like, we didn't finish the story because I just take for granted that I've seen you on your TEDx talk walking around the stage. But that is a vital part of the story when people are just listening, not watching you to tell. So you did recover. You have been able to get to that point.
You mentioned you're now 45, so we're five years post your injury. And physically, where are you at now? Well, as you can see, physically, I am able to move around, and I do, you know, if you didn't know any better, you would maybe see me when I walk, maybe there's my embolition isn't great or maybe my stride is not perfect or even with my hands. I still have permanent nerve damage on my hands and my feet.
So from about the middle of my forearm down and the middle of my chin down, there's a lot of numbness, but at least I can move. And that's the key right now is to be able to do that. And once I got out of the military, I was as far as they were concerned, I was physically rehabilitated, but it took me picking up the martial arts to really help me get some of that debtors capacity back, to get some of that ability to have motor skills, having to try to move, like do things with a sticker with an knife or anything like that. It really is good for the fine motor skills.
And that's what I've had to do, and that's what I try to cultivate every day. And, you know, the body that we have will never work. We're 20, it's not the body that we're going to have them with 30. The body that we have them with 30, it's not the body that we're going to have them with 50.
So understanding that urgency is to try to do something with it, not necessarily a fear or an anxiety with it, but an urgency, a deadline, knowing that you know what, we may not be able to do everything that we're doing right now. So be grateful for this moment, be grateful for the present, be grateful for the breath that you just took because it may not be that tomorrow. So you had to work really hard to regain that capability. Absolutely.
How would you describe the soul? The soul is a cultivation of our beliefs and our thoughts and actually our actions. I know that the soul is actually embodied by this physical being that we transport it with, but all the things that we do with that physical being helps feed that soul. And all the beliefs that we have and all of the intent that we have is what cultivates that soul.
That to me is what the soul is. What the feelings is about your emotions and how you're able to actually put that into play. Feelings are great, but we have to be able to actually be willing to act on them to help impact other people's souls as well. And what does fulfillment mean to you?
Fulfillment means, and I think this is a great question. Fulfillment is two things. One, it's of actually taking the time to find what we really want and to find a worthy goal. To find something worthy of our mentality, our actions, our beliefs, the things that we do.
The second part is to actually fulfill that. But by making that happen, it helps us want to do more and more things like that. So being fulfilled is actually finding something that will make us feel better, make us help other people that will make us a better person, so that we continue to build on that. So it's this cycle, this self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will, so that we'll actually push us to go forward and continue to fulfill not only ourselves but other people.
The way I look at it now is the situation that happened to me was very unique to me, and I want to try to give that knowledge as many people as I can in a quality matter. And that to me is what fulfillment is. If I can change people's lives, that's not done with John. I've got one more question for you because we have been talking for a while, so I think it's probably time to wrap it up.
That fulfillment, that sounds a lot like finding what matters, you know, identifying your potential and going after it. How do we go about stepping up into our potential? Do you have any beginner tips? If we are that 40-year-old person or that 30-year-old person going through a midlife crisis or that person going, I don't know how to get going from here.
What advice would you give that person? There are a lot of different things that we can do, but the big thing, and I don't want to be vague because I hate it when people use vagities. There's something in my book, and it's not just my book, but it's a Japanese concept called Eekei guy. And people are probably seeing that it's four circles that sort of overlap, and they'll be circles that talk about things that you can do as a vocation to make money, things that you can do for yourself to create, that cultivation in yourself, things that you can do for yourself discipline and all these things.
And if we look as a child, there were a lot of things that we were excited about, things that were interesting to us. And if we look at those things, all those things put together, there will be a common thread throughout all of those. So the idea is if you can find the common thread of the things that you like or reembrace the things that you've forgotten about, I know that we get busy when we have a family when we have all these things going on, but going back and trying to figure out what you actually like and what you enjoy. From there, if you can kind of understand that, it will help you kind of find those other things.
And again, I don't want people to beat themselves up over it. You know, Tony Robbins says there's no failure to their success, there's simply result, they're simply in results of what happens, and that's what we have to do. So another thing that people can do that's actionable is I call it an adversity scale. So zero is when we live in Nirvana and everything's perfect, and 10 is like the worst thing we've ever encountered in our lives.
So for me, I ask myself, what's my 10? Well, that's a dynamic operating table and being paralyzed. So I ask myself, what am I about to encounter? Is it going to paralyze me?
Is it going to kill me? Probably not. And once I have that, once I'm able to look from that perspective, it helps me realize that the thing that I'm so concerned about right now, is probably on that scale about a three. And then that gives me the perspective to realize, you know what, I can do this because I've done a lot harder than what this is.
So one, it gives me encouragement to it, it re-encourages the fact that I am stronger than what I think I am, and three, it cultivates that resilience so that we can feed forward into our next adversity stronger and wiser than before. So that was Marcus Aurelius Anderson. You can find him at his website, which is www.marcus Aurelius Anderson.com. I have linked to that in the show notes.
I've also linked to his TED talk. So if you want to reinforce some of these points, definitely go and watch that. His book, The Gift of Adversity, is available on Amazon. I will be linking to that as well.
If you want a shortcut, if show notes aren't your thing, you can head to my website www.thrive.how forward slash podcast 68. Until next week, keep thriving.