The holiday note I got from one of my seminar attendees, Doug McCullough, described his trips skiing, camping, kayaking, canoeing, driving his high-end convertible, and other outdoor activities. There was a picture of him swimming with dolphins.
He also linked to a TEDx talk he gave, which reminded me about one of my major inspirations, Mark Zupan, star of the Oscar-nominated Murderball and author of the book Gimp, and whom I describe on some depth in my two-day seminar and on my Resources and Inspirations page.
I try to inspire people in my seminars. Many tell me I do. I love when they inspire me back.
http://youtu.be/1keCb7oEMBg
I also mentioned Zupan in this post, “Handling life’s biggest challenges,” by another friend who inspired me, which also mentioned this quote:
Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.
— William Feather
His video put his outdoor activities in context. I can’t help get the feeling he squeezes more meaning, value, joy, and reward out of these activities than most people. In his video he talks about overcoming challenges, but you’d think the challenges would decrease the joy he gets from those activities—they take more preparation and work. He can’t do many of the things most of us can. Think about it: if you’re going to kayak, wouldn’t you rather have full control of your arms? If you’re going to ski, wouldn’t you rather have full control of your legs?
Yet many people get less meaning, value, joy, and reward from those activities despite having more material ability to get it. Something about this pattern seemed to resonate with the quote in bold above and I couldn’t help playing with it. Please don’t quote me on it, since it’s only half-baked now, but I think there’s something to it:
Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I see someone enjoying life the most, the joy is usually had by somebody who could claim to suffer the most.
When was the last time you enjoyed life more than anyone around you?
Great post. I also follow Sean Stephenson and nick vujicic.
With all due respect to Doug and his tremendous achievements, I must say that they are the exception rather than the rule. While their achievements put us in awe, because of their disabilities, I am sure there are a lot of able bodied people who are squeezing a lot out of life as well.
I agree with the statement that challenges make it more enjoyable, maybe not in the present moment, but in te long term. For these people the challenges were given to them, with no choice of theirs. For people not born with challenges, I think the joy comes from creating challenges for yourself. Like Elon musk, Steve jobs etc. I am sure there are plenty in other fields as well. It’s like a professor/entrepreneur who goes about asking hard questions and then answering it themself.
One thing I have learnt about setting and overcoming challenges is to know your limits/know yourself. At any point of time, something I can do easily can be extremely challenging to somebody else and vice versa. So just seeing somebody else do something doesn’t mean I should jump head first into it. Even though the bigger challenge/goal may be something I really want I have to calibrate/dumb down the challenge so I can do it in small steps. Overcoming these smaller challenges gives me the self-esteem/confidence/joy necessary to keep pushing forward towards the larger challenge.
For people born with challenges like these, I think their self-esteem gets crushed very early in their childhood especially because of repeated failures and being mocked by society. unless there is a external intervention. So I wonder whether Doug had someone like that, who provided him the moral support necessary to believe in himself. He mentions that 75% of disabled people are unemployed. I am not sure what kind of disability he is talking about. In this age of software industry, and accessibility, that’s a surprisingly large number. Is the unemplyment rate that high because the other 75% never got the moral support in their childhood, that people like Doug got? As a result their self-esteem got crushed. Self-esteem is a big component of overcoming challenges, I think.
Thanks for the comment alpha_123. Lot of great points. This is Doug. A couple thoughts.
1. The point I didn’t emphasize enough in my speech is that I should not be considered inspirational just because I am living a full life with a disability. The point simply is that there are a lot of misconceptions about disability and we should not put artificial limits on what people can do. This certainly applies to both able bodied or disabled. At the end of the day, I want disabled people to be considered as regular people and not inspirations simply because they live their life to the best of their ability. I have a friend with cerebral palsy who actually wrote a book “I’m not here to be your inspiration” partly because he was tired of people regularly coming up to him in the gym and telling him what an inspiration he was.
2. I had a loving family growing up, but would not say I had any person that provided me with any special moral support. I did have the advantage that I have essentially eased into my disability. Thus when I was younger I was close to able bodied and even though I was occasionally mocked never developed a mindset that I was disabled. I still don’t think of myself as disabled even though I am by standard definitions. I think you are right that self-esteem is a big component of overcoming challenges. I would just flip it around to say I have primarily developed my self-esteem by overcoming challenges. A key obstacle is that we tend to have low expectations for the disabled. They don’t get challenged enough and develop the self-esteem and confidence that comes from overcoming challenges. A final point on this is that I draw inspiration from seeing others overcome challenges. To your point, this doesn’t mean I can do anything. Simply that if I see someone else overcoming a challenge, it prompts the logical question of why can’t I do it?
3. The 75% disabled unemployment rate represents all disabilities. This is widely reported in disability literature and is assumed to be directionally correct, but is a bit of a gray area because official unemployment rates are calculated based on people actively looking for work whereas the 75% makes assumptions around people wanting to work even though they are not actively looking. I would say there are two main factors driving this statistic in addition to basic discrimination. First, the low expectations set for disabled people. Second, the disincentive to work resulting from disability payment programs. I don’t know the details on this because I’ve never looked into it, but in general people accept the safety net of collecting disability payments instead of the higher risk, but potentially much higher reward of working. This is driven in part by the self-esteem and low expectations issues.
Thank you for the thoughtful post, alpha_123, especially for writing with more nuance than I did. I painted in too broad strokes, partly because I often write believing that many who read my posts is familiar with other things I’ve written, and I don’t have an editor. Also, while writing this post, I knew I was going to follow it up, though I’m not sure how soon. I was trying to allude to how our emotions arise not just from our environments or randomly but through the lens of our beliefs and also influenced by our behavior.
Our control over our muscles is only one input to how we feel. Everyone with a working brain has as much ability to create happiness or any other emotion. If you can’t change your material situation, you can still change your beliefs. Even if you don’t like your situation and want to change it, I can’t see how it benefits anyone to feel miserable, outraged, offended, or the like.
One of the main points of this blog, maybe the main one, is that anyone can choose their environments, beliefs, and behaviors (collectively, a lifestyle) to create the emotional life they want. I know that perspective has limits so one of the main reasons I find Zupan, Bauby, and Frankl (all on my resources page) inspirational is that they expand those limits. If Frankl could create meaning in Auschwitz and he had the same emotional system I do, I can create it in my life.
I can’t speak to numbers of people with disabilities or their experience since I haven’t looked up numbers. Of my many goals in life, finding those numbers isn’t one of them. One of my big ones is to increase my emotional reward and from the few people with disabilities I’ve come across, I’ve seen ways to increase my emotional reward.
The first time I saw Murderball I found some characters great because they overcame challenges of their disabilities. The second time I didn’t. That time I found them great because they were great athletes and overcame the challenges of competition.