This week’s episode begins with my 40th birthday and reveals what I learned when I died on the operating table – twice. During our time together I will share how I discovered the gift of Adversity through a spinal injury that drove me to being bedridden, broken, and acutely aware of everything I was taking for granted. Listen in to learn why I let go of anger, learn to find gratitude for both positive and negative experiences, and how you can snap yourself out of the slumber of mediocrity.
Episode Transcript:
00:02
Acta Non Verba is a show that’s raw and real, featuring hard-hitting interviews with people that live by the ethos of actions, not words. Marcus Aurelius Anderson is a TEDx speaker, best-selling author, veteran, and leadership and mindset coach. With this show, you get to join Marcus as he goes inside the minds and experiences of the world’s most successful warriors, leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts. With each episode, you’re going to get the philosophies, concepts, tactics, and strategies these leaders use
00:32
turn adversity into victory. Live an extraordinary life based on actions, not words. Now here’s your host, Marcus Aurelius Anderson. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and this is Acta Non Verba. Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. In this episode, I’m going to talk about my story and background because listen, there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there. So why the hell did you listen to a thing that I say?
01:03
That’s a good question. I’m a TEDx speaker, professional keynote speaker that’s spoken around the world, bestselling author of the book, The Gift of Adversity, Overcoming Paralysis and Pain Defying Purpose, and an executive coach to leaders, companies, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. I’m also a lifelong martial artist and proud veteran. My story starts with my 40th birthday. A person’s 40th birthday is quite a milestone. This is the birthday that is seen as the marker of a person’s achievements.
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a time of reflection. Most have a job where they’ve been employed for a number of years. Many are married and perhaps have a family. At this point in their lives, they have everything pretty much figured out. At least, those were the expectations that I had when I was growing up. But life happens on its own terms and timelines, and there’s never really a perfect time for anything. Here’s the reality. In this life, there are basically three things that can happen. What we hope will happen. What we fear will happen.
02:02
and then what actually happens. My 40th birthday was a huge milestone for me as well, but not for the reasons that I mentioned previously. You see, I turned 40 years old, broke, divorced, bedridden, and paralyzed, wondering if I would ever be able to walk or use my hands again. In 2012, while preparing to deploy with the US Army, I suffered a severe spinal injury. During the subsequent surgery that followed, I died on the operating table, twice.
02:30
And while they were able to bring me back to the land of the living, when I woke up, they said, the good news is you get to live to tell the tale. The bad news is this is what you’re left with. My world was turned upside down. In an instant, I went from preparing for war on the battlefield to a war within my own body and mind. Now before my injury, I had read stories and seen movies about people who had been seriously injured and disabled before. And while those stories were compelling,
02:58
I still live my life with the, oh, but that won’t ever happen to me kind of attitude. The harsh reality that slapped me in the face was I felt like I’d wasted my life up to that point. At least, that’s how I felt when faced with the possibility of being bedridden for the rest of my days. I felt like I’d been bitch slapped by the universe as if my injury was some sort of punishment for wasting all of the opportunities that I’d been given but had never bothered to act upon. There was so much more that I wanted to accomplish with my life.
03:28
I had wasted so much time, talent, and potential, assuming that I would always have the time, talent, and potential to do whatever it was that I wanted to do. They say in life, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, but that’s not true. You see, we know what we have, but we just assume that we will always have it. The more I thought about it, the madder I would become. I was beyond angry. I was furious with myself for being so lazy and short-sighted.
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I thought of all the other times in my life when I’d ask lesser of myself because I thought, oh, there’s always tomorrow. I’ll just do it then. And for what? So I could binge on Netflix? So I could catch a nap?
04:09
The realization of my injury was sobering, and I felt like a statistic. Soon my anger was directed inwards, and I went into a deep depression. These were my darkest days, and if I’m honest, I can tell you that I seriously consider taking my own life. But I couldn’t even commit suicide in my physical condition. I felt completely defeated, like I’d lost the battle, and I just wanted to give up. And for a brief moment, I let that defeat.
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that darkness hover over me. I could feel it begin to slowly descend and completely surround me. Yet, even in the face of this adversity, I knew the truth. I realized that even if I was able to somehow take my own life, that I would be settling for mediocrity. That if I gave up now in my time of greatest struggle, that I would be settling for what my life had been up to this point.
05:09
And that is a very dangerous precedent to establish. It’s dangerous because if we train ourselves to quit at the first sign of adversity, we are literally conditioning ourselves to give up when we should be fighting the hardest. And that’s when I made a decision. I made a promise to myself. I swore that if I was ever able to get out of that bed and walk again, if I was ever given a second chance, that I would never settle, never hesitate.
05:39
and never compromise on my dreams and ambitions again. Now, I had no idea what the future held for me, but I knew one thing for sure. I wasn’t about to sit on my ass and play a victim for the rest of my life. Misery loves company, but not as much as mediocrity. And I, for one, would rather die of thirst than drink from the cup of mediocrity a second time. You see, adversity has a way of really getting your attention because it grabs you and it shakes you violently and it screams, hey, wake up!
06:08
Look at your life. Is this what you want? Is this what you really want? My injury was the wake-up call that I needed to snap me out of my slumber of mediocrity. It took losing everything that I thought was important in my life to give me a genuine sense of urgency. It took my death to make me truly begin to live my life. So if you listen to nothing else that I say in this podcast, hear this. Stop waiting. Stop hesitating.
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Stop compromising and start acting now on the things that mean the most to you. Because if you’re within the sound of my voice right now, the reality is this. There will eventually come a time in your life when you will no longer be able to chase after your greatest dreams and ambitions. And that time is much closer than you think. The truth is you don’t need more time to change your life. You don’t need more time. You need a deadline. And there’s no better deadline in this life than adversity.
07:07
After three months of lying in that bed, I had an epiphany. I finally realized that all the anger that I was feeling wasn’t helping me at all. In fact, it was draining my energy and making it impossible for me to recover. I was left with two options. I could either stay angry and play the victim for the rest of my life, or I could change my mindset about my injury. But that was much easier said than done.
07:33
Deep down, I knew that there had to be a lesson to be learned from my injury, that there had to be some sort of opportunity in this adversity, but try as I might, I still couldn’t see it. I also knew that I had to do something to counteract all the anger that I was feeling. And for me, the opposite of anger wasn’t love. It was gratitude. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Oh yeah, Marcus, everybody talks about gratitude, but just hear me out. And I’m not talking about that.
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bullshit gratitude that people claim. I mean, legitimate, true gratitude. In this paralyzed state, I had no other choice but to find something, anything to be grateful for. And again, I know that gratitude is this huge buzzword that everybody talks about, but here’s the thing. It’s very easy to be grateful for your life when everything is going well, right? When things are going well, it’s even easy to be philosophical about somebody else’s pain and misfortune because, hey,
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That’s not us. But when the shoe is on the other foot and adversity comes to pay us a visit, it’s much more difficult. In fact, we suddenly wanna be the exception to the rule. In this life, you cannot just cherry pick the things that you like and be grateful only for those things. That’s not how gratitude works. You must learn to be grateful for everything in your life, both the good and the bad. In other words, when you can learn to be just as grateful for winning the lottery,
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as you are for the person that catch you off in traffic and gives you the finger. When you had this 360 degrees of gratitude, that’s when you’re bulletproof. Because now no matter what happens in your life, everything is a blessing. The good things will encourage you while the perhaps not so good things will be opportunities to learn to better appreciate what you do have. And though I obviously wasn’t happy with my current physical condition, I started thinking of the things that I could be grateful for.
09:29
And now listen, I’m not gonna lie. At first it was tough because I didn’t think there was anything that I should be grateful for. I wasn’t even grateful to be alive at that point. But finally, after some brutal soul searching, I was able to find something. And it was this. For every man that is injured on the battlefield, it takes two men to pull him to safety. So if I had suffered this injury while I was deployed overseas with the infantry, I may have gotten not only myself but other men killed as well. I would have put my team in danger.
09:59
I would have put my squad in danger. I would have put the helicopter that would have had to fly into a hot zone and the medical crew that was on that in danger. In all, there were dozens of other people whose lives would have been put in harm’s way had I suffered that injury while I was deployed. In other words, when I took myself out of the equation, it all made sense. Honestly, I was just lucky to be alive and I was even more lucky that no one else was injured in the process.
10:26
And after that realization for the first time in months, I smile, tears of joy stream down my face. And I believe for the first time in my life, I was genuinely and unconditionally grateful. And once I was able to lay that single cornerstone of gratitude, I was able to build on it. Soon I became grateful for everything in my life from the bed that I may never get out of to the room that I may never leave. And a week after I started seeing my adversity as a gift,
10:56
Instead of a curse, something miraculous began to happen. I started getting a little bit of feeling back in my hands. And for that, I was truly grateful. But the thing that I was the most grateful for will probably surprise you. The thing that I was the most grateful for was the incredible gift that my injury had given me, the gift of adversity. What is the gift of adversity, you ask? Well,
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That’s an entire podcast in and of itself. And that episode can be found if you go to Acta Non Verba, but go to the episode titled, The Gift of Adversity, to learn how adversity is a gift. To find out more, you can watch my TEDx Talk, The Gifts of Adversity on YouTube. You can find my book, The Gift of Adversity, Overcoming Paralysis and Pain, to find purpose on Amazon and get your copies there. You can also go to my website to check out the resources that I just mentioned as well as more information about my individual coaching and other coaching programs, how to hire me to speak at your events,
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the workshops that I provide for companies and organizations. And while you’re there, join my Acta Non Verba inner circle to get even more exclusive content and information. Until then, live a life of actions and not words. Live a life of Acta Non Verba. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
