Leadership Turn

B5 Apprentice Challenge: Survive and thrive

by Miki Saxon on December 20th, 2007

If you somehow missed out or haven’t been following (with baited breath) the successes and travails of Kay, the intrepid entrepreneur we’ve been advising for the Biz Channel Apprentice Challenge, catch up here. This week’s challenge is to tell Kay a success story that inspired me.

I’ve always been a survivor and believed that anything was possible, but what happened to my friend John personified both—up front and personal, as they say.

I’m not good at sentimental writing, so I’ll just lay out the facts as they happened.

I was in my early twenties, working as a recruiter, when I met John. Maybe ‘met’ is too strong a term. He was my client’s HR manager and we worked long distance, becoming friends over time. John occasionally had business in Denver and we spent more time together; Ma Bell (as it was then) made great money off our Sunday long distance football parties, especially when John’s beloved Dallas Cowboys were playing.

Then one day John was gone. He’d resigned his job and completely disappeared from the known world.

Fast-forward four years. The doorbell woke me and John walked in sounding no different than the last time we talked. But he was different—anybody would be after what happened.

He said that he’d been out dancing (it was disco times) and the next thing he knew he woke up in the hospital. John regained consciousness just in time to hear a doctor tell his estranged father (whom he hadn’t spoken to in over a decade) that he would never walk again.

John started yelling that it wasn’t true; when his father told him to “grow up and accept it”, John told him to get out. Two days later, wheelchair-bound, he checked himself out of the hospital, resigned his job, put everything in storage and disappeared.

I asked why he had severed connections with everyone he knew and John replied that he didn’t want to be around anyone who knew him before it happened, didn’t want the sympathy or the support.

He went to Canada and finally found a physical therapist who either believed John when he said that doctors were wrong, or was just willing to take the money from the American nut case.

John never went into detail about what had been wrong, but the gray in his hair and the odd bits that surfaced were enough—he’d gone through his own private hell and come out the other side.

I listened carefully to my thoughts that evening as I watched John on the dance floor—anything is possible; don’t always believe what the experts say.

And I’ve never forgotten.

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