Coral Snake at 26: Paralyzed, Then Alive, Then Unstoppable

I was 26 years old, building a deck for my parents in south Florida as a gift. A coral snake bit me on the back of the leg. I did not see it happen. I felt the bite, looked down, and within about seven minutes I was paralyzed.

My dad drove me to Broward General. In the car I told him not to stop at any red lights because I did not know if I could keep breathing. That sentence, spoken to my father while my body was shutting down, is still the most honest thing I have ever said. I was not performing courage. I was trying to stay alive.

Antivenom was flown in from a serpentarium in Miami. They saved my life. I spent time in the hospital, and I walked out.

What happened next is the part I still think about. Within a month of discharge I quit my job, started a company, proposed to my girlfriend, and jumped out of planes. Not one of those things. All of them. In a month.

I am not telling that story because I am reckless. I am telling it because something cracked open when I faced the possibility of dying at 26. I could see, with a clarity I had never experienced before, that the life I had been living was smaller than the life I actually wanted. The job was fine. The relationship was good. The routine was comfortable. And all of it was insufficient. I had been living at maybe 60% of what was available to me, and it took a snake and a hospital bed to make me see it.

The clarity that came from that experience has not faded in 35 years. It is the root of everything I do now. The coaching, the methodology, the three legs, the brand. All of it traces back to a coral snake on a deck in south Florida and the month that followed.

What I have learned since then, and what I teach, is that this clarity is available to anyone. You do not need a snakebite. You do not need a near-death experience. You need honesty about whether the life you are living right now, today, is actually the life you want. Not the life you have settled for. Not the life that happened to you. The life you would choose if you were choosing fresh, with full knowledge that the window could close at any time.

Most of the men I coach are not in crisis. They are in comfort. And comfort is where clarity goes to die, because comfortable is easy to mistake for good, and good is easy to mistake for enough.

The snake taught me that enough is not enough. The question is whether you need a snake to learn that, or whether you can learn it from someone who already survived one.

If you had one month of total clarity about what your life should look like, what would you change first?

~b