The Quote That Ran the Day Before I Almost Died
The short answer
Both times I nearly died, I got the same thing: clarity about what matters, which is whether you're living the life you say you want, today. You don't need a coral snake or a ski wreck to see it. You do have to start.
At 26 I was bitten by a coral snake while building a deck for my parents. I was paralyzed within seven minutes. My dad drove me to Plantation General Hospital and I told him not to stop at any red lights because I didn't know if I could keep breathing. Antivenom flown in from a Miami serpentarium saved my life.
Within a month of walking out of that hospital I quit my job, started a company, proposed, and jumped out of planes. Something had cracked open. I could see, with a clarity I had never experienced before, that the life I'd been living was smaller than the life I actually wanted. And I knew, in a way that doesn't fade, that the window to live that bigger life could close at any moment.
About twenty years later, a friend submitted my name to a USA Today reporter who was writing a piece on how near-death experiences change entrepreneurs. I didn't pitch it. I just talked. The closing line they printed was this: "Life is a gift. It's meant to be pursued, shared, and savored."
The article ran on a Thursday.
The next day I was skiing at Breckenridge and I hit a snowmaker at over 50 miles per hour. I woke up paralyzed in Denver. Life-flighted. Aortic bleeding, collapsed lung, six fractured ribs, fractured sternum and clavicle, thirteen broken bones in total. Almost exactly twenty years after the coral snake, lightning struck the same spot.
It's a dramatic story, and I tell it because the timing is the lesson. The day before the wreck, my words about life being a gift were in a national newspaper. And then the universe tested whether I believed them.
I did. I do.
That line became the brand. "Life is a gift. It's meant to be pursued, shared, and savored." I said it out loud to a reporter, and then I had to live it the very next day, lying in a hospital bed for the second time in my life, wondering if I would walk again.
Both times, the moment of facing death produced the same thing: clarity about what matters. What matters is whether you are actually living the life you say you want, right now, today, because today might be the last day you get to choose. Money, status, the title, and the company all come a distant second.
Most people don't need a coral snake or a ski wreck to figure this out. That's the whole reason I coach. The clarity I got from almost dying twice is available to anyone willing to stop and look honestly at the three dimensions of their life: body, business, and being. You don't have to nearly lose your life to start living it.
But you do have to start.
What would change if you treated today like the gift it actually is?
~b