Time to be own hero!

We all have moments in our lives that end up being engraved on our souls and having a profound impact. One of those moments for me was in 3rd grade. Two times each year, my elementary school had what was affectionately called ‘hotdog’ day and, as you can probably imagine, it was the day that everyone got to eat hotdogs. For some crazy reason, we all thought it was one of the most special days ever, all because of a silly hotdog.

Nevertheless, hotdog day was in full swing, and I remember eating my hotdog with all my friends when suddenly, I found myself in distress. I had taken too big of a bite and found myself choking. Not only was I choking, but I was also in full panic mode, but for all the wrong reasons. To this day, I still don’t know why I did what I did, but in that moment, I was embarrassed that I was choking, so I ran out of the auditorium where we all ate lunch every day and I ran into my empty classroom. I don’t know what I was thinking or why I left the only area where everyone who could possibly save me was sitting, but I did.

It won’t be the last time I do something stupid in life, trust me on that one! I’m panicking because I can’t breathe, so I run into the bathroom. Again, not sure why. Then something shifted in my mind. I realized in that moment that I would not be able to make it all the way back out of the classroom, through the hallway, and back to the auditorium to find someone to save me, so I instinctively started to thrust my clenched fists into my stomach to dislodge the blockage.

I don’t think at that age we had learned the Heimlich maneuver yet, but it’s quite possible. Somehow, I knew that I had to force the blockage out of me if I wanted to live. Thankfully, as the sound of my voice is attesting to, I somehow managed to unchoke myself and live to do stupid things many times after that.

That moment had a profound impact on me, not only because I cut my food into small bites ever since that day, but that moment also impressed upon me the sobering fact that, often in our lives, whether because of our own doing or not, nobody is coming to save you and, if you want to survive, you have to self rescue.

Yes, that really happened to me. No, I had no idea at the time that the idea of self rescue was being imprinted into my little brain. It’s only after 40+ years of other fairly harrowing situations that I put myself in that I’ve come to realize that it may have all started there. I believe that situation is one of the key moments that set me down a path of wanting to learn martial arts, learn how to fight, learn how to be self sufficient, and study all things survival and self rescue.

It was like that experience that early in my life flipped a little switch in my brain that said, ‘anything can happen and you better be ready to do something about it.’ When I think back over the themes and threads that connect all of the experiences since that time, I can see a very clear inquisitiveness about risk taking, skill building, having adventures, but also knowing how to take care of myself if I found myself in a bad situation.

Fast forward 20 years or so and, by then I had taken several first responder courses, some outdoor survival training, worked with military and law enforcement agencies teaching defensive tactics, had traveled the world having some wild adventures, and had essentially gathered an internal library of beliefs, as well as skills and tactics that would give me and those around me the greatest chance of survival should things go pear shaped and I find myself in a potential rescue scenario.

What I have also come to realize over the decades is just how much of that kind of training and mindset applies to normal daily life, relationships, and, of course, business.

Because here's what they teach you in survival and rescue training, and they teach it early, and they teach it hard: you are the first responder on the scene of your own emergency. Not the second. Not the third. The first. You were there before anybody else, you're there right now, and depending on where you are and what's happening, you may be the only one who's ever going to be there. The idea that there will always be somebody there to save you if you get into trouble is a comforting one, but not a realistic one. The person closest to the problem, the person with the most information, the person with the most to lose, and the person who can act right this second, is you.

Now, I want to be clear right up front about what this episode is and what it isn't, because the title might have some of you thinking I'm about to tell you how to survive a plane crash or build a bug out bag. That's not where we're going today. Today, we’re going to talk about the emergency you're already in and maybe haven't named yet.

Most emergencies in business are not the loud kind. Nobody hears a splash or the thrashing around in the water. There's no air horn or siren. There's just a slow, quiet realization somewhere around year five, eight, or even year fifteen that you're further from shore than you meant to be, you're tired from swimming, and the current has been carrying you the whole time.

The first recognition we all have to have in those moments is that nobody is coming to save you or your business. I know this sounds negative and maybe even a little doom and gloom, but it’s actually the opposite. When you realize that nobody is coming to ‘unchoke’ you, you either give up and perish, or you mobilize all the forces within and get to work.

I’ve said it many times before and will say it again, Fannie Mae is not coming to save you, the regulators couldn’t care less about you, the trade organizations, the AMC that promised you volume, the market when it turns, the class action lawsuit somebody's cousin heard about. None of it will save you. Not the economy, not the guy on the forum who says the whole thing is going to collapse and then they'll all come crawling back to us. None of it is coming. And thank God, because if nobody is coming to save you, that also means nobody can stop you.

Let's get into it.

Take a real honest look at the state of the world right now. Don’t just focus on the appraisal industry, take a 360 degree look at what is happening all around us. AI, layoffs, war, increased living expenses, and a host of threats from almost every corner imaginable.

In the appraisal industry, fees have been essentially flat for a decade and a half while the cost of literally everything else you touch has gone up. Waivers keep expanding. The technology is getting better at the parts of your job you used to think were the whole job. The AMCs have gotten very, very good at teaching a generation of appraisers to work faster for less and call it a career. And every couple of months there's a new announcement that sets a portion of this industry on fire for about seventy-two hours.

Now, what's the dominant response to all of it? I want you to think about this honestly, because I read the same groups you read. The dominant response is waiting.

Waiting for somebody to notice how unfair it is. Waiting for regulation to fix it. Waiting for the pendulum to swing back. Waiting for the AMCs to finally get what's coming to them. Waiting for the market to correct so that all the people who came in during the good years wash out and there's more work for the rest of us. Waiting for someone, somewhere, to look at this industry and say, you know what, those appraisers have been right this whole time, let's go fix it for them.

That is a rescue culture, my friends. Everybody in this industry has a flare gun and almost nobody has a plan. We are collectively treading water, firing flares into the sky, and getting angrier and angrier that no helicopter has shown up. And I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually answer it, out loud, in your truck or car, wherever you're listening to this:

Who or what are you secretly waiting on to fix your situation?

Name them. Go ahead. There's a name, or an event, or a headline in your head right now that you have been quietly counting on. And here's the second part of the question, which is the one that stings a little. How long have you been treading water waiting for that thing to show up? How long have you been hoping the joker in the Facebook forums talking about gathering signatures and fee studies will suddenly come back and say, “It worked! Congress heard us and is raising appraisal fees by $500 and firing all AMC companies!”

Because if it's been a year, that's a rough year. If it's been five years, that's a habit. And if it's been ten, my friend, that isn't waiting anymore. That's a way of life, and it's the one you chose. And I can tell you based on the number of conversations I have with appraisers every day around the country that there are way too many of you living the waiting life. It’s time to self rescue, my friends.

Before we get into the rules, I have to give you the phrase that runs underneath every single one of them, because without this phrase the rest of the episode just sounds like a guy yelling at you to work harder, and that's not what this is.

In first responder culture, in military culture, in a lot of the corners of the world where people do genuinely hard things on purpose, there's a phrase that separates the people who make it from the people who break. It's a simple little swap of two words, and it goes like this.

“I don't have to. I get to.”

I don't have to go out in that storm. I get to.

I don't have to carry this heavy backpack. I get to.

I don't have to do the thing nobody else wants to do. I get to.

Now, I know how that sounds to some of you the first time you hear it. It sounds like a mind trick, like something you'd read on a poster in a break room, or something Jocko Willink and the gaggle of Navy Seal influencers like to say. But listen to what's actually happening in the language because words and language are the operating system your brain runs on.

"I have to" is the language of a victim. Every single time you say it, you are announcing, to yourself and to everyone around you, that something outside of you is in control and you are simply complying with it. "I have to raise my fees." "I have to make those calls." "I have to fire that client." "I have to learn this new thing." Every one of those sentences describes a person being pushed.

"I get to" is the language of an owner. It's the language of somebody who understands what they're actually holding. It’s the language of survivors.

Here's the part I want to land on, because I think most of you have never really sat with it. The overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever lived on this planet did not get to build anything of their own. They worked in someone else's field, someone else's factory, someone else's system, on someone else's schedule, for someone else's benefit, and they died having never once had a say in the direction of their own days. That is the historical norm. That is the water almost every human being who ever lived was swimming in. It’s not a judgment; it’s simply the math.

You get to build something. You get to decide what you charge. You get to decide who you work for and who you tell no. You get to decide what you learn, what you build, who you become, and what's left when you're gone. Nobody is making you do any of it.

So, when you catch yourself saying that you have to do the hard thing, I want you to hear what you're actually saying, which is that you resent the very privilege you spent your whole life trying to get.

You don't have to do the hard things, my friends. You get to.

And so, let me ask you this one right now, and this is the question I want you carrying for the rest of the episode: what is the one thing you keep saying you have to do that you've been avoiding for months? You know what it is. It came to mind before I finished the sentence. Now say it again with "get to" in front of it and see if anything moves. And if nothing moves, be honest with yourself about what that means, because it probably means you're not unable, you're just unwilling, and those are very different problems with very different solutions.

Alright, you all know me by now and how much I love frameworks, so, here's the framework. Seven rules, straight out of the world of survival and emergency response, and every one of them maps onto your business so cleanly it's almost uncomfortable.

Rule 1: No One Is Coming

This is the foundation, and everything else stacks on top of it.

Burn this one into your brain and wake up every morning and rejoice, ‘nobody is coming!’, because every one of these rules fails if you're still, somewhere in the back of your mind, holding out for rescue. You can learn every technique in the world, but if part of you is still scanning the shore for a cute lifeguard racing to save you, you'll never fully commit to saving yourself. Half your attention is out there looking for the rope. Half your energy is going into hope.

Radical responsibility means you take the position, all the way down to the bone, that you are one hundred percent responsible for where you are and where you're going. Not fifty percent. Not "well, the market did play a role." All of it. Now, is that literally true? Of course not. The market is real. The AMCs are real. Fannie Mae is real. Things happen to you that you did not cause and didn’t necessarily deserve.

But responsibility is not about who caused it. Responsibility is about who's going to respond to it. That's what the word actually means when you break it apart. Response + Ability. Your ability to respond. And you are the only one on the scene with any ability to respond to your own situation.

Hope is not a plan, my friends, and rescue is not a strategy. Stop scanning the horizon and start checking your own gear.

Rule 2: Don't Become the Second Victim (scene safety)

This is day one, hour one, first thing they teach you in survival and first responder training, and it's the rule people find hardest to accept because it sounds cold. It’s referred to as ‘scene safety’.

Scene safety comes first. Before the patient. Before the person who is screaming. Before the thing that is on fire. Because the math is very simple and very unforgiving. If you rush into the danger and you go down, there are now two patients, two victims, now one of them is you and you have helped exactly nobody. You’ve actually made the situation worse. Your good intentions and your bravery and your big heart actively made the situation worse, because now the real rescuers have to spend resources on you as well.

And Appraisers do this every single day. Entrepreneurs do this every single day.

You watch it happen in slow motion. Somebody's business starts sliding, and their response is to burn themselves down to the studs trying to save it. More hours. More reports. Less sleep. More weekends. Lower fees to keep the volume up. Skipping the workout, skipping the vacation, skipping their kid's thing, skipping the doctor's appointment, diet turns to shit, health turns to shit, relationships start to suffer, because right now the business needs saving and they're the only one who can do it.

And here's what I've watched happen more times than I can count. Twelve months later the business is in the same spot or worse, and now the owner is exhausted, resentful, unhealthy, and out of gas. Now there are two patients. The business and the person who owns it. And a business with a hollowed-out, depressed owner has no rescuer at all.

You don’t rescue someone drowning by drowning yourself. And you cannot rescue a drowning business by drowning yourself.

By the way, a little side note, if you’ve never seen what it looks like when someone is really drowning, it’s nothing like what the movies typically show with the flailing arms, the thrashing around, the yelling. Drowning rarely looks like what you think drowning looks like. It’s quiet, usually unseen, and devastatingly quick. The person slips beneath the water silently and, because there is nothing solid to push off of back to the surface, the person drowning silently flails under water under its over.

If I would have choked to death in 3rd grade, it would’ve been in silence and all alone in that classroom because I didn’t think in the moment to ask for help. It was only at the last minute did I realize I needed to self rescue. I say this to encourage you to be the one to reach out because often someone is going through some stuff you may know nothing about until its too late.

Friends, protecting yourself and your own capacity is not selfish, and it is not a reward you get after the crisis passes. It is the necessary precondition for being useful to the world, including your family, your clients, and the business itself. Your brain and energy are the only rescue equipment on the scene. Everything else is optional.

So, here's the question. Are you rescuing your business right now, or are you drowning right next to it?

Rule 3: Learn the Umbles

One of the things I learned in wilderness survival, ski patrol training, and avalanche courses is that there’s a thing called the ‘umbles’, and it's one of the best diagnostic tools I've ever come across for anything.

When somebody is going hypothermic, they don't announce it. They don't say, "excuse me, my core temperature is dropping and I'm in serious danger." What happens instead is that they start to stumble. Their speech starts to mumble. Their hands start to fumble with simple tasks like zippers and buckles. And they start to grumble, as in, they get irritable and negative and short with everyone around them.

Stumbles, mumbles, fumbles, grumbles: the ‘umbles’. And here's the critical part, and the part that makes it such a beautiful teaching tool. The person experiencing the umbles is almost always the last one to know. Everybody around them can see it. They cannot. Because the very thing that's failing is the thing they'd need in order to notice that it's failing, all their faculties.

Your business has umbles.

The stumbles might be the fees. They didn't collapse, they crept. A little concession here, a little discount there for the client who's been good to you, a fee you haven't raised since a year you'd rather not admit out loud. Maybe it’s the lack of marketing and brand building. You figured you’d just get on some lists like everyone else and you’d make a good living. Then it all stopped.

The mumbles are how you talk about your own work. You used to be able to explain what you do and why it matters. Now you kind of trail off. You describe yourself as "just an appraiser." You apologize for your fee before anybody has objected to it.

The fumbles are the simple things getting hard. Reports that used to take you four hours now take seven. The pipeline that used to be a system is now a pile. Things you used to handle in your sleep now cost you a whole afternoon.

And the grumbles, my friends, the grumbles are the loudest tell of all, and they're all over this industry. The grumbles are how much time you spend angry about things you cannot control. It's the forums. It's the venting. It's the daily two hours of energy poured into how unfair it all is. If you want to see an industry deep in hypothermia, go read the comments on the Facebook forums. They be grumblin’ hard!

But here's the hard truth: nobody is attacking you, you’re drifting out to sea.

Comfort is the current, my friends. It doesn't feel like danger, and that's precisely what makes it dangerous. When you're in the water, the current doesn't hurt. There's no pain. You don't feel yourself moving because everything around you is moving at the same speed. You feel completely fine right up until the moment you look up and realize you are nowhere near where you meant to be, and the sound you're hearing is the waterfall up ahead or the bag waves coming to push you under.

So, what's been quietly declining in your business that you've been calling "just the market"? What have you been neglecting that you know should’ve started at least a year ago, but you got lazy and didn’t start?

Rule 4: Self-Arrest Before You Slide

If you've ever done any mountaineering, you know the ice axe self-arrest. If you’ve ever done any skiing or snowboarding on steep terrain, you know how to use your edge to self arrest. If you haven't, the concept is dead simple.

You're on a steep slope. You lose your footing or maybe you fall while skiing. And in that first second or two, the slide is slow. It's gentle. It almost feels like nothing. And in that window, if you’re mountaineering, you flip onto your front and drive the pick of your axe into the snow and dig in with everything you have, you stop. It's ugly. It hurts. You end up on your face with ice in your teeth and your heart in your throat. But you stop. If you’re skiing, you turn on your side and dig your edges in to slow and eventually stop the slide.

Miss that window, and the slide picks up speed, and it does it fast, and past a certain point no amount of technique on earth is going to save you. You are no longer sliding. You're falling. And falling is a completely different problem entirely.

The reason so many appraisers go over the edge is not because the slide is fast. It's because the slide is so slow at the start that self-arresting feels like an overreaction. You’re losing ground so slowly that you think you’re winning.

Think about what it actually feels like in real time. Your fees dropped twenty bucks. Are you really going to blow up a client relationship over twenty bucks? One client crept up to sixty percent of your volume. Are you really going to walk away from your biggest source of work in a soft market? You haven't marketed in three years. Are you really going to make cold calls at your age, with your experience, with your stellar reputation?

Every one of those decisions, in the moment, feels like an overreaction. And that's exactly why people don't make them. Self-arrest always feels like an overreaction, right up until the second it becomes impossible.

The move is ugly and early. That's the whole rule. Not elegant and late. Ugly and early.

Rule 5: You Fall to the Level of Your Training

There's a line that gets thrown around in that world and it's worth saying carefully, because most people get it backwards. We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.

That's a hard one to swallow, because the story we all tell ourselves is that when the moment comes, we'll be different. We'll be sharper. Something inside will switch on, adrenaline will do the rest, and we'll rise up and become the person the moment requires. It's a beautiful story. It shows up in every movie you've ever seen. It’s the hero’s journey. A nobody is called into action to save the princess and kill the dragon, and in that special moment, he rises to the occasion and does the deed, wins the girl, comes home a hero.

And it's a lie, and the people who train for real emergencies know it's a lie, which is why they train endlessly for things that will probably never happen.

Under real stress, your creativity drops through the floor. Your fine motor skills go. Your ability to think through a novel problem in real time basically shuts down. What's left is what you drilled. Whatever you built into yourself before the emergency, that's your entire toolkit. That's it. That's the whole box.

Which means your response to the next big shift in this industry has already been decided.

Sit with that one. It was decided months ago, or years ago, by the things you built or didn't build. Whether you have relationships outside of lender work. Whether you have a pipeline or a phone number. Whether you have any financial and emotional reserves. Whether you've ever practiced saying a higher number out loud without your voice cracking. Whether you have ever, one single time, gone and found a client on purpose instead of waiting for one to be assigned to you.

If you've never done it before, guaranteed you will not do it in the middle of an emergency. That's not a character flaw. That's just how human beings work under stress.

There's a rule of thumb in emergency response about how people behave in a sudden crisis. Roughly ten percent act decisively and correctly. Roughly eighty percent freeze, they go passive and compliant, they wait to be told what to do, and they will follow anybody who seems like they know where they're going. And roughly ten percent do exactly the wrong thing, they panic, they thrash, and they often take other people down with them.

Ten, eighty, ten.

Now, everybody listening to this thinks they're in the first ten, they almost always do. Everybody. That's the whole problem with the first ten, everybody assumes they're in it. But you don't have to guess, my friends, because this industry has run the experiment on you already. There have been shifts. There have been announcements. There have been market moves and technology moves and fee moves. And you responded to them somehow.

So, look at the tape. The last time something blew up in your business, did you stop and think, or did you thrash? Did you act, did you freeze, or did you make it worse?

Rule 6: Triage. You Can't Save Everything.

This is the coldest rule in emergency medicine and it's the one this industry needs most. I had a difficult time with it when it was being taught in first responder courses because it can be brutal.

Triage is the decision nobody wants to make. When there are more patients than there are resources, somebody has to walk the scene and decide who gets attention, who waits, and who gets nothing. And that last category exists. It's real. It's the hardest thing in the job, and here's why they do it anyway: because refusing to make that decision does not save everyone. Refusing to make that decision means you spread yourself so thin over everybody that you end up saving nobody.

Appraisers refuse to triage, and it is quietly killing this industry from the inside.

You keep the client who pays you the least and complains the most, because it's still revenue. You keep the service line that eats forty percent of your week and produces eight percent of your income, because you've always done it. You keep the AMC that's been grinding your fee down for four years and treating you like shit, because what if the other work dries up. You keep the geographic area that costs you three hours of windshield time, because it's a fee.

Every one of those is a patient you're refusing to leave behind. Everyone of this is a black tag you refuse to place on a process, a client, or product. And the total effect of saving all of them is that you have nothing left for the one thing that could actually change your business, which is going and building something better.

Trying to save every client is precisely how you lose the business.

Triage in your business looks like this. You walk your own scene. You look at every client, every service, every commitment, and you make the cold call on each one: this one gets my attention, this one waits, and this one I am leaving behind. And then, and this is the part people don't do, you actually leave it behind. You don't keep going back to check on it. You don't keep it on life support out of guilt. You leave it, because the resources you're spending on it are needed somewhere they'll actually matter.

It feels heartless. It's the opposite. The medic who triages saves more people than the one who won't. Every time. Not sometimes. Every time.

Ok, hopefully this last one might make you feel a little better.

Rule 7: Self-Rescue Is Not Solo Rescue

I have to put a little guardrail on this whole thing, because I know how "no one is coming" lands with a certain percentage of you, and I've been in business and in this particular industry long enough to know exactly which percentage.

Some of you are going to hear this entire episode and take it as permission. You're going to hear "no one is coming" and think, that's right, I've always known it, I don't need anybody, I'll do it all myself, always have. And you'll turn a message about ownership and responsibility into a justification for the very thing that's been holding you back for twenty years.

So let me be extremely clear. Self-rescue does not mean solo rescue. Those are two different things and confusing them will kill you.

Go look at how actual rescuers operate. They train in teams. They call for backup constantly. They have systems, protocols, and mutual aid agreements with three counties over. Nobody in that world gets a medal for handling it alone. In fact, going in alone when you didn't have to is the thing that gets you a conversation with your captain afterward, because you didn't demonstrate courage, you demonstrated ego, and ego on a scene is a liability.

First responders are called first responders simply because they may be the first to respond to a scene. There goal is to assess, maybe stabilize, and then get victims to the next highest level of care.

Self-rescue simply means you own the outcome. It does not mean you refuse the help.

If somebody throws you a rope, you grab the rope. You'd have to be a fool not to. Owning your rescue means you're the one who decides, who acts, who moves, and who's accountable for where you end up. It doesn't mean you turn down help out of pride while you go under.

And that lone wolf thing, my friends, is not strength. That's Rule 2 waiting to happen (don’t become the second victim). The appraiser who does everything themselves, who has no team, no coach, no mastermind, no peer group, nobody to call, that person is not independent. That person is one bad month away from being the second victim on their own scene.

The most independent people I've ever met have the best teams around them. That's not a coincidence. That's the whole point. They're independent because of the team, not in spite of it.

Friends, the water doesn’t drown you. Your inability to swim or self rescue does. The market didn't drown you. The AMCs didn't drown you. Fannie Mae didn't drown you. The technology didn't drown you. Your lack of self-rescue capacity drowned you.

The water is just water. It doesn't have intent. It isn't out to get you. It's been doing exactly what water does since before you were born and it will keep doing it long after you're gone. The water is not the variable. You are the variable. You are the only variable in this entire equation that can actually change, and you've spent years studying the water instead.

So, here's the question, and it's the one that made a few of my coaching students genuinely angry with me before they thanked me for it: what are you blaming the water for that's actually your own lack of preparation?

I know that's hard to hear. I know some of you are in your car right now doing the thing where you're arguing with me out loud. Good! That means it hit something. Here’s the flip you may need to transform all of this: If nobody is coming to save you, then nobody can stop you either.

Think about that for a second. If there's no cavalry, then there's also no permission required. There's no one whose approval you need. There's no gatekeeper, no committee, no rescue operation with a schedule and a waiting list that you have to be patient with. There's nobody out there who decides when it's your turn. You are holding the rope. Nobody else's hand is on it. Which means the only question left is what you do with it, and that question has been sitting there, unanswered, waiting on you, this entire time.

Here's your assignment this week. Three questions. On paper, not in your head, because in your head you'll cheat and you know it.

Question one. If your biggest client disappeared tomorrow, how many days until you're in real trouble?

Not how many days until it's uncomfortable. How many days until it's actually a problem, until you're making decisions out of fear instead of out of strategy. Write the number down. That number is your self-rescue runway, and it is the single most honest number in your business. It tells you exactly how exposed you've let yourself get. If that number is small, you don't have a business, you have an arrangement, and arrangements end.

Question two. What's the one "have to" you can turn into a "get to" this week?

You already know what it is. It surfaced twenty minutes ago when I first asked. Write it down, put a day next to it, and do it this week. Not this quarter. This week. Because the whole point of Rule 5 is that you fall to the level of your training, and training starts with one rep.

Question three. Where are you drifting on the comfortable current?

Name it specifically. Not "I need to grow." That's not a thing. "My fee for X has not moved since Y." "Client Z is sixty percent of my volume." "I have not asked for new work in three years." Whatever it is, that's your slide down the mountain, and that's where you drive the axe in. Remember: ‘ugly and early’, that’s the rule.

I want to take you back to the water one more time before we're done.

You go in. You surface. Your breathing goes shallow and your chest gets tight, and your eyes start scanning the shore, because that's what human eyes do. That's the part that isn't your fault. That's a hundred thousand years of programming and you don't get a vote on it.

But then comes the next second. And in that next second there's a choice, and it's the only choice that has ever actually mattered in your life or your business. You can keep looking for the rope, or you can start swimming.

Everybody's watching that shoreline, my friends. This whole industry is watching that shoreline. Firing flares, checking the sky, waiting for the sound of a helicopter that has never once been dispatched. And the current keeps moving, and it feels like nothing, because it always feels like nothing.

Strength is not waiting for rescue. Strength is self-rescue. It's you, on the scene of your own emergency, being the first responder you already are, because you've been the first responder this entire time. You just hadn't accepted the job.

So, take the job. Check your gear. Stop your slide. Read your umbles. Make your triage calls. Grab the rope when somebody throws you one, and then keep swimming anyway. And when it's hard, and it will be hard, remember that you don't have to do any of it.

You get to.

Until next week, my friends, Do more. Be more. Live more. Give more. I’m out…