Turning Darkness into Light: A Blind Man's Journey to Purpose with Chad Foster

00:00:00
You are going to love this conversation with Chad Foster. Chad is the author of Blind Ambition, and the reason he's qualified to write a book like that is that Chad went blind when he was 21 years old. And so he's lived a good portion of his life, more than half of his life, blind. And it's incredible what he's been able to do with that, with his life. He's.

00:00:30
The guy is a success professionally and personally, no doubt about it. He is a downhill skier, which is amazing. And we talk about that toward the end, how he's able to do that, being blind, it's just incredible. He also is a jiu jitsu practitioner, which we get into. We talk a lot about the art of being comfortable with discomfort, you know, being okay with things not being okay, and turning your adversity into a strength.

00:01:06
He is really an ideal guest for my show. He was the first blind executive from Harvard Business School's leadership program, which is just incredible. He's done a lot of computer coding and CRM work, which is just fascinating, the fact that he's blind. And so therefore, he ended up writing code, which benefited not only himself, but benefit the company he was working for because he was blind. So that's really an underlying theme of this episode.

00:01:42
Just looking at what may be viewed as a curse or something, that's not fair, something bad in your life, and really turning that into a strength. It's easy to say. It's easy for me to sit here and talk about that. But you're going to love how Chad unpacks this and how he details how he was, over time, able to do that in his own life and how he's now using this to. As a blessing to benefit others.

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So this is a fantastic episode. You do not want to miss it.

00:02:17
Welcome to from adversity to abundance, the go to podcast for real estate entrepreneurs seeking not just to thrive, but to conquer with resilience and mental sharpness. Each week, join us as we dive into the compelling world of real estate through the lens of mental fitness, where challenges transform into opportunities. Get ready to transform your mindset and expand your understanding of what it takes to succeed in real estate. Let's explore these stories of triumph and resilience together.

00:02:56
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the from adversity to abundance podcast. I am your host, Jamie Bateman, and I'm pumped today to have with us Chad Foster. Chad is the author of a book called Blind Ambition, and he's a sought after speaker. And we're getting get into, uh, more of what he's up to in a bit here, but, Chad, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Jamie.

00:03:18
How you doing? I'm doing pretty well. I, uh, had a call earlier, and I. I said that the sun is shining and birds are chirping, and I'm. I'm vertical.

00:03:27
So, you know, it sounds a lot. Like what I say. Sometimes I'll say it to people and they wonder, where's this guy coming from? But I'll tell them it's a great day because I'm on the right. I woke up on the right side of the dirt today.

00:03:38
You. You know, any day you can wake up on the right side of the dirt. It's a good day. I love that. That's awesome.

00:03:43
Um, so, Chad, before we jump into your backstory, um, tell the listener who you are and what you're up to today. So, name's Chad Foster. I am a keynote speaker, professional speaker, and author leadership coach. I help people by empowering them to not be victims of their circumstances. So I break down the anatomy of resilience to equip people so that they can bounce back from their own setbacks better off than before.

00:04:16
And I think I'm qualified to do that just in case people are wondering, because as they'll hear, I went blind, totally blind, from an inherited eye disease while I was in my early twenties and came out of that experience happier and more successful than when I could see. So that's a little bit unusual. But what I like to do is help people, and leaders and organizations empower people so that they don't have to be victims of their circumstances and they can reach their full potential, that's fantastic. And the fact that, you know, you're a blind downhill skier, blind combat brazilian jiu jitsu practitioner, and you've had a lot of corporate success as well. Obviously, that all speaks to the fact that you know what you're talking about, and you are absolutely qualified to speak about overcoming adversity and getting to abundance, which is the whole, whole purpose of this show.

00:05:09
So this is the ideal guest for the show, for sure. Wonderful. Look forward to the conversation. Yeah, it's funny. A lot of times we look at adversity.

00:05:22
I think a lot of people look at adversity as this big, daunting thing, and I just tend to view it a little bit differently. I look at my situation and where I'm at today. If I hadn't faced what I'd been through in my life, I probably wouldn't appreciate where I'm at nearly as much if things were just handed to me. But I had to work so hard when I went blind to relearn how to learn and to get a college degree and to work in corporate and to get promoted and all those things, doing it all with my eyes closed, teaching myself how to write code, to engineer software without being able to see my computer screen. And all these things that I had to do were super duper hard.

00:06:02
But it also makes where I'm at today all the more enjoyable. So I think the adversity actually helps us, because without it, we wouldn't have a chance to grow. It's the adversity, the obstacles that we face that give us that opportunity to grow. So I personally don't want a life without adversity just because I feel like it wouldn't be that fulfilling or that gratifying. Absolutely.

00:06:24
That's so good. I just read a book a little while ago called the Comfort crisis, and it just speaks a lot about how as a society, we've just become addicted to comfort and having no problems getting rid of any kind of discomfort or staying within your comfort zone 24/7 man, does that not lead to problems and not what, you know, unfulfilled lives and a lot of societal issues. But before we get to philosophical there, and before I get on my soapbox, let's jump back into your backstory and more specificity. So you mentioned to me before we hit record that I think age three is when you were first diagnosed. Is that right?

00:07:10
Yeah, three years old. They diagnosed me at From Adversity to Abundance Podcast center with retinitis pigmentosa. They weren't entirely sure this was back in the late seventies, and so they weren't, they couldn't prove like they can today, what my genetic mutation is, but back then, they suspected that's what it was because I couldn't see well in poorly lit conditions. And so my parents took me there, and doctors there diagnosed me with RP retinitis pigmentosa. And they advised my parents strongly to put me in a special school for the blind, and they instead, they decided to sign me up for soccer.

00:07:42
So took a little bit of a detour there. Yeah, that was not in the prescription, I guess, but doctors got it, so. Okay, so walk us through kind of. I know, from three to 21. Walk us from three to 21.

00:08:00
How was your life at that point? It was bumpy, literally and figuratively. Learning the limitations of my eyesight, not being able to see and. And poor lighting conditions, frequent trips to the hospital, you know, at night, I would bump into things, be that, like a downspout or the pipe on the back of a water truck one time split my head wide open. I was there so much, just to give you a sense for it, that the hospital staff questioned both me and my parents in separate rooms because they thought that they were abusing me.

00:08:30
Excuse me. The truth is, they were not abusing me. I just didn't know what I couldn't see because I couldn't see it. And so I was bumping into things. So that was very physically uncomfortable.

00:08:40
And then I got older and learned the limitations of my eyesight at night, but could still see okay during the day. And I got. Got to high school and couldn't really drive at night, obviously, because I couldn't see well enough to walk at night, so I couldn't drive at night, even with the headlights. So that was kind of socially uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable. And then in college, graduated high school, went to college, where I was studying to go into the medical field, because I wanted to help other people.

00:09:07
And then I was in the pre med field with classes like anatomy and physiology, and I, you know, I couldn't even see to complete my classes at that point. My eyesight really faded out to the point where I had to get a medical withdrawal, both from my classes and from my major. And that was a really difficult point for me because I wasn't sure where I was going to go from there. You know, we ask kids all the time what they want to be when they grow up, and there's a good reason that none of them say they want to be a blind person. You know, it's not on the short list of most people.

00:09:38
And so I had to really reassess my situation, because they were. I was in college. I was 21 years old. What do you want to be? I didn't even know what I could be.

00:09:46
I didn't know what was possible. I didn't know what tools were out there, what was available. And so I was just kind of stuck in this victim mindset from that point forward. Actually, it started before then, if I'm being honest. I had a victim mindset as a kid.

00:09:59
Why'd this happen to me? This is unfair. None of my friends are going through this. And obviously, when things faded out totally at 21 years old, that didn't get much better. Jeff.

00:10:06
Yeah. So actually speak to that a little bit, because, number one, we're going to be kind of moving the show going forward to focus more on mental fitness and mindset, specifically for real estate entrepreneurs. Um, but, um, speak to that, you know, as a. As a young kid. I mean, you know, maybe as a teenager.

00:10:24
Um, just real quickly, I'd. You know, my son has had a lot of major challenges in his life. He's 14, and. And he actually has a genetic condition. And.

00:10:36
And when we found that out, I spoke with him and we told him about it, and. And I told him, you know, and. And now, I will say, this is easy for me to say, right? It's much more difficult to actually internalize. But I told, look, hey, bud, you can.

00:10:53
You can look at this like, why me? Why do I have this genetic condition? Why did God do this to me? Why? Why?

00:10:59
You know, most kids don't have this condition. It's not fair. And. Or. Or you can look at this like, hey, actually, most of the kids who have this genetic condition have.

00:11:10
Have it a lot worse than I do, and I have a lot of things going for me. And again, I'm not sitting here. I mean, Chad, I'm not blind. I'm not. I'm not.

00:11:20
I'm not saying this would be easy. So I'm not sure this is this the little pep talk I gave him, and he started to. He's like, yeah. And, you know, it's all about your perspective, right? So, I guess, you know, when you were, say, a teenager, you mentioned the social aspect.

00:11:36
What did that process look. Look like to kind of, I guess, move from that victim mentality to kind of empowering yourself? Well, let me. Let me start off with just a slight modification to the framing, because this is really is the essence of resilience, what you just said. And I would take it a step further than what you did, and that's what I do in my life.

00:12:03
I take it a step further in my life so I could sit around and I could choose to tell myself that I went blind because I've got incredibly bad luck, which is sort of the knee jerk reaction for most people. We all have this instinct to ask, why me? But after a lot of soul searching, I started asking that question with genuine curiosity. Instead of asking that question with the tone of a victim, the why me? This is unfair.

00:12:29
I started asking that question with an open mind and open heart and genuine curiosity. And eventually, the answer revealed itself to me. And the story that I chose to tell myself about my circumstances wasn't, this happened to me because I've got bad luck. It became, this happened to me because I'm one of the few people on this planet who has the strength and the toughness to overcome that. And use it to help other people.

00:12:53
And by doing that, you reframe your weakness into a strength. You take something that is a perceived weakness, like not being able to see or whatever your son's genetic condition is, and you start telling yourself a story. This happened to me because I'm dominant. I'm going to own this thing. I'm going to be mentally tough enough to deal with it.

00:13:10
I'm going to be able to overcome it and make it look good. I love that. That becomes a really powerful, self fulfilling prophecy that lives in your mind, and it's not long before it exits the mind and into your behavior, into your words, into your actions, into the people that you hang around with, into the, you know, everything, every aspect of your life. So it sort of permeates everything. I didn't know that when I was a teenager, right?

00:13:33
When I was a teenager, I wasn't there. I was in the eye of the storm. I hadn't figured all this stuff out, and I was very woe as me, you know, this is garbage. This isn't fair. And I'll tell you what changed it for me was when I went to get my first guide dog at roughly 23 years old.

00:13:49
And I was there with people who had it way worse off than I did. Some of them have you. They had mental impairments as well as being totally blind. So they're, you know, they have more than one disability. Some were on dialysis because they had diabetes that caused them to go blind.

00:14:05
And then there were these girls there who were literally deaf and blind, and they couldn't see nor hear anything. But yet these people had the living courage to get a guide dog, to travel the world independently on streets. And it just. It blew me away, and it honestly blew the pity right out of me. And, you know, instantly it's hard to.

00:14:24
It's hard to be around somebody like that who faces such inconceivable challenges, even relative to somebody who went blind. You live with these people for 26 days like I did, and it's impossible to leave there feeling like a victim. You have to feel like, oh, my God, you know, I've been given so many things that I haven't really been appreciative of, like my hearing, like my kidney function, like my mental faculties, all these things that we all very naturally take for granted. So what I learned in that crash course, 26 days at leader dogs for the blind in Rochester Hills, Michigan, is that a lot of people think happiness is a feeling or it's an emotion, and it's not, you know, happiness is not a feeling. And I don't think success is an event.

00:15:10
I think they're both choices that we make or don't make. I think happiness is a decision that you make every, say, every single day when you wake up. Right. And it's linked to the gratitude that you have in your life. If you choose to be grateful for what you do have, what you'll find is that abundance follows, and you'll find that happiness follows.

00:15:29
And with happiness comes success. And so the foundation of everything for me was learning that lesson and learning how to shift my perspective not to what I lack, but for the things that I've been given, that these other people who, in my opinion, had far more challenging lives than I had, you know, they were meeting with such living courage. It just. It blew the victim mentality right out of me. That's so good.

00:15:50
And I. I mean, that really is the intent of the show here is to highlight. It's not to downplay the true struggles that anyone else is going through. Right. And the list, the listener, you know, everyone deals with hardship and adversity in their life.

00:16:06
And so our intent with the show is not to downplay what someone's going through and say, oh, well, you don't have it as bad as Chad did, or, you know, but. Yeah, but it's to inspire and say, look, you know, look what Chad did, like, and use his story and the lessons that, that you've learned, Chad. And we're trying to encourage people. So I think that's. That's.

00:16:29
That's exactly what happened to you during that 26 day period as you were. Everybody's doing something, you know? Absolutely. And it's. It's all relative to the journey that we're on.

00:16:38
You know, my experiences are significant to me because it's relative to my life experiences. And the same is true for you and your son and all of your listeners. I'm not trying to measure anybody else's adversity using my measuring stick. That would be very unwise and unempathetic. But what I do want to do is share that.

00:16:58
You know, we all are in this. This common experience of being human, and we're all going to experience some challenges and hardship. And I think it's important to be there in these experiences and in these moments and meet people where they are with empathy. But also, it's also equally important for us as owners of our lives. I'm the owner of my life.

00:17:21
You're the owner of your life. Your son's the owner of his life. We have to make a conscious decision. How much air time are we going to give these issues in our lives? How much space are we going to let them take up in our heads rent free?

00:17:35
At what point are we going to decide that, you know what? I've given this? How many ever days or hours or months or even years, I've given this issue a lot of time. And now we've gone from reflection and empathy, and we're now into rumination. And this unhealthy rumination is where it starts to become toxic and we can't move forward, and it holds us hostage.

00:17:59
And it's this victim mentality that's preventing us from moving forward. And, you know, even reframing the obstacle into an opportunity and really bouncing back better off than before from it. I love that. And it's so good because neither extreme is great, right? You can't just gloss over the adversity and say, you know, pretend like, oh, I'm not actually blind, or, this is not a challenge in any way, shape or form.

00:18:26
This doesn't bother me. I'm actually, I'm actually good with it. Right, right. I mean, that'd be ridiculous, but, yeah, but like you said, if you can't stay there for too long, because that is not healthy for you, it's not healthy for the people in your, in your life and, you know, absolutely your loved ones, et cetera. Um, I saw a little clip from Grant Cardone.

00:18:47
Regardless of what people think of grant cardone, uh, he was just talking about, um, the, the crossover between mental health and mental health challenges and entrepreneurship. And so I think specifically, he was talking about people, entrepreneurs have a much higher level of ADHD than kind of the non entrepreneur out there. Um, and he made the exact point that, that you made a little bit ago, which was because it's not that entrepreneurship necessarily leads to mental health challenges. It may in some, some level, because it can be really challenging. But, but the fact that you've overcome someone who's overcome, say, you know, ADHD or some, some, some other physical or mental challenge like that, anxiety, depression, whatever we're talking about, means that you're that much stronger, and now you're able to weather the storms that inherently come with entrepreneurship.

00:19:44
And so it's almost like because you've been through, in your case, this serious challenge with blindness, like you said, now you're able to weather these other storms with business and relationships and whatever else comes your way. Anything to add to that? Absolutely. It's all related. Right.

00:20:04
And I think even you know, in my personal life, the fact that I, as an example, you know, demanded sort of physical fitness from myself at an early age. I've always been into sports. I've started lifting weights at 14. I started playing sports when I was three, four years old until I went blind, but, you know, continued to work out. And I think a lot of people will say, well, that's sports.

00:20:26
What does that have to do with. With mental. And I'd say everything, because the mental discipline that it takes to go train on days that you don't want to train and to do the hard work and to push through when the body's not responding in the way that you want it to respond or you don't feel up to it, that discipline, I think it permeates all of our lives. And I think when I went blind and I had to relearn how to learn, yeah, it was hard work. It was hard work going from being a very visual learner to being a completely auditory learner, where visual learning was no longer an option.

00:20:58
But I was used to doing the hard work. I was used to pushing through the discomfort because of what I've been through and because of, you know, what I'd done in the gym. And then you fast forward the things that we have to do in the workforce when job changes and you have to reskill or reinvent yourself to take on a new opportunity. All that, it takes hard work, and it takes the right mindset, and I really believe that you can have all the effort in the world, but if you don't have the right mindset up front, then you're going to get sort of diminished or diluted results. So it starts with having that foundation of the right.

00:21:35
Absolutely. And I come from a sports background as well, athletics. I played college lacrosse, and, I mean, just. And you and I were speaking. I did a little jiu jitsu as well.

00:21:45
And just so much of that. Yes. Yes. It's important to be physically fit, and I'm sure that, you know, you are more productive each day because you are physically fit, for sure. But I think even more valuable is what you just said, which is the mental fitness, the mental sharpness that you brought over from training every day, the adversity of lifting weights and then relearning how to learn.

00:22:10
All that translates into facing additional adversity. So get comfortable with discomfort, brother. Get comfortable with discomfort. That is definitely the number one thing I learned from jujitsu, is just. Just get comfortable being uncomfortable, and that's okay.

00:22:25
You know, you're gonna have stress, and, um, you're gonna have hardship, you're gonna be uncomfortable, and that's. That's where the growth happens. So it just kind of accept it and. And be okay with that. Um, so when walk us through, you know, from.

00:22:38
We left off at 23 there. What did your life look like? Uh, professionally and personally from 23 on. So, 23, I had to. I'd gone into business.

00:22:51
I came back from leader dogs for the blind. I had a new outlook on life, went back into the College of Business Administration, relearned how to learn. From that point forward, I made straight a's from that point forward, made the dean's list, and got a job for a top consulting firm. And a lot of that was because of my attitude. I think, you know, when you show up with the right attitude, instead of being bitter about things, I was grateful for the things that I had been given.

00:23:20
Doors started to open up for me. I found that abundance was all around me. And so professors were more. More open to helping me. I got the resources that I needed from the school.

00:23:31
My mom actually entered the scene here and literally read every single one of my business books to audio cassette for me because no options were available back then for audio. And so I didn't want to let her down. So, again, I made. Did really well, made all a's, and I was a better blind student than I was sighted student at that point. And ended up got a job for a top consulting firm, From Adversity to Abundance Podcast, Accenture, as it's now known today, and got a job there, was in the consulting business for a little while, shifted into commercial outsourcing, did market intelligence, and then eventually, the pricing of these commercial outsourcing deals.

00:24:08
So picture large multibillion dollar technology outsourcing deals. So that could be infrastructure outsourcing, applications outsourcing, and. Or, you know, full scope applications and infrastructure outsourcing. And these are. These are huge deals and very complicated and a lot of spreadsheets.

00:24:25
And some people may be wondering, how's the world? How in the world does a blind guy use very complicated financial models? And the short answer is, I taught myself how to write code so that I can engineer my software without being able to see my computer screen. I wrote a lot of back end code to make my software talk to Microsoft Excel so that I could get what I needed out of the spreadsheet. So there's this whole back end library of objects that I could tap into.

00:24:52
Then I'd leverage that into not only doing my job well, but automating a lot of what we were doing in these financial models. So we would work on a deal and we might have 500 or 600 individual files that we're working on for a large global deal picture, trying to manage 500 to 600 individual excel files all linked together, doing all these calculations, tens of thousands of calculations inside each one of them, and then managing that with multiple iterations and multiple stakeholders inside of a really large technology services firm. So I ended up writing automation tools for a lot of that in visual basic to automate what we were doing. So that disadvantage actually helped me. Yeah.

00:25:36
Next thing I know, I'm taking a job with, with a large technology company in the Washington, DC area because I wanted to get some federal experience. And sorry to cut you off, but just so because of your blindness, you had to create that code. And because of that, the company benefited due to the automation scripts that you were. Yeah, they did. Sorry, I kind of glossed over that, didn't I?

00:26:01
No, no, I just want to make sure I highlight that the, the company, it may be viewed like, oh, well, it's a, could be like a charity case or hire this blind guy. And obviously I want to be sensitive, of course, but it turns out, no, this is actually a huge benefit for the company. Right? Yeah, it's ended up, we adopted the tools that I wrote globally. In fact, every now and then I'll still get, and this is back, and geez, 2005, 2006.

00:26:35
I've had emails as recently as a couple of years ago, like, hey, can you help us with this part of the code that you wrote? They're still using it across the entire global department to save everybody time. And you think about when you're negotiating one of these deals and you've got to make last minute deals, you want people focusing on the value at hand, whether that's the analysis or what the data is telling you, not, not focused on trying to collect and make sure the data is accurate. And so it helped to save a lot of time. And it also, honestly, it helped me to be a better new business finance lead on these deals because my blindness forced me to be a more technical person.

00:27:22
And so because of that, I can understand in a deeper, more meaningful way the technology services that we were providing. So I understood I could really wrap my head around, okay, how does the help desk services that we're providing affect desk side support, and how does that affect tier three dispatch, whether that's desk side support or desktop engineering or servers or applications or how are all these things related and how do we manage the risk associated with it? When you're billing on a fixed unit basis, and you're costing based on the actual cost for services. You got people you got to hire, equipment you got to buy, transition, transformation costs, that sort of thing. So I could wrap my head around that in a way, I think that's maybe a little more technical because I went blind.

00:28:08
Right. Most other people wouldn't be able to. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay.

00:28:13
So did you move to the DC area or you were working? Yeah, we were living there. So we were in Atlanta when I was with Anderson, and then we moved to DC back in 2003 and was with Computer Sciences Corp. They're now DXC after a couple of transactions, but then went to Unisys, helped them with their single largest account, $2 billion account that they hired me to help with, and ended up. I only stayed there a year because I realized that culturally it wasn't a great fit.

00:28:41
So I ended up going to SRA and had a lot of success there at SRA International. And several promotions there went from being a senior pricing lead. Three or four promotions later, I was a senior director running the pricing strategy and solutions group for the company. Brought in over $45 billion in contracts with my pricing decisions and strategies. And they were so appreciative for what I did for them.

00:29:05
They asked what they could do for me, and for some crazy reason, I told them to send me to Harvard. And for some crazy reason, they said, okay. They agreed to write a six figure check and send me to Harvard Business School. Wow. Yeah.

00:29:15
I was just going to mention that you were the first blind executive to graduate from the Harvard Business School's leadership program. Is that right? That's right. Yep. That's amazing.

00:29:24
When was that? 1516 when I was there. So 2015, 2016. And that's sort of what put me on the path that I'm on today. You know, I was there.

00:29:34
A lot of people think you go to Harvard Business School and you're going to learn about business cases and metrics and all that. And we did, certainly. But I think what I took away that was even more meaningful for me was the time that I spent studying with Bill George. He's the former chairman and CEO of Medtronics, and he's an executive fellow there at Harvard Business School, and he teaches people how to discover their true north. And a lot of times it has to do with challenges that people have faced in their lives.

00:30:00
And a lot of my. A lot of my fellow classmates are grappling with what theirs could be, and mine just sort of reached up and smacked me in the face. I've never really done anything with my personal journey of going blind. I didn't see it as any all that different. Anything all that different.

00:30:14
I just did what I had to do to get to my next goal. But after sitting in his class and realizing that there was opportunity to use it to help other people, I started to contemplate that. And then my classmates elected me to speak at our graduation. And so I felt that that was going to happen. So I'd prepared for it.

00:30:32
I'd flown to Texas to meet with a professional speaking consultant. Professional speaker. And we wrote like a twelve minute talk together before I'd even been nominated or elected. And so, needless to say, when I was elected and, you know, I was prepared and that sort of changed the course of my life, I saw firsthand what, what good I could do and. Yeah, that.

00:30:54
Unknow that. Once you feel that, you sense that, you can't unknow that. Yeah, well, that's so, so important. And now you're, now you're helping so many more people than you probably would have been had you kind of got, you know, just gotten another, another job. I'm not saying you didn't help people before, but now you're on a whole different purpose driven path now.

00:31:13
I went, it reminded me last night, went to a little, my daughter's a junior in high school, so she's looking at colleges and things. And so there was a panel presentation that we went to, and they were talking, four people who were representing different colleges and universities, talking about the, you know, just the process of applying in college, et cetera. And for me, it's like I hadn't really thought too much about college recently. And it just struck me that what kind of, what you just said, which was, um, you know, does it really matter what your, what your major is? I mean, you know, and I guess if you're going to be a doctor or something like that does, but, um, in most cases, you're going to change your mind anyway.

00:31:56
It's really, the value of college is not so much about the academics, right? It's about the internal work that you're doing and the relationships that you make, which is really what you just said about your experience at Harvard Business School, the internal work that you did to evaluate. What does my story mean? What could that mean to others and the relationships you made is what I hear you talking about having the most value as opposed to the classes you took and the lessons you learned about, you know, business, business principles. Is that fair to say, yeah, I think it is.

00:32:34
It's the business principles are helpful, but I think, yeah, the relationships and the introspection and the broadening of horizons and in particular for me, as it relates to sort of finding my true north, my purpose. And a lot of that comes from, yeah, what we're learning, but also not just what you're learning from your professors, but what you're learning from your classmates and what you're learning from yourself and really leaning into what's going on inside of us. You know, a lot of people think vision's about what you see. I think vision is, you know, what's inside of you, not what's outside of you. And so that sort of occurred to me then and there.

00:33:14
But I think particularly as we move into the future, the rate of change being what it is. Oh, man. I think, you know, the. The ability to transform oneself is going to be more important than it's ever been. So self reinvention, how do you have the flexibility to do that in an environment that is going to be changing so much?

00:33:35
I think it's. It's crucial, and it gets down to the openness, but certainly the tools that I talk about in mindset shifts. And it's choosing the right response, it's telling yourself the right stories, visualizing how to make unfavorable circumstances work for you instead of against you. It's getting comfortable with this comfort, and it's taking advantage of your disadvantages, because every disadvantage offers us some advantage if we use it in the right context. And so how do you use the tools that you need to reinvent yourself?

00:34:03
Because whether or not you want to change what you want to be when you grow up, which I've done a few times now, and I'll probably, you know, it's probably going to happen again, you know, at least another time or two or three, who knows? But I think you have to follow your heart and you have to be able to evolve and adapt. But I think particularly for people coming into the workforce now who are maybe 2030 years younger than I am, that rate of change is going to give them a lot fewer options. I think we had more options when I entered the workforce. Technology was starting to advance the rate of change, but now it's just, it's light years faster than what it has been.

00:34:38
And so I think it's just going to be the catalyst to force that, as opposed to waiting on people to discover that for themselves. That is. That's just gold right there.

00:34:49
My daughter doesn't, doesn't listen to me too much anymore, but I think I'm going to force her to listen to that little clip there because literally what we were talking about in the car ride home last night, she was saying that almost like it doesn't even make sense to learn a specific skill because it's going to be different in four years anyway with AI and everything else. I mean, on some level she's probably right, if we're talking about an academic, you know, skill but a particular field. But what you just said is the ability to reinvent yourself, I mean, you had to relearn how to learn, and just the ability to respond and reinvent yourself and adapt is going to be so much more valuable than it already is. Um, yeah, just due to the rapid, the rate of change. That's really good.

00:35:38
Um, absolutely. So talk about what you're up to in, you know, today in a little bit more detail. I know you have, uh, speaking arrangements and you have your book. Talk to us about what's going on today. Yeah, so the, the book's been out for a couple of years.

00:35:56
I speak kind of all over the world. I'll probably do 60 to 80 events this year, ranging from audiences as small as 60 or 70 to as big as five or 6000 so far here in the US mainly. I've got some in Canada, I've got some in Europe and South America and Southeast Asia. So kind of all over, wherever, wherever conferences are. And people think that they could use someone to come in and help them empower their organizations so that they don't have to be a victim of their circumstances, whether that's economic uncertainty or the rate of change or whatever else is going on, market disruption, all those different things.

00:36:35
And so I help leaders and organizations do that and equip their teams to understand the anatomy of resilience. I think resilience is kind of an overused word, if I'm being honest. I think a lot of people talk about resilience and it tends to sound to me a little bit like platitudes, you know, try harder or don't give up. And that's not really helpful when you're in the middle of that change curve, whatever that is. And so I'll break down how specifically people can think more resiliently using the lessons that I've learned in my own life.

00:37:04
Obviously I didn't read these in a book somewhere. It's stuff that I've lived my own lived experience, but so I help people with that and I do some coaching as well, and shorter than that, I mean, I really enjoy, like we talked about earlier in the. Before we started recording, you know, I like to get roles in, so I train in brazilian jiu jitsu every day that I'm not traveling. Yeah, love that. And do some downhill skiing at least two or three weeks a year.

00:37:30
That's, that's. I mean, it's amazing. So how long have you been doing jujitsu for? Just under two and a half years. Okay.

00:37:39
Just under two and a half years. I did it for about three years. And it was, you know, I wasn't there every day or anything. Two or three times a week for three years. And it is.

00:37:48
It is, man, it is hard to put into words the. Just the life lessons you can learn from that, but, yeah, that's, that's awesome. We want to talk about facing your fears and getting comfortable with discomfort. Like the, you know, the first few times a black belt, you know, they take your back and they put you in a chokehold and you don't feel like you have a way out. It's pretty terrifying.

00:38:09
It feels like your head's going inside a vacuum cleaner bag. But the more you do that, the more you go train, the more you learn to settle into that discomfort. And the funny thing is, the more you get comfortable with it, the more you learn to relax in the face of terror. And then you start to find ways out of the situation. And ironically, a lot of times, those seemingly inescapable chokeholds actually do have a way out if you can just stay calm and relaxed enough to look for them.

00:38:36
And it's not just applicable on the mat, you know, I mean, how many of us feel like life or work or something in our, you know, whether it's medically related or it's something in our business is putting us in a chokehold and we don't have a way out. We feel this sense of constriction and hard to breathe and anxiety. But what if we could all get really good at just settling into the discomfort and getting really calm in it and we could find ways out of situations that we otherwise wouldn't be able to? Absolutely. And what.

00:39:06
And I can tell you from, uh, tell you one thing that doesn't work on the mat, which is, uh, you know, trying harder and getting tense and, uh, just. Just muscling through. Uh, it just doesn't ask me how I know. Oh, I know. Because I did the same thing for the first year, year and a half.

00:39:26
Right. And I still have a tendency to do it every now and then. It's I mean, I'm not going to say that I'm cured. I've. I got my purple belt recently, so I'm.

00:39:33
I'm learning. Wow, that's awesome. But I'm a, I'm a slow learner when it comes to that. You get on the belt with, excuse me, on the mat with somebody who's really strong and technical, and it's the knee jerk reaction. It's like, how do you untrain that behavior?

00:39:44
Because the thing is, when you're tense, you can't feel or see the openings because you're too, you're too constricted, you're not loose enough. And, yeah, you know, it's just, it's one of those things, like, what if everybody could just stay calm and relaxed? How many more cracks and life's chokeholds could we find? I just. I feel like there's.

00:40:05
It's so broadly applicable, Jeff. It is. We're missing opportunities every day because we're so focused on our own fear and our own, you know, just limitations. We're just missing that. And so there's, that's, that's.

00:40:19
We could have multiple episodes just on. On that topic right there, but. So I've got a few. Few rapid fire questions. You ready?

00:40:28
Yeah, let's do it. All right. This one sometimes trips people up a little bit. Okay. What is one thing that people misunderstand about you, Chad?

00:40:38
One thing that people misunderstand about me.

00:40:44
They may look at my situation and think that, you know, Chad 2.0 never faced, like, real internal emotional struggle, and I did, but I think they'll see me today and wonder, well, that guy went blind, and, wow, he seems completely unfazed. And the truth of the matter is, you're seeing Chad 2.0. Chad 1.0 was in a really bad spot, and that was years ago, but thankfully, I've been able to navigate that situation. I came out in one piece, but I definitely, you know, there were some dark days. Pun intended.

00:41:23
There were some dark days, figuratively. Figuratively and metaphorically and literally speaking.

00:41:31
And so I can. I can empathize where people are struggling. I really know what it's like to be in that spot and to feel, whether it's fear, whether it's hopelessness, it's anxiety, a sense of not wanting to be dependent on other people, a sense of not feeling comfortable with who I am because I didn't want to be a blind guy. And shifting all of that now I feel I'm super comfortable in who I am. I can be unapologetically authentic to who I am without any fear.

00:42:08
I don't really. I mean, I have fear now, but I step through fear, and so fear doesn't control me. And. But. But it used to, and that's.

00:42:17
And that's okay. We're all on our own individual journeys. But I think people look at me today and just think, wow. That, you know, that there's. Did he ever face.

00:42:26
You know, not did he face something, but did he ever, you know, get into it? A really bad spot. And the truth is, yeah, I was in a really bad spot 25 years ago. Got it. And, yeah.

00:42:39
Thanks for sharing that. And we don't. Yeah. It's very easy to gloss over a lot of the hardship people have been through, the guests have been through on the show, and we're not saying that Chad or I will never be in a hard spot again. That's.

00:42:56
The whole point is life will bring us more adversity, and that's okay. So if you could go back and give your 18 year old self some advice, what would that be? Ooh. I mean, start doing the. Start doing the work sooner.

00:43:16
I sort of. When I went blind in college, I had the woe is me mentality, and I was. I did some fairly non productive things, just like, okay, I'm gonna see what I can see while I can see it. Instead of putting my nose down and doing some of the hard work, I would get myself pointed in the right direction a little bit sooner. And, you know, those.

00:43:38
Those non productive years kind of made me who I am today. So I say that with a little bit of trepidation, but I feel like I could have been a little bit more effective in getting on the right path. It was. It was hard, though. You know, you get.

00:43:54
You have something. Life happen to you like that. And. And I honestly, I would start training brazilian jiu jitsu before I'm 46. I would have started in my late teens.

00:44:03
Yeah. If not sooner. Absolutely. What is a book or two besides yours? That's called blind ambition.

00:44:12
What is another book or two that you would recommend for our listeners?

00:44:19
I think Chris Voss's book is really good. Never split the difference. That is a really good one. Yeah. Really like his book.

00:44:26
I like Bill George's book, True north, another really good book for people looking to do some self reflection. But I've got a probably. I've got hundreds of books that I just. I love reading, so. Got a long list.

00:44:39
It's awesome.

00:44:42
What is one question that I have not asked you that you wish I had.

00:44:58
Anything you want to cover we haven't. Touched on, maybe about, you know, some of the people may. Yeah, about the downhill skiing. So people may wonder kind of how that works and whether or not I do experience fear. So how does a blind guy go down a black diamond at 55 miles an hour?

00:45:16
And why, maybe more importantly, you know, the why is maybe a little simpler. And it's just because I'd always been tethered to something as long as I have been blind, you know, whether it's a person, a dog, or whatever, guiding me around. And the first time I got on skis at 38 years old, I felt something I hadn't felt in 16 years. And so I was kind of hooked at that point. And obviously, I wasn't a very good skier back then.

00:45:43
I was just kind of somewhat controllably hurtling down the mountain, which was not. It's pretty hard to learn how to ski when you can't see. Got to have really good balance, really good technique. Neither of one. Neither of which I had at the.

00:45:57
At the time. But eventually, you sort of. You do learn how to do it, and it helps you continue to kind of push your edges. And when I say that, I don't mean the edges of the skis, but I mean the edge of your comfort zone and face your fears because, you know, when you're going downhill and you can't ski, you can't see. Excuse me.

00:46:16
Then you really do have to, you know, you have to face your fears, what's in front of me, and you have to trust the person next to you or behind me, in this case. And they're using a bluetooth earpiece and microphone, and they're telling me which direction to go. And so that's kind of how we navigate it is just with bluetooth communication gear, with microphones and earpieces and things like that. So it's. It's not bulletproof.

00:46:40
You know, we've had a few hiccups that have happened, and, you know, you learn and move on, sure. But at the end of the day, you know, I don't want to live my life to try and just maximize years. Sure, I would love to live a long, healthy life, but I also want to maximize experiences. And I just don't feel like for me personally, it's about the number of times we rotate the sun. I feel like for me, it's about the experiences that I get out of life and how fully I live what, what life has to offer.

00:47:11
So that sounds like. Sounds like the skiing just makes you feel alive and, and, uh, you know, like you said it, living quality years, I think, and having those quality experiences with people, uh, yeah, it's just more valuable than just living a long life. I mean, yeah, certainly those can go hand in hand, right? Yeah, it can be. And we're as careful as we can be and we try to minimize, you know, the likelihood of incidents, but you don't have to look too far for somebody who can see who's been injured out on the mountain.

00:47:43
Right, right. And it does happen, and you just sort of accept that going into it. Like, okay, we're going to try and minimize this. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but if it does, you know, sort of is what it is. I have to live at the same time.

00:47:55
There's also, you know, it's. It's. It's also, in my opinion, risky to not live, right. To just, like, play too safe in life. Right.

00:48:04
There. There's some risk there. Well, there's a big risk of having regrets. You look back on your life and that's the one. The one fear that I can't get over and that's looking back on my life if I'm so fortunate to make it to the golden years and I look back and it's like, wow, I wish I would have.

00:48:18
Oh, I could have. And, you know, we only get one life to live. You know, we have to make it. We have to make the most out of it. I'm not getting a do over, and neither are you or neither or any of your listeners, so we have to make the most of this one.

00:48:31
Awesome. Well, as we wrap up here, Chad, real quickly, you mentioned you have. I think it's vacation rentals. What does that look like? Since we have a lot of real estate investors who listen, I think you and your wife do that.

00:48:42
What's that look like? Yeah, we have vacation rentals in different places we like to go, whether that's at the beach or in the mountains, obviously. I like to ski and my wife's a brazilian, so she likes to go to the beach and I like to spend time on the mountain. And so we've got a bit of that and hope to continue doing that. That's going to be our retirement plan, if you will.

00:49:01
The passive income that we create from the vacation properties that we get to go use both when we're working and also in retirement and creating passive income from that and if we stay within the IR's limits, obviously creating a tax deduction for those visits. So it's kind of a win, win, win. And I feel like vacation properties for me is the poor man's dividend paying stock. I don't have billions of dollars, so that 2% is enough to, to really live on. But if you can kick off 1015 ish percent off of passive income, off of a piece of real estate, then why not?

00:49:36
Especially with the tax advantages that you get from some of the write offs. 100%. All right, two more questions. I normally ask. This one, I skipped over it.

00:49:44
If you were given $10 million tomorrow, what would you do with it?

00:49:52
I probably put, I probably put seven of it in real estate. There you go. Yeah, I would, I would, I would. Because the next place we want to buy, we're checking it out. But, you know, we're not, we're not buying that expensive.

00:50:08
We're buying like four bedroom places. But I'd probably, probably get a place in France, south of France, because it's like, it's close to the beach and it's close to the French Alps. There you go. Yeah. Kind of kill two birds with 1 st there.

00:50:22
So I probably put seven of it in real estate. Keep probably a million and a half on hand, and then I probably would probably end up spending the other million and a half on probably cars and stuff like that. That's my guess. Yeah. There you go.

00:50:40
I've got a bit of an affinity for going fast. Sounds like it. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not a great driver, but my wife is, thankfully awesome. All right, last question before we wrap up.

00:50:51
Where can our listeners find you online? Chad, go to Chad efoster.com forward slash a, two a and that's the letter a, the number two a and the letter a. Chad Foster.com forward slash a, two a. Awesome, fantastic, Chad. This has been so, so good.

00:51:12
Really, really good stuff. Had a great time. Thank you. Super inspiring and practical. Just, I wish you nothing but the best, Chad.

00:51:21
And to our listeners, thank you for spending your most valuable resource with us. And actually, I'm going to start changing this. I used to say it's your time, but now I think it's your attention. We have so many things we give our attention to these days. Thank you for spending your attention listening to Chad and me.

00:51:40
And we wish everyone nothing but the best. Thanks all. Take care.

00:51:51
Thank you for joining us on from adversity to abundance. We hope today's episode has equipped you with valuable insights and practical advice to elevate your real estate journey. For more inspiring stories and resources, visit us at www. Dot Adverse Adversity two From Adversity to Abundance Podcast. If this episode has inspired you, please share it with a friend who could also benefit from our conversation together.

00:52:14
Let's turn adversity into abundance. Until next time, keep building your mental fitness and your real estate empire.