Dean Furness / To Overcome Challenges, Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Hello, dear BookDuck listeners! Today let's listen to the story of a man who, despite his inability to walk, went further, reached new heights, and learned how to stop comparing himself with others. That man is Dean Furness. By his example, he teaches us how to overcome challenges by stopping comparing ourselves to others.

Dean began his speech at TedxTalk with these words.

It seems that for almost our entire lives, when we were babies, we were measured by our height and weight, and as we grew, this became our speed and our strength. And even at school, there are test scores, and today with our salaries and labor productivity. It seems that these personal averages are almost always used to measure our standing compared to our peers. And I think we should look at it a little differently. It's just a personal average, it's something very personal and it's meant for you and I think if you focus on it and work on building it, you can start doing some amazing things.

This idea came to Dean’s mind on a December evening in 2011. He just went outside to do his evening work and feed the horses. He jumped into their tractor and a few minutes later a bale of hay five feet high and weighing 700 pounds fell out of the loader, pinning him to the tractor seat and crushing his T5 and T6 vertebrae. Dean didn’t lose consciousness, but he felt that hum in his whole body and immediately understood what had happened.

Dean’s hands reached for his legs, but his legs didn't realize they were being touched. And he didn't really feel anything below the center of his chest.

At the hospital, he was told that he might never be able to walk.

Everything that he had learned and known about his height, strength, balance, and mobility was blown away. Because his entire personal average had been reset.

Dean always compared himself to the old Dean. What could the old Dean do, in different situations?

After the hospital, Dean was transferred to a specialty spinal cord rehab hospital about 10 hours from home, and wouldn't you know, the first day of rehab and the first session they had something called fit class, and a group of them broke into teams to see which team could do the most reps in the weight machine. They've all been there and haven't been to the gym in a year or two. Neither had him. And so what do you do? You try to do what you did a couple of years ago, and you do a couple of sets.

And then what do you do? A couple more. And you're feeling even better, so you do more.

And the next two weeks you complain to your family about how sore you are. Dean’s team went all out and they won, they won big, and for the next three days, he couldn’t straighten his arms, which isn't that big a deal except when you're in a wheelchair and that's really what you have to use to get around.

And that proved to be a fundamental lesson for him.

It was one thing that Dean couldn't compare himself to himself, but even around people in the same situation in that hospital, Dean found that he couldn't try to keep pace or set the pace with them as well, and he was left with really only one choice and that was to focus on who he was at that point in time with where he needed to go and to get back to who he needed to be.

For the next six weeks, for seven to eight hours a day, that's what Dean did.

He built little by little, and, as you might expect, when you're recovering from a spinal cord injury, you're going to have a bad day. You might have a few in a row.

What Dean found out is that good and bad really didn't have a lot of meaning unless he had the context of knowing what his average was. It was really up to Dean to decide if something was bad or good based on where he was at that point in time, and it was in Dean’s control to determine if it really was a bad day.

In fact, it was his decision on whether or not he could stop a streak of bad days. And what Dean found during that time away from home is he never had a bad day, even with everything going on. There were parts of his day that were certainly not as pleasant as they could be, but it was never an entirely bad day.

What Dean found in those scenarios is the quicker you move on to what's next, the quicker you can start attacking things.

And by moving on to the next as fast as possible, you shrink the time you spend in those bad scenarios and it gives you more time for the good. And, as a result, the good outweighs the bad, your average increases and that's just how the math works.

It didn't matter to him if he'd spent the morning really struggling with his medication, or at lunch, his legs being very spastic, or even if he had fallen out of his wheelchair.

They were just small parts of his day and small parts of his average. And so, in the months and years that followed, Dean continued to try to attack things in that way, and before he knew it he was being presented with some pretty incredible challenges, like completing a marathon in a wheelchair.

In 2016, his therapist said that Dean should run a half marathon. He only had 10 days to do it. And he liked this idea and succeeded. Then he realized that he wanted to run another marathon and start looking for the best wheelchair races.

He also participated in these races, didn’t win, but found real friends, and believed in himself. For the third time, he was better than the second time. And there was a moment when he had to help himself, and he did it.

To sum up, if you really want to be better in so many ways, a better parent, a better husband/wife, a better coach, teammate, friend, and person, take some time and focus on yourself instead of others, and you can win challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.