Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside personal growth. This is Greg voisen, host of inside personal growth. And joining me from Atlanta, Georgia, is Chad e Foster and Chad has a new book out, and I'm going to hold it up here, Chad, and you can all see it on the back of his screen as well blind ambition, and it's how to go from victim to visionary. Chad, Good day to you. How you doing? Doing great.

Chad Foster
Greg, how are you doing this morning?

Greg Voisen
Great. It's a pleasure having you on the show, and I'm so happy that we got this opportunity to spend a few minutes with my listeners, because I think they're really going to get a lot out of your story and how you've lived your life, and I want to give them a little bit of background. Chad is a husband, a father and an avid snow skier, and that's no joke. And for all of you listening, if you haven't already figured out, Chad is blind, and I've seen some of the videos on YouTube of him skiing. He is not just competing with his condition, he's competing with the world's most successful people. Chad wants to make blind look good and believes he is not successful in spite of being blind, but because he's blind, he embraced his problem and turned it into a solution. He works at Red Hat, one of the world's most innovative tech companies and the world's largest open source software company, recently purchased by IBM for 34 billion with determination and ambition, which this guy has mountains of it and drive. He created what Oracle would say would be impossible. He gave millions of people the ability to earn a living by becoming the first to create customer relation, or CRM software for the visually impaired with speaking initiatives from London to Beijing and Atlanta. Opera, I commissioned an opera inspired by his life story. Chad inspires people all over the world, and he wants people to learn from their own blind spots. Well, Chad, that's quite a bio for all my listeners, just go to the website that you're going to want to go to is Chad e Forrester fo I'm sorry, Forrester F, O, S, T, E, R, there. You can learn more about Chad. There's all kinds of great information there, including information about the book. You can inquire about his speaking engagements. You can inquire personally about him as well. Well, I want to just kind of kick this off, because everybody knows at this point who's listening or watching that you literally are blind. And I think it's good to tell the story share kind of the moment when you realize you kind of lost your sight and and then you realize it wasn't the end, but the beginning of a new perspective. And I think that's, you know, for most people listening, that's going to be the most important part. Is when you lose something you gain something else.

Chad Foster
Yeah, the thing is, it happened sort of gradually over time, and there were a few moments, you know, there were moments growing up when I realized I just couldn't see as well as other people in certain situations, maybe it was at dark or at dusk, and that was kind of challenging learning the limitations of my eyesight, although I could still see fine during the day, I played sports, I I drove a car, I did all those things that young kids do. And then when I was in college, that's when my eyesight began to fade, really during the day, to where I couldn't even see to complete my classes, I had to get a medical withdrawal from my from my major, from my classes. I wanted to go into the medical field because I wanted to help other people, and then, as I'm going blind, I'm not even sure if I can help myself, you know. So I switched my major to business. Lost nearly three years of university work because all the work that I've done towards pre med wasn't applicable in the business area, and so had to really do a reset and try and figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Because, you know, we ask kids all the time what they want to be, and it sure isn't blind, right? That's not what people dream of being. And so really did have to reset at that point. And this is roughly 21 years old, 23 years old, I went to get my first seeing eye dog, and that really is where things shifted for me. You know, that experience getting my first seeing eye dog and arriving on the campus there and thinking that, you know, life was pretty bad. I was a victim, and all my friends were able to see and they didn't have any real disabilities they were dealing with. And here I was dealing with this, this condition, and I rolled in there with this victim mentality, and I met people there that really inspired me, you know, people who had it far worse off than I did. Some of the people had diabetes, and so they were on dialysis all the time, and some people had multiple disabilities, whether it was mental or hearing and visual disabilities, ie they were deaf and blind, and they were chasing the world and their dreams with such hope and optimism and living courage that it made me ashamed of my pathetic attitude in the way that I'd looked at my situation. And so that's when I really started to to embrace my situation and accept it, because I appreciated what I had been given. And that really is the the foundation for everything is gratitude. And looking at, you know, the 20 something years of eyesight that I'd had, all of my hearing, all my mental faculties, all the things that many of these people whom I've grown close with never had, and here I am living with them for almost a month, you know, 26 days there. It just completely reshaped my perspective on everything, and it showed me that happiness, and even success, for that matter, they're not events. You know, happiness is not a feeling, and it's not an emotion, it's a decision that you make every single day, when you wake up and it's it's linked to your perspective in the way you've attached yourself to circumstances. And so that really was the moment for me, when I started to reevaluate my approach towards everything. I didn't have all the answers at this point, but I certainly had a new attitude and a new outlook on life and the things that I'd been given in the circumstances that I found myself in.

Greg Voisen
Well, mentally, obviously, this is as much a mental game as it is the physical part, where you lost the site, and I think working on yourself psychologically and emotionally is really as difficult of a journey as working on yourself, because now you need a seeing eye dog, right? Yeah. And so I think for our listeners, what would be a really important thing to kind of explain to them is as you gradually went blind and you knew this was ultimately going to be the outcome, and you first triggered this, what we're going to call victim mentality. What are a few of the things that you were able to do or that other people helped you do, to have this visionary mindset, this mindset of, okay, I'm accepting who I am now. I'm blind. I can still do things. Were there a couple of few things that just really triggered for you, that were really embedded within your mind, that that would help people out there today say, Hey, these are ways for me to change my own perspective.

Chad Foster
Think it probably started with, you know, looking at the fact that there there are more options. And so early on, it started to occur to me that I didn't have much of a choice in this situation. So just my logical brain kicked in and said, Look, I don't have I don't have an option here. Nobody asked me if I wanted to go blind. And so this was forced upon me. Certainly wasn't something that I'd hoped or wished for. So I couldn't change it. And so logically speaking, you know, I could sit around and spend all my energy ruminating on why this is unfair and all these things, but that wouldn't change the reality of the situation. So that wasn't going to do me a lot of good. And so instead of focusing on what I could not control, the circumstances that were forced upon me, what I started to notice were things that gave me hope and optimism. And that hope and optimism, you know, created agency. For me, there were things that gave me agency in the situation. And whenever we have or feel like we have, agency that gives us hope and that gives us optimism, and that causes us to really act and to move forward, and then that progress allows us to continue. And for me, it was discovering that there were computers out there, so I went to go get my first seeing eye dog. I mentioned that earlier, and I'm there, and there's a roommate that I've got, you know, one of the guys that I became friends with, and he says he's going down the hall to check his email. And this is back in 99 I guess it was 9899 and it was 99 and I'm like, Yo, dude, you're blind. How are you going to check your email? What are you talking about? He's like, Oh, now they have software down there and talks to you. It's on a computer. It's called screen reading software. I'm going to go check up on my email. And thought, Wow, that's pretty cool. I never even heard of this here. I am 23 years old in college. Never really heard of this tool, and so I was not prepared at all for what was coming. But the fact that there were tools available at that time that sort of gave me that that hope and that optimism and that agency in the situation. So I I came back and started to learn about this technology, started to get really familiar with it, how to use it, and then eventually, as I launched into the professional workforce, I came back to college, ended up making straight A's, made the Dean's List. My mom read all my college books to cassette for me, audio cassettes. For those who don't know what those are, they can look those up, maybe in a museum somewhere,

Greg Voisen
cassette or CD. Yeah, exactly. There's

Chad Foster
somewhere in a Smithsonian Institute somewhere, but those are things we used to use to listen to audio. Back in the day, my mom read all of those cassettes, all those books, the cassette for me. And it turns out I was actually a better blind student than sighted student, you know, because I was forced to not just memorize shortcut my way through class. I was forced to listen to the book, and I read the book twice. I listened to the lectures twice, went over my notes with the note taker that the university had assigned. I ended up making straight A's all throughout my college of Business Administration courses, not because I'm a genius, but because I couldn't shortcut it. I had to really take the time and put in the extra effort. Going blind forced me to really be committed and to be focused and to have that determination. And so do do

Greg Voisen
you think Chad, that you became extremely auditory? You know, people say kinesthetic, auditory, visual. You know, obviously you couldn't be visual anymore, but you certainly became auditory when your mom read your books on cassette, and you were able to learn that way. And you know, you, you said you had to rejigger everything that you'd been studying to be a medical doctor, or at least be in medicine. And so you, you rejiggered. Uh, how do your background in business analytics and finance modeling kind of prepare you for the challenges of navigating a life without sight. And then let's talk a little bit about this CRM that you created that really has changed the world for 1000s of sightless people, to really be able to to have work and to make a contribution in a big way and get paid for it, I

Chad Foster
think Greg, the big thing to take away is I wasn't an expert in modeling and analysis and all those things. As I went blind, that was the path that my career led me down, but it was very fortuitous for me, because it's very analytical and solutions oriented, and when I needed to write code to engineer software without being able to see my computer screen, there was a way to do that. I could do it by listening to what I was hearing. As you mentioned, I had to change my learning style. I was a visual learner, which obviously wasn't all that helpful. After I went blind, had to relearn how to learn. Became more of an auditory learner, that then translated into way that I use a computer, which is, I have these earplugs in, these little earbuds, and they let me hear what's going on with the computer on screen and and the program and so on. And that really is how I learned how to use a computer and then troubleshoot, and then eventually write code, and they get to where I could build financial models, very complex Excel spreadsheet models. I was doing the financial modeling for multi billion dollar commercial outsourcing transactions. We literally had hundreds of individual Excel files with 1015, tabs in each 110s, of 1000s of calculations all over the place. Everything's interlinked and interconnected all the way from the very bottom of the architecture to the the top of the client facing architecture. And just getting familiar with that, and it helped me, because I was used to writing code to write software applications, and when you can do that writing a complex set of formulas isn't all that challenging. I could literally do it with mines closed. So that really helped me, I think, have a solutions orientation towards not only my job, but towards what I needed to do on a day to day basis, just to get to and from my job, just to travel, whether it's down the down the road, or across the globe. You know, I travel all over the world for work I have done so for quite some time, whether it's corporate or speaking or otherwise, and so having that solutions focus has really helped me. And as that relates to the CRM solution that you're talking about, I had a friend of mine who we worked together at Anderson Consulting back in the day when it was called Anderson Consulting. Now it's referred to as Accenture, and he had called me because they had a customer who couldn't do his job because there was a problem between their CRM system and the screen reading software that was used by the blind. And so I did what I normally do, I sat down, I looked at it, I wrote some code, and took me some time, but I built a software solution that talked to the back end of this CRM system. And so the CRM system not to get too technical for your audience, but it was done in a web browser, so what was known as a thin client environment, and in particular, it's called Siebel Hiner activity framework. And the owner of the application at the time was Oracle. Oracle had bought it from Siebel, and Oracle was going around telling people that it was impossible to make this particular deployment accessible, but I had already actually done and I'd made it accessible. And so I had Oracle on the phone, had the manufacturer of the software, the screen reading software on the phone, and they were both saying, Hey, we don't think this is doable. And I had my client on the phone said, yeah, actually it is doable, because we've had an employee doing his job with the software that Chad wrote for the last year. So we know it is possible. And what I had to do, essentially, was reverse engineer all of the HTML source code and connect the dots on that with the on screen ActiveX plugins that were inside the browser. And nobody had really thought to do that at the time, I was the only person in the world who could do it. In fact, unfortunately, I got called to testify in a few court cases. Because of that, I was the only person who knew how to do it. And so it was related to accommodations and things. And so this obviously unlocked job opportunities for millions of blind people, because there was a way for them to do the job related to customer service using this tool, and it was a widely used and widely available tool that was used in commercial aspects as well as well as across government. And so it was great opportunity to really unlock those opportunities and level the playing field for everybody, regardless of their disability or diverse abilities.

Greg Voisen
And what's the name of that tool you had given to me before we did the pre interview, but I can't remember right now.

Chad Foster
Well, the tool is it's just a it was a custom software solution for Siebel high interactivity framework. I didn't really give it a formal name. It was just the code that I'd wrote. Had it translated into multiple languages for various clients. I started getting referral business from Oracle. They started sending people my way because they didn't think it could be done up until then. And so I ended up that actually paid for our first vacation home. Well,

Greg Voisen
I actually, I actually went last time and checked it out, and it is fascinating. So for all my listeners, go, go, take a look at that. Now you you said that you're gonna switch gears her for acceptance a second, but the role of humor, uh, plays an important role in your journey for more self self acceptance. And I think people are way too serious out there today. We're all, you know, just exceptionally serious about pretty much stuff. How can others use humor to kind of overcome these challenges? I mean, look, you were obviously went blind. You had to look at a different way. I don't think people would look at it too humorously. So how did you

Chad Foster
Well, I couldn't change it. You know, if I can't change the situation, why do I want to be miserable, miserable about something that I can't change? You know, sitting around and feeling sorry for myself for the rest of my life didn't sound like a very good proposition. I'm a pretty optimistic person by nature. But even when things don't look positive, how do you look at blindness and go, Well, how do you make light of that? Well, the fact of the matter is, no matter how I approach the condition, it's not going to change whether or not I'm blind. So do I want to be blind bitter and unhappy, or do I want to be blind and happy and at peace. And, you know, having fun with the situation. I just want to make the best of of any situation. Sure, I didn't want to sign up for this, but it's the way that the cards were dealt. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I've got what? By the time I went blind, roughly 5060 years left in my life. You know, living the next 50 or 60 years of my life, being blind and bitter, that's a lot of miserable.

Greg Voisen
What I think is kind of, yeah, it's kind of acceptance of what is, I know, in the Buddhist philosophy, we say, you know, there's pain and suffering and then there's the end of pain and suffering. And the end of pain and suffering really is as simple as when you shift your mind to say, hey, I don't want to have that pain and suffering anymore, right? And and so that's the acceptance.

Chad Foster
Well, I think, I think part of that real quick, Greg, I think the pain in life is mandatory. I think it's the suffering that's optional. And the suffering becomes optional when we learn how to attach ourselves differently to the circumstances, the meaning we attach to circumstances. And so I could sit around for the rest of my life telling myself that I went blind because I've got terrible luck, and that would create, I think, more suffering. Instead, I chose to tell myself that I went blind because I'm one of the very few people on the planet who has the strength and the toughness to overcome that, and I could use it to help other people. Now, you see, technically, both of those stories can be true, but one of those stories paints me as a victim, and it creates the suffering. The pain is still there. I still have the loss. I still won't be able to see things. I'll never see my kids. I'll never see my wife, all those things, but the suffering disappears because of the meaning I've attached to my circumstances. Now I went blind because I'm uniquely qualified to navigate that and help other people navigate their own blind spots, which gives new meaning, a new purpose, to the challenges that I face on a day to day basis. So the pain is the same, but the suffering dissipates. So

Greg Voisen
you you speak in the book too about authenticity, and that being blind forced you to live your life authentically. Now we hear this word. We hear the word thrown around a lot. How can people without disabilities cultivate the same level of authenticity in their lives, because probably 99% of the people listening to the show are not blind, right? And so here you are, and I think you could give people a good formula here for like, Okay, what does authenticity mean? Being true to yourself and to your vision, living your life that resonates with you. How would you tell people out there today listening to focus in on being more authentically themselves? I

Chad Foster
think all of us have areas of ourselves that we're not particularly fond of, you know, things that we might try to hide from other people, and maybe even from ourselves. For me, it was blindness. For years, I tried to hide the fact that I was losing my eyesight. I tried to pretend like I could see fine. I tried to not use a cane, not use a dog for some time, and was bumping into people. It was awkward, and what I was really doing was trying to, trying to pretend to be somebody I was not. Instead of embracing the thing that I was trying to hide, I was trying to prevent other people from knowing that I had a visual impairment. And when my eyesight completely faded and I had to get a seeing eye dog to help me get around, it forced me to embrace the thing that I'd been trying to hide. And so I'd recommend everybody really contemplate the value of that, because when you embrace the side of you, the things about you that you're not fond of, and you just own it. I was forced to own my blindness. I walked into university classrooms with 100 pound German Shepherd. You're not hiding a big German Shepherd in a classroom. It's just not happening. And so people knew that I had a vision impairment, and it forced me to own my situation, and that got me really It forced me to be unapologetic and authentic to who I am, not making any excuses, not making any apologies. Look, this is me. This is my situation. I didn't sign up for this, but I'm going to make the best of it. I think, really thinking about parts of us that we're not particularly fond of, and if we can't change it, how do we embrace that? To me, that's really where the rubber meets the road, because it's easy to be authentic about the parts of us that we love. But wow, what if you could take something that you didn't love about yourself, like going blind, learn how to embrace it, learn how to own it, and eventually learn that that flaw, that perceived flaw, is actually an asset. It creates value and it creates something unique to you, and you could use that to help other people. And certainly that happened with me. The blindness that I'd been trying to hide and run from for so long created so much opportunity inside of me, not only to help people, but it gave me certain advantages that I would not have had had I not gone blind.

Greg Voisen
Well, you know, it's this. This is a great story, and obviously it's something that's very important for our listeners to reflect on. I always have this question, you know, here you are out there and you had your seeing eye dog, is it still Romeo? Or is it now? No,

Chad Foster
I've had a few since then. We've had look at Romeo, we've had Sarge, and now we're up to major. So he got a promo case.

Greg Voisen
So you got major. And I curious, how did you meet your wife? You know, it takes a special kind of woman, right, yeah, to really do that. And then you guys decided to have children too as well, yeah, because you have how many children? Two, two. So how did you meet her? How did your being sightless, if it did at all, impact the relationship? And how has the dog that you've built this amazing relationship with impacted your independence, your ability to be independent, yeah.

Chad Foster
So funny story about how I met my wife, I was out with a friend of mine, and the truth is that my buddy that I was out with that weekend was hitting on her. Oh, okay. He was talking to her, and then he stepped away, and then she came up, she started talking to me, and we chit chatted for about an hour, two hours, whatever, and I'm sitting there the whole time. And you have to understand, by this point, I'm 26 years old. I'd had a seeing eye dog for three years. I was a young man. I was, you know, gainfully employed out of college with a good job. I was a pretty confident guy. Women would often use the dog as an icebreaker to hit on me. It happened all the time, and I went for a couple of years. Yeah, I didn't even buy my own drinks. My friends would get mad at me. They're like, Hey, let me borrow the dog. This is, this is garbage. I want to, I want to use your dog and walk around the bar and see if I can get some of my drinks bought for a minute. And I even had one time we're at a bar in San Diego, and these guys came up to talk to us, just so they could talk to the women that were around us. And so that was kind of interesting and novel, but it kind of got old after a little while. And so I'm talking with who is now my wife, Evie, and I'm talking to her for about an hour or two, and she doesn't say one word about the dog, nothing, not, I like your dog, not what's his name, nothing, not a word. And I'm sitting there wondering myself, wait, is she blind too? Like, what's going on? How does she not mention this 100 pound German Shepherd laying down at my feet the whole time? And so it struck me that this girl's different. You know, she's she's unique. She's got something different about her. She didn't take the easy layup going for the icebreaker. And so that really impressed me. And then the other thing that really impressed me is that she had the courage to move to United States from Brazil at a young age, 2526 years old, no family, no friends, didn't really speak the language to build a life here on her own that is better than what she would have in Brazil. And so that really took a lot of courage, and it really hit me that maybe we were kindred spirits in that regard, because I felt like what I needed to do in my life took some courage to move from Knoxville to Atlanta, start all over, not have any support system, any family, any of that, and take on a job where I was traveling all over the United States and beyond without being able to see so I really kind of felt like we had this, this sort of kindred spirit connection between us, and so we hit it off. From there became friends, and here we are, 23 years later.

Greg Voisen
Congratulations. What a great story. I love it. The dog was being used to attract the ladies, so but, but, you know, look, there's been obviously a lot of discomfort in and we, everybody speaks about discomfort. I had an author come here to San Diego. You just mentioned that. Her name is Jen Drummond. She has seven children. She's climbed all the highest Seven Summits, and now she's doing the second set of the next highest mountains in the world. And I always look at the discomfort that people go through for growth. You know, you look at people who have that kind of ambition, who have that drive and desire, just like you can. You elaborate in a time when you stepped way out of your comfort zone that led to some kind of significant personal or professional growth for you, some big impact in your life.

Chad Foster
I think for me, it's speaking,

Greg Voisen
probably speaking.

Chad Foster
I didn't really want to be a speaker. I I was more scared of speaking than I was dying. I'd rather literally be the guy in the box than the guy giving the eulogy. I didn't want to do that at all. And then I was elected. I felt like I was going to be elected as our graduating speaker when I went to Harvard. And so being a type A person who was terrified of speaking, I did what, what seemed reasonable to me at the time, I flew to Texas, met with a professional speaker, spent a lot of money to write a graduation talk for something I'd not even been nominated or elected to do, and was that

Greg Voisen
was that professional speaker? Jim Cathcart,

Chad Foster
no, no, it was not. Garrison. Wynn, actually.

Greg Voisen
Oh, okay, Garrison, yeah, yeah,

Chad Foster
he's in, he's in Houston, and he and I met, and we carved out a short little talk, 1012, minute talk. And, you know, I was elected to give that talk. I gave that talk. I did very well. Was scared doing it, you know, not someone who was fond of the spotlight or being in front of people. But then I saw how powerfully I could help other people simply by sharing my message in an honest, heartfelt, funny and and straightforward way. And that really inspired me to lean into something that was very scary for me at the time speaking. And so that was, was that eight years ago. And so now I'm, I'll do 14 events over the next 30 days on in four four countries and nine domestic cities. I've got a full speaking calendar now. I have a professional speaking business. The book came out, all those things, all that was very uncomfortable for me at first, but now it's become one of my greatest assets. One of my greatest strengths is using a talent that I've got and speaking who knew I had that to to reach people and empower people to not feel like they have to be victims of their circumstances.

Greg Voisen
Well, I'm glad you took that discomfort and took the high road with it, because the reality is, you're able to provide a message that people need to hear, and I hope everybody listening this podcast hears this as well. Now look, there's a lot of people out there that are struggle with self doubt, just like you did about speaking, right? Especially with it faced with adversity. You're right. Most people would rather die than speak. You know, they they say it's that. It's the worst one, yeah. What advice would you give someone who feels overwhelmed by any challenge that they're faced with, obviously you've been faced with blindness, obviously you have a book out now, obviously you're speaking 14 times in the next month. You know, that's quite a calendar for somebody to keep, and especially when you're blind, and you also have to carry, you know, the have your dog kind of go with you everywhere you go, right? So I always look at that and say, look at the coordination that Chad has to go through to get all this to happen right. And so what is it would you tell people about that might be facing a challenge and there's got a ton of self doubt?

Chad Foster
The first step is the hardest one. Take the first step. Make it a small step. The smaller you can make the first step, the less scary and the less consequential it becomes. The stakes are lower. It's like skiing, right? The first time I skied, I didn't get on a double black diamond. The first time I skied, it was just getting comfortable, doing the magic carpet, getting the bindings on all those things. I'm 38 years old, totally blind. May even just getting comfortable with the fact that I was putting on a set of skis and going down a mountain that took some getting used to. And so you have to start with where stakes are low and you want a big goal. You want this bold vision of greatness that inspires you to take action and inspires you to do the hard work that you need to do, but your first few steps outside of your comfort zone should not be bold and should not be scary. Those should be as low stakes as possible, so that you can start to teach yourself that you are capable of more than you've been giving yourself credit for, because every single one of us, every single one of your listeners, Greg, are capable of more than they give themselves credit for. And we have to learn that ourselves. We have to teach our brain that that is the case. And we do that by by by getting it we get a little scared, and that's fine. It's fine to be a little scared. You know, sometimes you just have to do it scared. You just have to lean into it and recognize that if it doesn't feel at all scary, if it feels totally comfortable. For me, comfort is another word for complacency, and growth never happens with complacency. So if you want to grow, you have to get out of your comfort zone. That's where life begins. Is outside of our comfort zone. So take that first step. It's the the hardest one, the most important one, but don't make it the most consequential one. Don't, don't make it the one with the biggest stakes. Take a small step outside of your comfort zone and start teaching your mind that you are capable of more than you've been giving yourself credit for

Greg Voisen
That's great advice. You say, take a low risk item and apply yourself to it, and take some risk and and and see what happens, and just continue to do that and work your way up. It's like anything. It's like training for a triathlon, right? You're just not going to go out there and go run the in swim and bike, and do it all at once, right? You're going to take each of these in little segments. I know, when I trained people to ride 100 mile bike rides, you know, we would start with like, 15 miles, and then we'd go to 26 miles, and then we'd and we'd do that over a 26 week period, and before they knew it, they were able to finish 105 mile ride. Yeah, and, I think that small little steps, and then you get the reward in the end for the completion. And the reward is, hey, I finished doing this event. This was, I didn't think I could ever do it. It's like, wow, I didn't I that. Then most people said, I don't think I can write 100 miles. And said, yeah, you can. Anybody can. So

Chad Foster
had the same fear when I started training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the first time I did my my first tournament in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I was terrified. I was terrified the first time I stepped on the mat. I was getting on the mat with people who had decades of experience, all their faculties, could see, could hear, you know, full eight fully abled people, and here I am totally blind. Never trained before. I'm almost 46 years old. What a great idea. I'll get on the mat with these killers and kind of see what happens. I was terrified, but it's that first step that's the hardest step. It's the most important one to take. And

Greg Voisen
I think when you're blind like that, and I don't know this, but I'm going to surmise it, and you can validate if it's true or not, you get a if you got on the jiu jitsu mat, any kind of mat where there was another I used to wrestle in high school, right? You can feel the energy, right? So if you can sense that somebody, you can almost probably sense where they are, because you're blind. I never closed my eyes when I did wrestling, but the reality was, most of the time I could send, I could feel it. You get this feeling like, okay, there's persons over here, and 90% of the time you're probably right, right, that's

Chad Foster
right, yeah, absolutely, yeah. You use again. I think you gotta take advantage of your disadvantages. And so there's a lot of information I get with my body, because it's Jiu Jitsu, and I can't use my eyes, so all the information I get about my opponent is through the contact that I have with my opponent. And so I would argue that, because the learning doesn't have to pass from my eyes to my body, it goes straight to my body, maybe I'm learning a little more quickly. Now, I'm not saying that I could beat everybody out there. That would be foolish, but I do think not being able to see forces me to learn it at the somatic level first, because I can't I can't learn it with my eyes and then translate it to the body. I have to learn it at the somatic level first, and so maybe that's helped me advance a little more quickly than I otherwise would have.

Greg Voisen
I think in life, everything that you do, you've had to learn at semantic level. And that brings me to this power of persistence and resilience that you talk about in the book. It's one thing to get on the jiu jitsu math once, but or get on the slope once and try it. But it's another thing to get out there and keep doing it and doing and I watch videos if you fall in the snow, like several times, right? We Yeah, we used to call it when my kids were out there, we were teaching them to ski. We called it a yard sale, right? Meaning everything went every different direction. The skis went this way. The snowboard went off, whatever happened. Can Can you? Can you explain to people how you stay motivated in tough days, and what strategies you do you use to maintain this kind of drive and ambition and resilience that you've been able to build up, because some people would just give up, right? They'd fall once, twice, three times. They're like, I'm over it. I'm too wet. It's called out here. I'm done, I'm going in and I'm going to have a hot toddy right? Not, not you. You just kept out there.

Chad Foster
Well, in that, in those cases, I wonder how badly they really wanted it. That's what I start to question, is how badly you really want something? Do you want it badly enough to do the hard work that it takes to get your goal Sure? Skiing for me is harder because I can't see, I can't see the terrain coming at me. I can't anticipate. I have to be in a good body position to accommodate whatever terrain we go over, whether that's, you know, these, what are they called? Like rollers. We hit a roller, we hit moguls, we hit whatever. I need to be in the right position to be able to handle all of those things and that that definitely took some trial and error. And I just, I wanted to learn how to ski more than I wanted to avoid having to pick myself up over and over. And you know, the same is true for Jiu Jitsu. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, having to to go and get beaten over and over and over, because it's very front loaded to losing. If you don't know what you're doing, you get on the mat, you get, you get submitted by upper belts. It's, it's very common, and it a lot of people's ego can't handle that. And for me, I just think it's the difference between walking in and thinking you're going to be great on day one versus putting in the work to be great over a period of time. You know, I think we live in a culture, quite frankly, where there's this need or desire for instant gratification that has permeated a lot of what we do, whether it's overnight shipping from Amazon or it's young college grads who think they want to, you know, they're ready to be a CEO, or All these things people are. They want it now. The next viral video. I want my I want my fame now. And it sort of takes away from the need to put in the commitment, put in the hard work and build greatness over time. You ever got a lot of people in the gym where I trained Jiu Jitsu, and I don't care how talented, athletic or nimble you are when you roll in the first time ever on the map, you're going to get a big dose of humility, because the people in there have been training for years. They've been going 34567, times a week, some of them for decades. And so how could you ever compete with somebody when you've shown up and maybe you've been doing it for six months, and you think, well, maybe I should be good now. Well, you're better. And if you look at where you started versus where you are, you've made progress. But if you compare yourself, and you look at the amount of work that you put in relative to other people who've been doing it for literally 1020, 30 years, you shouldn't be surprised that you get dominated on the map. And it's this culture that I think that we live in, where we look at other people and we see their progress, and we just wish we could make it happen instantly, and that's a shame, because there's not a lot of fulfillment in that either. I found that with my journey, the amount of work that I've had to put in, whether it's learning how to ski blind or learning how to train in jiu jitsu and compete in Jiu Jitsu, not being able to see or learning how to write code, to engineer software, just to be able to use my computer, that made all the things that I've been able to accomplish all the more enjoyable is the hard work that I had to put in. So yes, it wasn't instant gratification. It was delayed gratification. And I think the delay makes it all the more enjoyable. You know, the steeper the mountain that we have to climb, usually, the better the view at the top. No, no, no, no, blind joke intended. There no,

Greg Voisen
no, not at all. And I And I echo what you're saying, because you know, there's always going to be somebody better than you. Doesn't matter in most cases. Okay, so maybe a Michael Phelps nod or Simone Biles, not because they're triple, quadruple gold medal winners, but the point, the point is, is that, for the most part, there will always be people that are better it. Give you an example of I've been doing this podcast show for 17 years, and, uh, yeah, there's the Joe Rogan's of the world. I'm not Joe Rogan. I don't have that many followers, but I've stuck with it for 17 years. I've enjoyed the journey, and I get to meet people like you, and I'm always grateful. And that brings me to this question of gratitude. In the book, you mentioned the importance of gratitude, how is practicing gratitude influenced your outlook on outlook on life and success. Because I think gratitude is one of the most important things that we can have.

Chad Foster
I think it's hugely important. And I think just tying it to what we were just saying about what I think of as comparisonitis, I think we live in a time of comparisonitis as well, and social media propagates a lot of that. People are looking at everybody else's best lives on Instagram, and they're seeing photos of what they think is their real life, and oftentimes it's just images of best clips from their life. Nobody's showing the harder moments, the tougher times. And people tend to look at that and say, Wow, that's not my life. I must be doing something wrong. I have difficulty, I have hardship. I have all these challenges. And that's a shame, because all of us have difficulty, all of us have hardship, all of us have challenges. But the one comparison, the only comparison that I can think that we should be making it's not to other people anywhere. It's not to the Joe rogans of the world. It's not to the social media, the people on Instagram showing their their images of of their best trips and all those things. The only comparison that is valid at all is comparisons to ourselves. What journey have we been on? Are we a better person than we were yesterday. Are we making progress? You know what? What does the road look like for us? And that's to me, is something that that is missing this comparison, itis. And yeah, I'm coming from a position. I like to compete, too, and I compete when I get on the mat in Jiu Jitsu, and I want to win, but I also recognize when I'm competing against somebody. You know what? They may be better. They may have more preparation, they may have more natural ability. They they it just may be their day. Maybe it's not my day to win, and that's okay. I need to, I need to want to win, but I don't need to expect it so much that I'm constantly comparing myself to other people at my own detriment. Am I a better person? Am I training better? Am I learning? Am I moving? Am I checking my ego at the door and having the focus of learning and improving versus just simply focusing on the outcomes and comparing people who are on completely different journeys and had completely different starting points

Greg Voisen
and well and and rightfully so. And I think what we're seeing is it's about the experience we have every day, and you've been able to take these obstacles and turn them into opportunities. And I think that's a key. And to kind of wrap up the the interview, if you know, I'm going to hold up the book here for all my listeners, blind ambition, Chad Foster. Chad foster.com, is where you want to go. You can get learn everything about him there. We're going to have a link to Amazon to the book so you can get the book there. What do you hope readers are going to kind of take away from your book, your story, and how can they apply the lessons from your story in your own life? If you were to give like, three practical things of advice here, Chad that the listeners would take away, what would you want them to know, and how can they apply it into their life?

Chad Foster
Three things. Number one, recognize that you have a choice in how you show up. You don't get to control all your cards in life, but you alone get to control how you play your cards. Point number two, you will become the stories that you tell yourself, so make sure you choose your stories wisely. It's the foundation for resilience. Make sure you're telling yourself the right stories, because you become your stories. Point three, if you want to grow, you have to get comfortable with discomfort. So edge outside of your comfort zone and watch those comfort zones expand. Watch growth take place, watch innovation occur and watch you accomplish more than you ever thought you could.

Greg Voisen
Chad, those are great takeaways from our interview and from your book. I want to thank you for being on inside personal growth and spending a few minutes with our listeners. I know that they're going to take away a lot from this Blessings to you on your travels and all the speeches you have coming up, and I only wish you the best in life as we move forward. Let's stay connected, buddy. Namaste and thanks for being on the show.

Chad Foster
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Greg,