is this person? Start imagining now. Take a moment and reflect on life experiences; couple them with your inner child. Dream big. Realistically big, because not everyone gets to be an astronaut. But imagine what you could do if you were suddenly inspired to strive for it. If you had the passion and drive to go on an ambitious quest, what would that new life look like? Not just the body, but the whole life: career, relationships, finances, happiness, self-worth, personal identity … Take a moment; take three moments. Invest some mental energy. Think!
You’ve heard it’s about the journey and not the destination, right? Whatever. Despite what I just wrote, I’m not going to talk journeys too much in this book. Instead, we are zeroing in on the moment your passion to take that journey is unleashed.
Does this word “unleash” make you think of a process that happens slowly, step-by-step, through careful deliberation? Hell, no. It’s a big-ass rott-weiler straining to get off the chain and go fang-first into Nickelback.
It’s when suddenly life—or the universe, or whatever—sends you a powerful message for which you cannot help but proclaim, “Holy shit!” at the revelation. (Profanity optional.)
I don’t care if you believe in Santa or Satan, a golem or Gollum, an Indian elephant or Indiana Jones. Activate your imagination, and do some scientific discernment while you’re at it, because we’re about to take a voyage into explaining why you’ve been taking the approach to life change all wrong.
It may seem wishful thinking, what I’m about to tell you, but it’s not.
We’re about to unleash some shit.
Eye of the Tiger
I awoke at ass o’clock, guzzled some weapons-grade dark roast, and headed out for a six-mile run in temperatures hovering around hideous below zero.
As the sun rose, I did not lament the lack of sunglasses. They fog in under a minute at −20 degrees. Rather, my eyes were protected by a thick coating of frost collected on my lashes. Upon returning home, I snapped a selfie of my snowy visage and posted it to Facebook. The comments collectively proclaimed, “Dude, you are an entire cave full of batshit.”
My pre-epiphany self would agree.
In a previous life, I abhorred physical activity, guzzled English brown ales, and stuffed McDonald’s into my maw as though the apocalypse were imminent. Additionally, I was in debt, flunking out of college, and feeling like an unmotivated and out-of-shape bag of poo. But one day, the ground shifted beneath my feet. There was a transformative moment: a sudden strike of awakening in which my existence was split in twain; it became the instant that divided my life into “before” and “after.”
Everything changed that day. Not that day—that minute. Those few seconds.
I have often said someone won’t change their life in an instant unless they believe God threatened to shove a lightning bolt up their ass if they didn’t alter their path. Divinely inspired or not, what I didn’t realize at the time was how common the phenomenon of electricity in a posterior orifice can be for motivating rapid transformation. While coaching countless readers on the merits of the slow-and-steady path to change, I’d forgotten that wasn’t how I’d done it. When I asked for similar stories of people who, in a single instant, found an overflowing fountain of desire to change their lives, I was amazed at the response. As I will show, research reveals that sudden and overwhelming motivation to change is more common than not in those most successful at it. This book contains many such stories.
Stories like that of Lesley Chapman, who picked up a sword, and her life changed.
Eleven years later, Lesley felt no pain. There was no dripping sweat, no aching muscles, no heart ready to burst out of her chest, and no lungs rasping like an asthmatic Darth Vader after a road trip with Cheech and Chong. No fear, either. There was only this moment: the fencing match of her life, fueled by adrenaline and a competitive spirit her old self wouldn’t recognize.
The depressed, booze-chugging, overweight cigarette aficionado was no longer there; a lean and energized forty-four-year-old athlete questing for gold replaced the woman she had been. The new Lesley was a force to be reckoned with.
But her opponent was so fast; she struck like an arrow.
It was the last day of May 2015 in the city of Markham, Ontario, a multicultural community, part of the Greater Toronto area. The newly constructed Vango Toronto Fencing Center, located twelve miles north of the iconic CN Tower, was hosting the Canadian-American Veterans Cup, featuring the best fencers over the age of forty from across North America.
Lesley traveled from her home in the small town of Madison, New York, to take off to the Great White North for the first time, to prove her mettle after more than a decade of dedication to her bladework.
“I’d had a really good day,” Lesley said. “I went to the tournament without a lot of expectations.” As Lesley won match after match, her confidence in her sword-wielding abilities grew, and so did her enjoyment of competition. She beat someone she didn’t expect she would to get to the gold-medal round and was elated at the opportunity for a championship bout.
The match took place on the raised platform at Vango, the fencing strip reserved for the final pairings. Long and narrow, the strip runs along a white wall that is painted with a large Canadian flag. Lesley and the woman she would challenge, Jennette Starks-Faulkner, were the highlight as they battled for overall gold in women’s foil. Chapman took no notice of the crowd. All her attention focused on her opponent. She was in a state of flow.
Cue Rocky III music. It was “Eye of the Tiger” time.
“She is built like a teenager,” she said of Starks-Faulkner, speaking respectfully of her opponent’s physical build and skill; Lesley was honored to have this chance to compete against the world champion. But there was also a desire to prove herself. Six months previous, the two paired off in Reno, Nevada, and Starks-Faulkner throttled Chapman 5–0 in under a minute. Such a crushing defeat can be hard for a warrior such as Lesley to swallow.
Chapman explained she would be happy just to get a couple of points on her opponent. But because Starks-Faulkner was so small and fast, Lesley would have to outthink her to stand any chance of not repeating their match the previous December.
“When she attacks, she’s like an arrow,” Lesley said of Jennette. “I knew when she came at me I had no choice but to get out the way.” Back and forth they danced across the raised strip, blades ablur in an ancient test of skill that used to be scored with blood rather than buzzer. Lesley’s mind raced on how to outwit her opponent’s superior speed. The tactics she devised used the advantage of her reach, following up a retreat from her opponent’s lunge with a counterattack using her longer arm.
Lesley watched Starks-Faulkner carefully, fencing defensively, waiting for her opponent to lunge. When the strike came, she beat a hasty retreat, just out of range of her opponent’s foil, then countered the smaller woman’s lunging blade and scored her first-ever point against the champion.
“‘Holy shit!’ I remember saying,” Lesley recalled. She knew she was still not at her opponent’s level but she wanted to give her a good fight.
In such a match, it is often said you don’t win silver but rather lose gold. After a long-fought battle, the final score was 10–6.
Lesley Chapman won silver.
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