Adversity is a Gift

Everything that we talk about in Rapid Fire Wednesdays relates to the human experience: our relationships, our connections, our personal lives, our health. The reality of it is that everything on rapid fire is about how to help you see yourself more clearly– so you can move faster with less effort in business and in life, to be authentically aligned with who you are at the core.?

In today’s Rapid Fire Wednesday, I invited my friend and fellow business partner Aaron Golub to join us in discussing how to make an impact from a place of heart. He has an incredible story of overcoming adversity as the first legally blind division one athlete in football.?

I asked him to tell us about his story in his own words.

Aaron replied that he is legally blind. There is no vision in his right eye– it’s very limited. He played football at Tulane University becoming the first legally blind Division One athlete playing the game. Then, he was named team captain in his senior year. After school he went to the corporate world and worked in finance. However, he left to become a full time entrepreneur and speaker. He is building businesses with like-minded people and loving every second of it.

I asked Aaron to talk to me a little bit about his entry point into speaking officially, and when he started taking it seriously because I saw a big shift in him in the last two years.

Aaron explained that he has alway done speaking. In his senior year of high school he was on Good Morning America. But it wasn't something that he took seriously or even thought he was going to do. He graduated college, went into finance and didn't do anything. In 2019 he had a year out of college and left the job that he was in.So he moved to a different financial firm in Boston, Massachusetts, was there for a few months and loved what he was doing and decided that he wanted to make more of an impact to help people. So he decided to create another business and do something for himself. He started speaking, figuring out what to do and at that point he wasn't getting paid to speak. It was by any means. He was doing speeches for free, going on podcasts, figuring out what he could do to get better, just a little bit each and every day. Once 2020 rolled around COVID hit. Most people’s speaking businesses got demolished. But he used it as an opportunity to say what he can do to improve himself over the next couple of years. He used this drive to land a TED Talk. He started getting paid in small amounts to speak and that gradually increased over time. He started out just by saying “How do I create a business? How do I get booked and paid to speak?” He worked on developing his speeches. Now he is building a business around that to grow what he’s doing for himself and others.

One of the things that I've always felt from Aaron is his heart. The second I met him, I felt it. It was clear it was connected. It was open. I asked him to share a bit about how he puts heart into his business.

He answered that he’s still learning every day. The number one biggest thing is that he has surrounded himself with key mentors. He found that it's okay that he doesn't know what to do most of the time, and he has to ask for help. And so trial and error is definitely a huge part of that. He also shared that one of his focuses was how he can make money. He was doing fine in finance, but he wanted to supplement that income and he wanted to make more money. However, he learned that money can't be the number one reason. It can be the number two or the number three. The number one has to be something that truly means something to you, for him it’s how he can impact others with what he’s doing and every single one of his businesses now are aligned in that way. And when you don’t set a timeline on yourself, it makes it so much simpler.

I then asked him how his unique lens because of his experiences has affected his path and his life.

Aaron said that you can look at a situation, a challenging adversity, as either positive or negative. You can look at it as an advantage or a disadvantage. And he realized that if he wasn't legally blind, he wouldn't have played division one football because he probably would have tried to get a quarterback or receiver. There would have been a lot more competition. He doesn't know if he would have made it there. He also probably wouldn’t have gotten the same angles, going into speaking and entrepreneurship. He said that being legally blind is the greatest thing that's ever happened to him. He feels so blessed and thankful that it happened to him because if it didn't happen, he wouldn't know the people he knows, he wouldn't have had the experience of building a business, and his life would be 100% different. But 99.9% of people have the challenge and they see it as a challenge. And if you can make that perspective shift, that mindset shift, to realize why is this happening for me and what can I learn from this experience, then your life becomes happie, more fulfilled, and you can do so much more with this.

Then I asked him how he approaches fear.?

He said that he embraces it. Because he realized that, yes, it’s scary, but if he asks the right questions and learns the best he can, he can keep trying and failing till he gets it right. It's about taking that first step and if you don't jump into fear and embrace it, you'll never accomplish your dreams.

Overall, Aaron and I discussed how adversity can be our greatest gift and how it leads us to become the people we are meant to be. We also get to lean into change and fear because it is the only way we can grow, and failing is ok. Until next time, be great and be you!