GREAT LEADERS SAY “YES” MORE OFTEN – THEY NEVER KNOW WHAT MAY BE A MIRACLE!

LESSON: When battling for survival, we must take advantage of every opportunity life presents us, even if the window is only slightly cracked open and it is impossible to connect the dots to an eventual benefit. Just as in business where we must constantly train ourselves to say “yes” to the smallest invitations, which may turn into great successes, in adversity we must fight the natural inclinations of pessimism, hopelessness, and not swinging at every pitch. It was always the motions, the arguments, and the changes which I never thought would make a difference that helped me blindly navigate my way to survival and restoration.

The below lesson is an excerpt from my recently released Amazon #1 Best Seller, When Not If: A CEO's Guide to Overcoming Adversity, Forbes Books, 2024.

It was April 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic (if there was such a thing) was impacting every workplace and institution. Besides patients in hospitals, there are few populations more at risk of sickness and death than those incarcerated. Imprisoned people are infected by the coronavirus at a rate more than five times higher than the nation’s overall scale. The inability to quarantine or practice social distancing, together with overcrowding and inadequate medical resources, imperiled the lives of many people incarcerated in jails and prisons.

The pandemic spawned misinformation and disinformation in the real world. In the information vacuum of prison, rumors and misinformation ran rampant, and prison administrators usually respond to crises with lockdowns.?

In 2020, this was probably the worst response. Lockdowns just spread the infection more. In our prison camp, we had more room to move around, yet the warden confined us to our tight quarters, while a significant number of staff and guards suddenly stopped reporting to work.

As the pandemic worsened, Congress offered inmates a window of opportunity. The Trump Administration and Congress passed the CARES Act, which permitted minimum-security inmates, mostly at camps, to be moved to home confinement to reduce the prison overcrowding during the pandemic.

It was not lost on me that the miracle of this opportunity was available to me only because I had fought for over four years, pro se, and won a federal lawsuit against the BOP to be moved from FCI Fort Dix to this minimum-security camp.

Over 12,000 inmates have seen CARES Act home confinement placements. I was one of them. The conditions of home confinement were still serious, but, again, another marked incremental improvement. I had to wear an ankle monitor my friends would nickname “the microwave” due to its size and weight. I had a case manager I had to report to. I had to get a “day job” and keep it. And I was required to be available to answer phone calls at random times during the day and night, four to five calls a day, every day.

By all accounts, this unplanned program has been a resounding success. One clear goal of the program was to reduce the spread of COVID-19 within the confined space of prisons by decreasing the density of inmate populations.

Another was to reduce prison populations without jeopardizing public safety. On that score, the program was a resounding success. Of the 12,000 people released to home confinement under the CARES Act, the Bureau of Prisons reported that only seventeen of them committed new crimes (less than the population at large). In the context of a recidivism rate in a country where it’s normal for 30–65 percent of people coming home from prison to reoffend within three years of release, we’re talking about a recidivism rate of 0.15 percent.?

Now, if we could just get the rest of the country to lock up and keep locked up the violent prisoners in jail and take the spots of all the people who should not be there. It’s not a difficult equation?

This week, please promise me you will swing at every pitch, not be mentally lazy, and say “yes” more often.

Have a great week!

Order Amazon #1 ?Best Seller When Not If (Hardback, Kindle,?Audio):?https://www.amazon.com/When-Not-If-Overcoming-Adversity/dp/B0CKWTYSFF/r and on Audible https://www.audible.com/pd/B0D2LQ6QNC ?and Chirp When Not If by John Kador & Jeff Martinovich - Audiobook ( chirpbooks.com ) .

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