To Stay True To Your Dreams, Embrace The Curveballs That Life Throws You (And Learn From Them)

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If life was a baseball pitcher, then its favorite technique would be the curveball. Have you ever seen how a curveball flies, maybe on TV or even better – behind the plate at the stadium? The whole point is, it looks like a straightforward pitch down the line, until it dives, careening straight down in front of the batter. You think you’ve got a fastball, you line up the hit with full confidence, and then wham! It flies underneath your bat into the catcher’s mitt. Strike one.

We’ve all had a few curveballs in our life. But nothing like what last week’s Disrupt Yourself guest faced. Melissa Stockwell, PLY was 24 when she was called up to serve her country as a U.S. Army lieutenant. She had picked her S Curve, navigated past the launch point of boot camp and was ready for the growth that comes with the sweet spot.

“I knew that I was going over to Iraq, to a war,” Melissa said. “But you never think that something like losing a leg is going to happen to you until it does. Those things only happen to somebody else, right? But that was the last day I stood on my own two legs.”

A roadside bomb shredded the Humvee she was in, and 24 hours later, Melissa was an amputee recovering in a Baghdad hospital. Her service was over. But here’s why I felt that Melissa’s story was important to our ethos of personal disruption – she kept going. If Melissa couldn’t serve her country in the military, she refused to let it mean that the door was closed forever. She’d just need to find another way through to that goal.?

Part of hitting a curveball is being able to change your grip on the bat in the split second you realize what the pitch is. For Melissa, recovering stateside at Walter Reed Medical Hospital, that shift looked like and spoke like John Register, a combat veteran and Paralympian who was giving a presentation that day.

“He has this booming voice, and he's talking to all of us newly wounded veterans, saying – ‘If you train hard enough and dedicate yourself to a sport, you can compete on the world's biggest athletic stage at the Paralympic Games and represent your country.’ I left that room kind of having this new dream, this new goal.”

In about a month, Melissa will take the field at her fourth paralympic triathlon in Paris, having mastered running, biking – and swimming! – with her prosthetic leg. She will drape herself in the American flag, representing and serving her country despite the life-changing curveball. And her non-profit, Dare2Tri, is giving other disabled athletes the resources and support they need to follow through on their dreams, too.

It puts into perspective how easy, and how often, we give up. Maybe the dream isn’t as big as Melissa’s, but think back to an S Curve that knocked you off as soon as the launch point resisted you. That first pitch slams into the catcher’s hand, and we throw baseball as a whole out the window. But strike one is not strike three. The example she sets is one at the extremes, compared to, say, a meditation practice that only frustrated us until we deleted the app, but the principle is the same. Curveballs should only change our grip on the bat, not the underlying dream. Curveballs should make us better ballplayers, not defeat us. Melissa’s example is at the extremes of this philosophy, of course, but it still holds.?

“You have no idea if you're going to be able to get through it,” Melissa said. “And then you realize that not only can you get through it, but you can thrive and be better on the other side.”

What dream did you give up on too early, and how can you use that curveball to remind yourself of why that dream meant so much to you in the first place?

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