Where Are Your Blindspots?

Isaac Lidsky is someone whom as I saw his TED Talk, I was completely riveted and moved, and have told everybody about his new amazing book, “Eyes Wide Open.” His popular TED Talk which I highly encourage you to go watch is “What Reality Are You Creating For Yourself?” He has literally done so many things in his life, from being on Saved The Bell as a teen star, to being an entrepreneur, to being a lawyer and clerking with two Supreme Court justices, and running his own business.

And now, he teaches all of us how he dealt with his information that he was going to eventually go blind, I believe it was at 25, and how he said “I might have lost my sight, but I’ve not lost my vision for what I want my life to be.”

It’s just amazing to see I think some of us think, “Oh, maybe I’ll have two or three different lives,” but you’ve really had five different reincarnations of everything you’ve done, don’t you think?

Yes. I’ve been blessed to do a lot of really neat things in my life along the way, as you generously mentioned. In a remarkable way, slowly losing my sight, I was diagnosed when I was 13 and it took above a dozen years. I lost my sight from 13 to 25. In a remarkable way, of the many things I’ve been able to do, going blind was one of the best things that happened to me. It really was.

As you said, I lost my sight, but I gained a vision in the process, and that vision has brought me immeasurable joy and fulfillment and success.

And not only are you successful, but you also have an amazing wife based on what you describe in your book, and four children I believe, correct?

That is correct, yeah.

And a dog even.

Yeah, so my wife, Dorothy, who is a miraculous woman, and I adore and admire her. Dorothy and I have six and a half year triplets, and a 16 month old baby. That’s the four kids, we call them the Kidskys. You know, my last name being Lidsky, we call them the Kidskys. The triplets are the Tripskys.

Oh, my God.

And yeah, we’re all enjoying a very busy life.

Yes. You talk about that going blind has actually helped you, but it wasn’t always like that, and you were very candid in your book, “Eyes Wide Open,” talking about your own internal struggles. Can you talk about how other people can deal with these maybe not as dramatic of challenges, but you have some really great tips on how to deal with obstacles in any form?

Sure. When I was first diagnosed with my blinding disease, I was terrified, and I was convinced that blindness was going to ruin my life. It wasn’t really something I thought as much as it was just something that I knew. I knew blindness would end my achievements. It would be an end to independence to me, and then I would never find a woman who would truly love and respect me, ’cause I figured I wasn’t going to love or respect myself, and on and on, and on, and all these awful things.

Psychologists call it awfulizing, which I think is a great term. But it was all these awful images and what was amazing is, it felt real. It felt like truth, right? That’s what’s so pernicious about fear. We all confront fear, we all confront challenges, the unknown types of crisis, and in those moments our fear really fills the void of the unknown with awful, with the worst case scenario. If we’re not careful, if we’re not aware, we believe it, we experience it as truth, and then it becomes true, right? It’s self-realizing.

So, for me, going blind in a lot of ways, the disease was really kind of the cure. As I lost my sight progressively and slowly, produced all these bizarre visual effects. Objects would appear and morph and disappear, and if someone told me about the picture I was holding in my hand then I could suddenly see it, but otherwise it couldn’t, and on and on, and on.

The upshot was, the impact was that this illusion of sight, this human experience of sight which is an illusion, was kind of shattered for me. I realized that far from being some kind of passive perception of some truth or some objective reality out there, sight is this incredible personal, virtual experience that is crafted in the mind. Literally seeing that firsthand was empowering and liberating for me, because the same is true of our fears, the way we experience our fears. The same is true of countless other aspects of life, and once we see our role in shaping our lives, we can take control.

I love it. Well, I neglected to say in your intro that you went to Harvard, have your law degree, and were on this fast track and have clerked for two Supreme Court justices. While you were blind, you were still able to have this amazing career, and yet, you realized that for you, there was something else to do, and that’s the entrepreneurial itch sometimes. You have all this time and money invested in this amazing education, and yet you find yourself going, “This isn’t quite right for me.” Can you tell us about that big decision that you made to leave New York and start something else?

Sure. So, a big part of living life eyes wide open for me is really holding yourself accountable for your own definition of success, your own understanding of what value looks like. Really, being rigorous in assessing how you want to spend your time and who you want to be as a person. So, that has put my money where my mouth is and endeavoring to live that way has played a major role in my repeated invention or career switches along the way. The one you speak of, I was blessed to do a lot of really call things in law in the public sector. I worked for the Justice Department, litigated appeals all over the country, clerked for the Supreme Court, all these great things which I enjoyed.

Then I found myself taking the easy route and big signing bonus and fancy office and paycheck and all of that, and working for a big international law firm, which to be clear, there are people who enjoy that work, who find it rewarding, who find value in their lives in that work. I have no problem with it. That’s great for them. The problem was that it wasn’t so for me. I was pretty dissatisfied and pretty miserable in my career.

So, this was around the end of 2010, the beginning of 2011. I decided with my college roommate that it might be a good time to buy a small company and use it to build an excellent business of our own. My roommate, Zac, helped me find the business and he put up a lot of the money to buy it, but he kept his fancy day job in the world of finance.

I put every single penny that Dorothy and I had into the business, and moved from Manhattan and my fancy law firm office to Orlando, Florida, to serve as the first Chief Executive Officer of our new residential construction company, contractor, and that was in June of 2011.

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John Livesay is known as The Pitch Whisperer. He is a keynote sales speaker to brands and shares lessons learned from his award winning career at Conde Nast. His keynote talk "Getting To Yes" show sales teams how to be irresistible by becoming storytellers so they can instill in their customers the “Gotta Have It” feeling. When that happens the brands' sales teams become revenue rockstars.

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