Part of what makes this attitude work is that when other people see you making the effort, they respect you more. They draw inspiration from you and reflect it back to you as approval. When you feel that good energy coming back, it’s like a reward—and it all started with you putting out good vibes in the first place. I guess what I’m talking about is something like karma: the idea that if you do good things, good things will happen to you. If you project positive energy into the world, you’ll create a feedback effect and get it back multiplied.
The most important thing is to not give in to negative energy. Don’t surrender to bad feelings. It’s not wrong to feel bad, but you shouldn’t let dark emotions take over your life. If this seems too touchy-feely for you, look at it from a more selfish angle: when you’re stewing in anger or wallowing in depression, do you feel good? No, you feel like shit. When you’re pissed off you mess up your stomach, you drive up your blood pressure, and you make your face look all scary. When you get depressed you bleed away all your energy and look like a basset hound.
You deserve better than that, and so do the people around you.
There are many reasons why people make the wrong choice in situations like this. Sometimes it’s the result of fear; sometimes it’s just laziness. The truth is, it’s easier to coast along than to change direction. Pretty soon people get used to being sad or angry or pitied, and then that becomes their way of life. Once this happens, it gets even harder to change, because lots of people are afraid of change, even when it’s for the best.
So how do you shake off bad feelings? Do whatever it takes, whatever works for you. Some folks just need to go out and do something fun. Other people say the key is to do something nice for someone else, some random act of kindness to get you thinking about other people instead of about yourself. When I’m in a bad mood, I know that I can cheer myself up by listening to some really kick-ass music, songs that make me feel like Superman.
Only you can know what will work for you, and it’s your job to seek it out. After all, if you fell into the ocean you wouldn’t just let yourself sink, would you? No, you’d look for the light, then you’d start kicking and fighting to get back to it. This is the same thing.
You’re stronger than you think you are, trust me. I know that “normal” can seem like it’s far away when you feel like shit, but the only way to get back there is to work for it.
The good news is that once you start the journey, each step will get easier. It’s like physics: objects at rest tend to remain at rest, and objects in motion tend to remain in motion.
Life is about forward motion. So get moving, already!
5
GIVE IT ALL
When I was growing up, my mom always told me, “Do things right the first time and you won’t have to do them again.” Actually, she told me a lot of things, but most of the time I wasn’t paying any attention to her. I was off in my own little world half the time, goofing around with my brother or whatever, and like most kids I thought I knew everything. The reason I remember this particular example of motherly wisdom will become obvious soon enough.
I grew up in a small town called Rolling Meadows, a suburb northwest of Chicago, with my identical twin brother, Bobby, and my mom. My mom and my biological father divorced when Bobby and I were four. My mom eventually remarried a man I will always consider my dad and they had my sister, Brianna, when Bobby and I were eleven, but for those first years after my mother and father divorced, it was just me, Bobby, and Mom, so our mom had to work to support us. The first place I remember living was a huge apartment complex. There were twenty-five buildings, and each one contained anywhere from ten to twenty condominiums. There were tennis courts, swimming pools, and a huge common green in the middle of it all. It was nice, despite being on the edge of a ghetto full of gangs.
Growing up with an identical twin brother, I never had to look far for something to do or for friends—I was born with a best friend. Bobby and I were the type of kids who would get home from school, throw our book bags down, and shoot right out the door. We’d come back in time for dinner, and then we’d race outside again until curfew. You couldn’t keep us indoors. We were very outgoing, very athletic, and always wanted to get our hands dirty.
There were dozens of other kids living in the complex, so Bobby and I always had someone to play with. Sometimes, on summer nights, all the kids would come out, and we’d divide into two equal groups and take turns chasing one another all over the place.
O’Hare International Airport was very close by, and we lived right in the path of its landing pattern, so sometimes we’d try to race low-flying aircraft from one end of the complex to the other. We were always too slow. On the few occasions when we thought we’d beat the planes, it was only because they were flying so high overhead that they seemed to be moving in slow motion.
One kid, Josh Kozma, was my and Bobby’s best friend. He’s a Marine now. Back then we liked pretending to be FBI agents. We’d use masking tape to write “FBI” on the backs of our blue windbreakers and “patrol” the complex on our bicycles. One time we actually pulled over an old lady for blowing through a stop sign. It might seem crazy, but she actually stopped and played along with us—she even let us write her a ticket.
Why am I telling you all this? It’s not just some detour down memory lane, I promise. The point of this is to get you thinking about how much heart and energy we all used to put into games when we were kids. Sure, it was just make-believe, but at the time it seemed vitally important, so we threw ourselves into it with everything we had. We gave it our all.
Somewhere along the way, as we get older, we stop doing that. Eventually, some of us forget how. We learn to go along to get along, to take the easy way out, to do the bare minimum.
As a teenager, I took the easy way out of everything. “Clean your room,” my mom would say, or “Do the dishes,” or “Rake the leaves.” I never did a great job. I always skipped a bit that I shouldn’t have, or I left some part of it undone. I think it was because I just didn’t care.
Prime example: It used to be my job to clean the bathroom in our house, every Sunday. It was a chore in every sense of the word, and it was always the last thing I wanted to do. Whenever I finally got around to it, I’d push a rag around the tub, wipe it once across the countertop, and do whatever I could to get out of there as quickly as possible so that I could go play with my friends or just do whatever I wanted—as long as it wasn’t cleaning that bathroom. You could kind of tell I’d been there, but let’s just say the porcelain never gleamed, and the chrome never sparkled.
Then my mom would step inside the bathroom, see what a lousy job I’d done, and say to me, “You call this clean? Do it again.”
Busted, I would start over, grumbling under my breath. I spent half of every Sunday redoing stuff I’d done wrong. If I’d done my job correctly in the first place, I would have had twice as much free time to enjoy myself. Not that I wanted to hear that when I was fourteen. And now you know why I remember just that one bit of advice. It just took me a long time to really understand it.
When I was a kid, I blew off my homework, or else I did a sloppy job and called it “good enough.” I never realized how intelligent I was until after I left school. Then, one day, I looked around and realized, Hey, I’m not a moron. I can learn about anything. I can do whatever I want. It would be easy for me to blame someone else for the lateness of this discovery. I could say my teachers never pushed me to excel, or my mom didn’t pay enough attention to my homework, or any of a hundred other excuses. The truth is that there is only one person to blame for my shoddy performance in school, and that’s me.
Nowadays I take pride in the things I do. I want to give my all. I want everything I do to be good. I don’t want people to look at my work and say, “Oh, that’s lame. He was just phoning it in. He doesn’t give a shit.” I don’t want to let anybody down. More important, I don’t want to let myself down. So you know what? Everything that I do, I make it top-n
otch. If I commit to do something, I’m going to do it to the best of my ability. If I set out to clean my bathroom, I want it spotless. I don’t want it teenager clean, I want it clean. My clean.
A lot of my attitude adjustment about what constitutes “clean” came from being in the Army, but the basic lesson applies to everything. I admit that I haven’t always given the Army its due. If you’d asked me right after I got blown up what I owed to the Army, I’d probably have said, “Fuck the Army. It’s bullshit.” But the truth is that the Army taught me to give my life structure. I learned how to take care of myself in any situation, how things are supposed to work, and how to be an individual. Being in the Army gave me self-confidence and taught me how to lead people. Many skills that I think of as essential in my life, I learned from being in the military.
Most of all I learned what it means to commit to something. For instance, if you decide to go snowboarding, don’t go to the top of a mountain just to bitch, “Oh, it’s cold, my feet hurt,” or just go down the mountain one time and say, “Okay, I’m done.” What would be the point of that? That’s not “giving it all.” That’s just giving up. If you’re gonna do something, be there and get all you can from it. Don’t sit and complain the whole time. Just do what you came to do.
Every day offers us another chance to give it all. When you’re at work and you have a choice between doing something just well enough to get by or making it the best it can be, which do you choose? A lot of people don’t like their jobs. I get that, but it’s no excuse to settle for being lazy, because the kind of results you deliver will become your trademark. If you need a plumber, and you ask your friends for recommendations, are you going to hire the one who everybody says did an “okay” job or the one who people say put out the extra effort to make his work perfect? I know which plumber I would call to work in my house.
Being a good friend operates on the same principle. We all know people who are fun to hang out with but aren’t reliable when we need a helping hand. Which kind of pal do you want to be? More important, which sort of friend do you want your friends to know you are? Make the extra effort to be good to your friends, and not just the ones closest to you. Is one of your coworkers moving? Get your work gloves and grab the end of the sofa instead of carrying that one flimsy lamp. Does your neighbor feel overwhelmed because she’s caring for a new baby? Offer to watch the kid for a while so she can run errands, or even just enjoy a long shower in peace. Have you heard through the grapevine that someone you know is having money troubles? Think about sliding them an interest-free loan instead of buying yourself some expensive thing you don’t really need. Offer someone a ride, even if it means going out of your way. Give a hungry person half your sandwich.
Maybe you don’t want to embarrass your friends or family members by offering them help they haven’t asked for. Okay, but have you considered that maybe they feel embarrassed to ask for assistance? Sometimes, all it takes to make the world a slightly better place is for one person to stop feeling self-conscious and just start doing the right thing. It might feel weird at first, but you’ll get over it, and the more you do it, the easier it will be to do things without ever having to wonder, What’s in this for me?
There might even come a day when someone—maybe a member of your family, or maybe a stranger—asks you for something really serious, like a donation of bone marrow or one of your kidneys. This is life-or-death stuff. Forget all the stories you hear about soldiers risking their lives for one another in combat; this kind of moment is when you find out who the real heroes are. When you have a comfortable, safe life and choose to make a sacrifice like this, that’s what “giving it all” is really about: putting other people ahead of yourself.
Another important aspect of “give it all” is this: don’t go cheap on yourself or your loved ones. I’m not saying you should go broke, but do the most you can and don’t cut corners on things that matter. Some things in life you can buy at a discount without worrying—paper clips, for instance, or paper towels, and maybe toothpicks.
As a general rule, when it comes to anything that you count on to protect your health, safety, or life, I recommend you spend just a little bit extra. To use a snowboarding example, if you’re ready to take the plunge, don’t buy cheap safety equipment or a shoddy board. That’s not a time or place for going half-assed—that’s a situation where you want to spend what it takes to get gear you can trust. If you don’t, the only one you’re hurting is yourself.
If you’re already spending thousands of dollars on a new car, spring for passenger-side air bags and antilock brakes. When you buy a house, spend a few hundred dollars to put in proper smoke alarms and carbon-monoxide detectors. If you bring a baby into this world, you have a duty as a parent to get life insurance and buy the best infant car seats you can.
That’s just my opinion, of course. But I’m pretty sure I’m right.
There are other times when it’s good to go all in for yourself. I know it’s important to save money for the big things in life—buying a home or a car, sending a child to college, or just having cash on hand in case of an emergency—but if you become a fanatic about it, pretty soon all you think about is the money in your bank account, and you stop thinking about why you’re acquiring it.
If there’s something you think you really need, or something that you desperately want, maybe you should just get it. I’m not saying spend as if you’re the only one who knows the world is ending the day before your credit-card bill will show up, but if there’s something important that you want to buy, and you keep coming back to thinking about how much better, or easier, or more productive your life would be if only you had it . . . well, that might be a sign that you should stop making excuses and look for a way to make the purchase. Maybe this’ll mean taking out a bank loan (if you can afford the payments!), or getting a part-time job, but that’s all right. You’re worth it.
This becomes even more important when you’re looking to do something grand for someone else. I know a guy who thought about dropping out of an expensive college after his first year because he thought his parents couldn’t afford the tuition. His father told him to go back to school and not worry about it. When registration day came, a check for the full cost of the semester arrived, as if out of nowhere. Months later, my friend went home for Thanksgiving—and realized only then that his dad had sold his car and taken a part-time second job to make sure his son had the chance to finish his education and follow his dream.
That is what I mean by “give it all.”
But it’s not just about money. In fact, sometimes just giving money is a bit of a cop-out and not giving it your all. If there is a cause you feel really passionate about—well, yes, it’s nice to make a financial contribution. But you make a much greater impact if you give your time. Giving yourself is huge.
It’s the same thing with friendship. You can be a fun friend, hang out, enjoy good times, but true friendship means becoming invested in another person’s life. It means you’re there for good times and bad. It means really listening, hearing what the other person is saying, and really caring. It means sometimes thinking of the other person first instead of just thinking of yourself. Yeah, it means giving it your all.
This philosophy of total commitment is what kept me pushing my limits in rehab at Walter Reed. I never wanted to settle for minimum standards, or for “good enough,” or for “almost.” I wanted to be the best person I could be. That meant putting everything I had into getting myself back to good, no matter how many times I had to fall to get there. If you’re wondering whether you’re giving it all, I guess a good rule of thumb would be: “Are you falling yet?”
Sure, I could have pushed myself less and still gotten through the basic steps of my rehab. There was always someone around who was happy to tell me to “take it easy” and advise me not to tire myself out. I’m sure those folks all meant well, but what would listening to them have gained me? Nothing, that’s what. If I had given in to temptation and
taken the easy way, my rehab would only have taken longer and I would have gotten less out of it. That’s not doing myself a favor; that’s ripping myself off.
There will always be people around you who are willing to let you off the hook. Don’t let them. I’m not saying push yourself too far; I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Just don’t settle for less than your best effort. Don’t quit until you know you’ve given everything you have. Be able to look anyone in the eye when you’re done and be able to say, “I gave it all.”
The same thing applies to my work with Quantum Rehab. I have a lot of creative input regarding the photos I appear in. When you see me on a poster or in a magazine ad, you can be sure I wasn’t just some mannequin that got posed in front of a camera. I care about the messages I help promote. I ask to see a sketch of the project; I want to know what the slogan will be. In a lot of cases, I think up those ads myself because I have something I want to say, an image I want to project to the world. I’m not gonna churn something out just to fill space, or to show off something I did. Anytime my face is on something, I want to be proud of that, I want to be happy I made that choice—and I want everyone who sees those images to know that I stand behind them, that I believe in the ideas they express.
If you don’t give it all, no matter what it is you do or make, if you let yourself get away with doing something half-assed, you’re not going to be proud of it. You’re not going to look at it as an accomplishment. You’ll just be filling the world with more mediocre crap. Don’t we already have more of that than we could possibly use? Never settle for producing something that’s just “good enough.” Dig deep and create something that’ll make people say, “Damn! That’s cool!”
Another big part of giving it all is not being afraid to fail. Failure is not always a bad thing. There is no shame in coming up short of your goal as long as you maintain a good attitude. If you give it all in everything that you do, even when things don’t work out the way you hope, you won’t have any reason to feel ashamed. In those circumstances, you can tell yourself, I did all I could. I gave my best, I made every effort. As long as your heart is in what you do, you’re never going to feel like you’ve wasted your time.
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