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Lynne. Hello and welcome to The Storied Human.
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This is Lynne Thompson. Today I have a guest, Jay Waddell, who has a very varied background.
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He's done so many things, and he's had some health issues that we're going to hear more about later, but I just wanted to name a few of the things he's done.
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He founded two successful startups, medical device industry and management consulting. He led a company from three employees to 143 employees, and had sales of 25 million in three years. He was a partner for 17 years at a consulting firm, SRG that was cited by Outside Magazine as one of the 50 best places to work in America. He helped grow the firm from 12 employees to 150 during his tenure, he helped develop and evangelize several new medical devices that make a difference in the world. He managed employees distributed all over the globe. He's worked in sales for the transportation industry, and he was, until recently, a professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado. Boulder for a decade, he taught brand strategy, innovation, advertising and marketing. He is a life coach. He focuses on helping people move through the hard stuff in life. Jay emerged victorious from severe hearing loss, a debilitating stroke, heart failure and a heart transplant. And we're going to have to find out more about that, because that's a lot of things. Welcome. Jay Waddell, it's so good to have you. Hi, Lynne, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on I'm happy to have you. I forgot to mention that we already know each other, and that we met because we both took the same writing course, and now we're accountability partners, and we speak regularly to keep each other on track.
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It's been great. It has, it has.
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It's really been enjoyable.
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So sometimes I just like to start at the beginning. I think you have a really interesting origin story. And you come from country, people from the country.
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Yeah, well, I'll jump in and you'll cut me off when you need to. So I'm a cheesehead. I grew up in the state of Wisconsin. I grew up in on a dairy farm, and it's really served me well in my life. I won't dwell on it too long. I had two brothers and a sister, my mom and dad, we worked really hard. That wasn't a negative. It was a positive.
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To do a lot of things out in the fields and milk 140 cows morning and night, and get up early and work seven days a week was phenomenal. And so you really you develop a well honed blue collar work ethic. And you know, lots of little tapes and mantras that play in my head from my parents and but one of them was you can outwork anybody. You know, they may be smarter, bigger, stronger, faster, but you can outwork anybody you choose to, and that served me well. And you get up and you put one foot in front of the other each day, and you just keep going. And so it helped me in business, it helped me in career, and it absolutely helped me as I hit wheels came off a few times with some health stuff. So kind of my roots really, really have served me well.
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Sounds like a great foundation and just a beautiful way to grow up.
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Really great weather six months of the year in Wisconsin.
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So are you literally, like one of those kids that had to milk the cows before you went to school?
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Yeah? Yeah. We it sounds like stupefying when you hear it. But by the by the time I was 14 years old, we were working 85 hours a week, and that was just normal. You get up, you get up at a quarter to five, seven days a week, and work until 715 730 at night, and you work Saturdays, and you work almost all of Sunday, you get a lot of hours in. And my brothers were doing it. My dad did it. All. My friends did it. They lived it on farms few miles down the road, and you didn't have to think about it. It's just, it's just who you were and what you did.
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It's an exceptional way to grow up. So tell me more, like, what did, did you want to get away from that? I mean, I know you went into a different Well, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting question, my sister in law, one of my brother's wives, said, Jay, how did, how did you escape the farm? Because it was a big family business. It was very successful. And, you know, it was set up for more of us to stay, stay involved. I think for me. I loved sports because, because we had so much farm work for my two older brothers, they get to go out for one sport, and they had to choose, and which sport do you want to go out for? Because the rest of the year you've got to work as the third son, the farm was more successful and more stable, and my two brothers were working and and so by the time I was a junior in high school, my my parents said, okay, they knew how much I love sports. They said, Jay, if you would like to go out for two sports, three sports, you can. But here's the deal, if, if you go out for the team, by the time the team has its first baseball game or first football game. If you're not in the starting lineup, you need to quit the team that you can only you can only be out if you're good enough, and you work hard enough, you know, to really make it worthwhile Otherwise, otherwise get back home here and work. So I, believe me, I was highly, highly motivated to make the starting lineup. I bet you were.
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I was so pretty early on I knew, I knew I wanted to keep going through college. And I grew up in a small town of 600 people in a rural community and and out of my graduating high school class, only six kids went to college, so it was not the norm whatsoever. And and so I did. I did go on to school, and you know, only, only one of my siblings did, and hardly anybody from where I grew up, but I went on and got a degree in business and education. I I wanted to continue with sports. I wanted to coach high school sports. And so I did that, and and made, made an amazing a whopping$8,000 the first year. And and decided I would move into sales and and business. And I did, and, you know, doubled my income in one year, pretty crazy. And, but, but went on to school, and I've, I ended up, I taught high school. I I did that for a while, and, and was in sales, but, but I went back and got a graduate degree, and, and that really opened some doors. And I was in Madison, Wisconsin, great town, you know, in my home state, joined a big medical device company, a global medical device company. I knew nothing about medical stuff, but I learned and, and I was, sometimes you just get plain lucky. And I got lucky and and got some jobs working on medical device product development and helping create products that were used in the operating room to save people's lives. Learned on the job. And, you know, it still amazes me. I was so, so fortunate. I got to work on products and used in the operating room on people, you know, when, they're in a life perilous situation, and I get to sit in on surgery 500 times in 19 different countries.
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No way. That's a song. That's amazing.
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I got to see a lot, if I keep count, I think I fainted six times, where you're gowned up, it's hot, you're standing on your feet for hours and and you're fixated on this surgical procedure, and next thing you know, you wake up on the floor.
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And so, you know, so I it's not like I mastered it, and I was excited every day I got I was excited every day I got to gown up and go into surgery and see miracles. So that was pretty fun. That's such an incredible different place than I'm sure you thought you would end up, you know, just a business degree, all of a sudden, you're part of medical device development, and you're in operating rooms all over the world. That's pretty cool, and that you were involved in something that was so impactful, that saved people's lives. That must have felt amazing. It was It did feel really good and and I feel really fortunate, lucky at the time, I did not take it for granted, and I never have, you know, we're Lynn, I so believe, and we've talked about it, we're just all fellow travelers on the planet, and we're just all trying to do the best we can, you know, and being in the medical device industry, you saw people, you saw people who were struggling and didn't get an equal shake in life and had hard stuff going on. And so, you know, I grew up in a way where you you felt fortunate for the things you had and and you tried to help those who were not as fortunate. So yeah, I felt pretty lucky on that front. And my wife also grew up not in my hometown, but six miles down the road in a much bigger town of 800 people, in the medical device company in Madison. They, after a couple of years, offered me. Job, working in our London office. My wife had just come out of of graduate school and was offered a really great job, and it was close to Madison. I was thinking, we were thinking, we've got it made, you know, we're this, you know, power couple, and we've got two great jobs and, you know, and they're close to each other, and we're set. And then I got this job offer to go overseas, you know, and I feel guilty. I feel so lucky on stuff that happened for me, you know, you want to believe you made some of it happen, but some of it just things fall the right way. I had this chance to go work overseas, and honest to God, for three days, did not mention it to my wife, only because she had just gotten her job offer, and I thought, I want to be married to this woman forever. There's no way in the world I'm going to go take a job that benefits me if, if it's going to disrupt her career. Because, you know, times are more liberated now. But man, we're talking, you know, 40 some years ago, for a female to get ahead and land a great job was hard, and so I thought, I'm not going to disrupt her path and have her be, you know, the trailing spouse. And so I didn't mention it. And then I was just ready to head out the door for something. And I said, Oh, honey, um, by the way, I forgot I've got a job offer in London with the company. And she goes, what? And so we sat down and talked about it, and I had to decide by Friday that within two days, and she said, You know, I will always be able to get a job. We'll figure it out. We grew up in little, little, little dinky towns. We neither of us had ever been on an airplane in our life, and we said, let's, let's go see the world. And so we made the choice, you know, almost knowing nothing about the job, and just said, Let's go do something very, very different. And so that was what triggered our choice what to go overseas and kind of let go of, you know, this, you know, gravy train we thought we were on, you know, because, because taking a chance felt like the right thing to do.
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That's amazing.
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Because that's a huge change, especially if you've never even been on a plane, and now you're going to go halfway around the world for a job you barely know anything about that's that's some risk taking, right there.
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We've never even, we'd never even been outside the state of Wisconsin. And to be honest, I never felt bad about it. To be it sounds really weird now that I reflect on it is, is I do not ever remember eating in a restaurant with my family. We never, I know, we never took a single day of vacation ever in my life. You know, my family and I didn't feel, I didn't feel one bit bad about it whatsoever.
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That's, that's just, that's how everybody grew up wherever, how it was, right? It's, it's one thing, if everyone around you is living differently, that's a very good point. Now, how long were you in London?
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I we lived in London two years and and but, but then when we moved back to the states with the same company and moved to another location in Boulder, Colorado, and when we made that move, my job continued to be an international role. I for never having traveled. I had five years, and my territory was everything outside the US, so I got to just travel extensively.
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And my wife, it was pre children, and so we were able to, we were able to combine work. And I do, I just feel so lucky and so blessed. You know, I have landed on that train. I noticed the best people do mention luck. I think it's lovely that you recognize that and and the you know, to have gratitude is a great place from which to live your life. So when, how long did you spend you said, two years. What? What did you have children? Then we did our son. We have we have two children, and a son who's 37 a daughter who's 32 and he was born in London. He was born in the same hospital as Elton John and Whiteford, England. He was born there, and in two months, we've moved back. He was two months old when we moved back to the US. Scroll a tiny story here about one of my one of my life philosophies comes out here. I don't think you've even heard this one Lynne, which is the concept of different is good.
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And after six months in the UK, this was 1985 it was a tough transition. We had no family there. We had left all our friends behind. You know, I worked in a place with 900 people, and I was the only American. And, wow, we it was a time where the Brits were not very happy with Americans and and so there, there's a bit of anima. City towards Americans, and it was cold and it was wet, and it took three months for British Telecom to install a telephone in our house. So we had no communications. There were only three TV channels.
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There were no American sports on TV. My God, how crazy. And so we were really, really bumming and we were depressed and we were homesick, and we my wife and I sat down, and I was on a two year contract. You know, you're only going to be here two years.
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And so we hit the six month mark, and we realized we've just used and burned up 25% of this grand adventure. And we said we need to reset our life mantra and and so we sat down with maybe two bottles of wine, and we decided to to craft a new life mantra. And we decided, instead of different being bad, different TV, different weather, different driving on the different side of the road, different food, we said, I knew mantra is different, it's good.
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I love that. And so we had three quarters of my contract a year and a half left. And so we just we used every weekend to travel and go somewhere within the UK or across the English Channel.
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And we just ate up every minute of of discovery and new things that we could and when we got done with a two year contract in London, we had a chance with the company to move back to Madison, where we'd rented our house out the landscaping I'd put in at all grown up looked great. Go back to a job working for people I knew intimately, be with all our family and friends and be back in the town we knew, or move to a new location with a company I'd never been west of the Mississippi to Boulder, Colorado and and for a job working on products I didn't know, for a small little startup division with 20 people absolutely foreign. And we said, let's apply our life mantra, which choice going back to Madison or going to Boulder, which one is most starkly different from what we've been doing? And it made the choice easy. Let's go where we know nothing. And that's what we did.
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I love that sense of adventure, and you were a team that you both saw it that way, reset your attitude while you were in England. Not everybody knows how to do that.
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And I, yeah, I would like to say that I know the magic formula for doing that. But at the time, at the time, we were in the middle of something, and we knew, we knew we were, I think we able to we're able to self reflect that we knew we had a gift. We were given a gift of two years to go live abroad, when, when we grew up in little towns, and we just realized we'd squandered a quarter of it, we'd squandered six months and whining a bit, and we we caught ourselves and said, That is not what we want to do. So I don't think we had a formula other than thank God we we kind of realized and caught ourselves midstream, and then you kept doing it, even when you came back, you went to a whole different area of the country. I've been to Boulder.
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It's beautiful.
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Boulder's Great. Boulder's great. I get up every day and I can back out my driveway and I see the mountains. I don't have to put on mosquito spray like I did in Wisconsin every all the time. And Boulder's been really good.
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So how long have you been in Boulder? 37 years. Because I it's easy my I know how old my son is and and he was two months old when we moved here two months old marker. I have a marker that defines how long I've been here.
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So what? What happened after like, I know you were in the medical device area, yeah, what happened after that? Where did you end up?
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Well, I, I continued with the company, moved through a few other jobs, and it things were going really, really well. And I was assigned a new medical technology, pulse oximetry, which, you know, I'm guessing many, many people are familiar with. It's measuring your blood oxygen. It's the device you put on your finger. And now it's commonplace. But I got lucky enough to be with one of the first two companies that that brought it to market 40 plus years ago, and we get to evangelize this life saving technology all over the world.
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It was very cool to walk in places with it and working on that technology, an engineer from outside our company approached us and said, I've got an idea for how to make it even better. And so I was in a role of kind of screening and and and vetting outside people with outside new technology. And so I reviewed his concepts and technology and said to my boss.
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Yes, hey, let's start a project.
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Let's get this in here, and let's get going. And my boss said it, we're a publicly held company. It's the middle of the year. That would financially be very disruptive to our company.
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Jay, I hear you. I appreciate you. Like it, but we can't do that in the middle of the year.
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And I was so enamored with the technology the the engineer had, and I like the individual, and so he and I started brainstorming and said, Why don't I leave my company and we'll go raise money, fundraise and we'll start our own company.
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This technology is just so great. And so that's what we started contemplating. But my boss and my current employer, very, very big company, you know, said, Wait, wait, wait, wait. And I I felt I liked him so much, and I liked my company, liked my boss, that Midwesterner, I felt compelled to be 100% honest with him. And I said, Hey, Joe, here's what I'm doing. And I told you, I'd love this technology. If we're going to drag our feet, I can't sit around for six months. This is so exciting. We got to get going. I told him, I'm starting to raise money, and I may leave the company. And he goes, Oh, please don't do that. You know, I don't want to see you leave. I don't want to lose, lose that new technology. And I read a book intrapreneuring, not entrepreneuring, but intrapreneuring With an eye. And it was modeled after 3m and the guy who did sticky notes was an employee and had a huge idea.
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You know, how do you how do you hang on? How does a big company hang on to employees who who have an entrepreneurial spirit, have a clever, new, high potential idea, and how do you keep them from leaving the company? And this author, this book, talked about ways you can structure a relationship and fund that idea and give that individual some autonomy. And so I read that book in two days, and I marked up pages and earmarked it and dog eared corners and, and then I gave it to my boss and said, Look, Joe, here's a way you can keep me, keep the idea, you know, change, you know, my relationship with the company, and let me go do this thing, and everybody will come out a winner. He said, You know, this is, this is awesome.
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And, and he said, I'm flying to New Jersey, talking to our big boss. And he did, and came back the next day with the big boss, and sat down with me and said, so you want to leave the company, have us set you up in a new company and fund you, you know, to with a whole millions of dollars to grow this new business. And he said, you're at nine and a half years you would be walking away from a lifetime pension with our company. Jay, are you really prepared to do that? And I go, in a heartbeat, wow. And he said, that is the correct answer. And he said, I'll fund you, you know. And they set us up as a company and and that, you know, you you referenced my bio, but that was the company where that engineer and another engineer and I left started this company, and it grew very quickly. We went from three to 143 employees in three years. That's like a rocket ship.
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That's hard. Some people don't survive that. Yeah, that's really tough.
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It was, it was hard, and it was, it was the most I've done a lot of things, I get easily excited, but it maybe was the most exciting thing, man, you're adding a couple people a week, and you're just crazy. Yeah, yeah. You're going in every day, you know? And you've got a whiteboard on the wall. We started every day with a company meeting and said, Does anybody have any reason why we can't launch this product in 14 months? That's how we started every day of Why Can't We? Why not us? And then we said, and we tried to train everybody, every single day, every single hour of your day, say, what is it that I can do in the next 15 minutes that will make the most difference to our company hitting its objectives. And how do I best spend the next 15 minutes to get there? And if you if you have every employee thinking every hour in every 15 minute chunk of what they can do to make it more valuable so but it didn't end like in the best way did it. No, that one, there's a lot of twists in terms in life. And on this one, I said we were in a big company, and we left, and they funded us and set us up as a kind of a satellite company. You know, we were youngish, and they were older and more mature and wise, with better lawyers. They set up a contract with us that said, you know, you guys get going, get this thing started. We'll fund you. We'll give you all the money that you need. And so they did, and we cranked it like a rocket ship. We got sales up, we built the factory. And after three years and we were just starting to to hit royalties and a big. Payout, you know, big financial payout for the success. And they said, you may not have seen the small print, the fine print, but if I said, we can take the company back over at any time we want. And so just as we were hitting phenomenal success, and it would have translated, you know, financial payoff for us, a much bigger payoff. They said, We're going to take the company back over. Thanks very much. You know, you did a really good job for us, you know. So it did end where it didn't culminate as quite as successfully, but it was, it was a phenomenal success. And so can't feel bad whatsoever you did so well with it. I mean, I can't believe that kind of growth. Yeah. And it sounds like one of those, no matter how it ended, right? You just knew you could do that, just to know that you could do that. So that's something to be proud of. So how do you pick yourself up after that? Yeah. So after that, I'm situated in Boulder, Colorado, and I've now got two small children. I'm very into, you know, coaching their youth sports and, you know, reading them books and hanging with them and, and so at the same time, I've, I've now got a job hunt. I found a headhunter and and she said, Boy, you've got some great experience and international experience and startup experience and big company experience, and I can really help you find great jobs across the country. She started the process, and she said, Tell me what else you're considering.
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And I said, Well, there's a management consulting firm that does brand strategy and help companies create new products, and they're right here in Boulder, you know, five minutes from me, and I've used them to help me grow the company that we grew quite quickly. That's cool.
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Yeah, they've offered me, kind of a standing job offer if I want to come work with them, because I like them. They like me. It's already here in Boulder, and my kids are here in school, and my wife is in town and working here. And so I said, I've got 90 days before I'm done with my contract. Let's look around and you know, see what else I can find. And the head enter said, I'm not even going to bother because I can tell you love boulder. I can tell you're into your kids. I can tell you like the people in this management consulting firm, and so you would put me through a lot of paces, find you a job that would be traveling and do all these things, but you have what you want, and so I'm not even going to do it. And so that's a good job, right? Yeah, it was really wonderful advice of, don't kick a gift gift horse in the mouth or something like that. And very much. So I love when people are straightforward with you.
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And she didn't want to waste your time, but she knew, she knew you had the best thing for you. Yeah. So when, when did your health problems begin? I don't have a sense of the timeline, probably.
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So I did join that management consulting firm, and that's, that's the company we we grew from 12 people when I joined to 150 people over about a 18 year window, probably Oh, a dozen years into that job. So maybe in my mid 40s, late 40s, I started developing hearing loss and pretty profound, and it started declining pretty quickly. My mother had a hearing loss, had to wear hearing aids, and was near death. She passed away at 79 her hearing declined so much that she would be in a group dinner and just sit there quietly and not and she was very, very, very social. This was a lot of my family. She would just sit withdrawn and not be able to participate because you can't, you cannot hear and you feel stupid and you don't know how to respond. And so I'd seen that, and I just felt it closing in on me. In the management consulting role I had, what I did was I sold new business, I cold call a client, say, can I come and tell you about our services? I visit them and do a new business, pitch, interact and then lead a project, interview people, moderate focus groups and ask consumers about things you know, put together a plan and a brand strategy and a final report, present it to a client, and do brainstorming sessions where I'd facilitate who has ideas, who has ideas, and be at a whiteboard and write things down, and all of a sudden, if you cannot hear, you can't do that. And so all the skill sets required for that job, I just they were gradually declining, I remember, and it would be so embarrassing. We did a new business pitch. The founder of our company, the CEO was along.
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We went into a room in a client's office, and the client was a real tough cookie. He wanted to put us through the paces. He was comparing us with another perspective consulting firm. It was. Hot day in Kansas, and it was very humid. They had an air conditioner in the room that was super loud. Oh no, my hearing is horrific at the time, and I'm the one leading our new business pitch. And I would say to this tough cookie of a VP, could we turn that air conditioner off? It's really hard to hear. And he goes, ouch.
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And so I had to keep going, and I would have to say, I'm sorry.
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Could, could you say that again?
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Could, could you say that a little louder? And he was a very big man, and he got very upset.
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It was so embarrassing and so horrific. And we didn't, and it was a very big piece of business, we're trying to win.
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And we did not get it. It just got so I couldn't do my job. And here I am a partner for 18 years and help grow the company to 150 people. And was, I believe, very, very good at what we did, and all of a sudden I could not do it. My My boss was a great guy, and he and my other partners carried me for probably 18 months and kept me on board, and then I was going through some really hard stuff, emotionally with family members, and just really, really difficult, emotional, personal stuff. And put all that together, and I got so I'm sure I was situationally depressed, and I could not pick up the phone to call people, and I, I could no longer generate ideas.
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I I lost my extrovertive superpowers. I just went down a rabbit hole. Ultimately, my boss and my partner said, Dude, we we love you. You know you're not carrying your weight anymore, and you, you've got to go.
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You've got to go figure something else out, because it's unfair to the other partners, because you, you're not, you're not carrying your weight for what we're paying you. And so I had to leave the company that I I loved what I did for 18 years and helped grow it, and had to walk away from it. That must have been incredibly hard, you know, it just adds to the devastation of your health, you know, like you're just depressed enough, and now you've lost your job that you love. Yeah?
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It, it was very hard, because it's it's your identity, it's your superpowers, and it's your identity, and it's your ego, and it's how you see yourself. I've never lost a job before in my life, and and that's hard, yeah?
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And then I got divorced right in the middle of that, because hard stuff going on was really tough, and one of my kids had some really extremely difficult, life threatening health stuff. It was a hard chapter. It was very hard, yeah, and you look back and say, How did I even get through that?
00:32:35.480 --> 00:32:54.819
I mean, one of those things would be hard, right? You had several things. So how did you get through that? How'd you come out the other side? I It's sometimes I wonder. I, you know, I think it was at Midwest upbringing of not getting through it is not a choice, you know. So what are you going to do? It's good point, Yep, yeah.
00:32:54.880 --> 00:33:41.319
And one of the life mantras that I kind of got drilled in me and have adopted is, so what? Now, what? You know, the the so what is shit happens and and things happen to you might have been a choice of your own, or just bad luck. Darn bad luck. You're allowed to feel your emotions, you know, feel the feelings, but don't spend too long wallowing in it, and don't spend too long in a pity party, because that's not going to change anything. So luckily, luckily, I think that got ingrained. And so the So, what is you get a little while to feel those feelings and feel down or angry or sad or guilty or whatever, but then you got to say, now, what? What are, what are the choices I could make.
00:33:41.559 --> 00:33:57.519
You know, what are the pros and cons? What are the trade offs, and what path forward into the woods am I going to pick? And then once I pick it, get on with it. That's what I did after losing the job, and I scrambled.
00:33:51.880 --> 00:34:36.980
And I'd been in Boulder many, many years, and I had some connections at the university, I had a lot of business experience, and so I reached out and said, Hey, any chance you have an opening for somebody teaching in the business school with my background? So thankfully, I had cultivated some relationships. Thankfully, you know, good fortune. They said, You know, we've got an opening in the fall for teaching. You know, why don't you come up and give a practice lecture and, you know, to the entire business school and marketing faculty? And so I did, and it went really well. That's so cool. They said, come on board.
00:34:33.199 --> 00:35:13.559
What a great pivot. That is so cool. Well, thanks. And was the hearing still bad? Then, I mean, it's, it's very hard to do any job hearing. No, it's like, oh yeah, I forgot I still had the hearing loss. Oh no. So I sort of, I sort of glossed over that in my practice lecture, and because, because it was a small group, maybe 20 faculty, and they're all sitting close and. And so I snuck through it, but, but then, as I got my first teaching assignment, they said, You're You're really a published, polished public speaker, and you're comfortable with this, and you got lots of experience.
00:35:10.679 --> 00:37:31.400
We're going to give you these big they were called mega classes, oh no. And they were 250 students per class, and they said they're really hard. We don't have many faculty who can handle that group and do it well, and Jay, you'd be great for it. I was flattered, but scared to death, because, you know, in a giant lecture hall with 250 students, they're sitting way back, I'm lecturing from a stage. I can use a lavalier microphone, and they can hear me, but you know Lynne, you know me enough already. I want to be highly interactive, and I want to ask questions and challenge them, and and, and I think that's a big key to learning. It was very hard standing up on a stage to engage with students in a cavernous lecture hall, and they're sitting way in the back and they're distracted. And initially, I let them use phones, which was stupid. By by week two, I was walking up and down the aisles of the lecture hall so that when I asked them a question, I could lean forward, get real close to the student that was answering, and I'd have a slim chance of being able to hear them. And that's a creative solution. I like that. Well, I came up with another one. I thought, that's still not working well enough. I still can't hear them, and I still have to go. I'm sorry. What'd you say? Mary? Mary, what was that? Mary? Could you speak louder? And the kids got so they didn't want to raise their hand if, you know, if I was going to badger three four times to speak louder. The the IT Department found me a portable microphone solution where there was, it looked like a beach ball, and there was a microphone embedded in it, and got four of them, and I would float them around the classroom, like people bumping them with their hands, like at a football game or something. So I would say, okay, who's going to answer to this one? You know, and bounce the microphone over to Thomas, he's got his hand up, and the microphone would go over, and he would speak, and it would be loud enough. And I told the students, I'm using these portable microphones, because I value all your answers so much I want you to be able to hear each other. But you changed like the whole nature of the class. It was way more fun.
00:37:31.579 --> 00:37:38.300
It was easy to engage, and you solved your hearing issue. I love that. So that worked out well.
00:37:39.079 --> 00:39:26.780
That worked out well, and then I got incredibly lucky, Lynn, my ear, nose, throat, Doctor, I had another health issue, benign positional vertigo, and it's one where you get the crystals get dislodged in your inner ear, and they float and get in the wrong place, and you have extreme vertigo, like You can't stand up, you'll fall down. And so I had that. And when I was seeing my ear, nose, throat doctor, he said, Jay, do you know you are a candidate for surgical procedure to repair your hearing? And I said, really? And he told me about it and and he said, but it's risky. You know, you've got a chance of going 100% deaf. And I said, Well, let's, let's pick my worst ear, and let's go for it. You know, I don't want the trajectory of declining hearing I'm on, so let's go for it. And so we did, I did the procedure, and I came home, and within two days, I 90% restored the hearing in that ear. Honest to God, Lynn, I came home and that second night with some people over for dinner on the back deck, and there was a conversation, and I had not heard every word and a conversation in a decade. And that's amazing. I came in the house and it was like eight at night, and I just came in to get glasses of water for everybody, and I just stood at my kitchen counter and cried because I'd gotten my hearing back. And I thought I had, I thought I had another 35 years of declining hearing loss and isolation. I got my hearing back and but what a moment standing at the kitchen sink and crying because you realized it's back.
00:39:22.460 --> 00:39:43.659
You know, you realized in that moment what you what you had been living without, and that it all, almost all of it, had come back. I had a lot of good fortune. I had some really hard stuff come my way in life, and we'll talk about more, but, but I've had really phenomenal bounce backs.
00:39:39.320 --> 00:39:59.920
Part of them, I think, my own tenacity and and part of them, you know, it's just our bodies respond in different ways, and the modern miracles of modern medicine, getting my hearing back my life in the last 35 years would have been very, very, very different. You took.
00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:27.260
That risk too. You were willing to take that risk. So I think that says a lot about you. Oh, thanks, yeah, yeah. Well, mind you, when we did it, understood the potential for success and deafness and said, Let's just do one ear. That's smart, yeah, yeah. And I could have gone back and done the other ear, but I thought the first one worked really well, and I'm doing quite well, so that was enough.
00:40:28.159 --> 00:41:01.079
Well, I noticed people do really well if they only have one good ear, yeah, well, and, and we'll talk about, we'll talk about, you know, then I had a stroke come down. That's right. Oh, my God. And so thankfully, it's kind of a blessing that my hearing got recovered, restored in my left ear, and my my vision, my stroke hit the occipital lobe, which processes your vision, and it hit it, and I lost all my peripheral vision on this side.
00:41:01.380 --> 00:41:29.239
And so my bad eye, where I can't see right side, yeah, and my ear, where I can here is on the all on this side. So when we go out, my partner and my kids and all my friends know, you know, Jay wants to sit on a certain corner at the table because he's got a good eye and a good ear over on the left. And so you just get used to it. You do now, the stroke was that severe? Was it?
00:41:30.199 --> 00:41:51.760
I sure thought so. And, yeah, and probably, probably around age 50, I I've been pretty athletic my whole life, and I'm I'm probably underselling. I'm an Exercise guy. I've exercised five or six days a week pretty much since I was 14 years old.
00:41:51.940 --> 00:42:03.420
Some of it is clearly disciplined, but some of it is, I just enjoy moving. You know, there's intrinsic versus extrinsic reward and motivation.
00:41:57.940 --> 00:42:24.559
And for me, exercise is intrinsic. I do it not because, oh, it'll have all these benefits. I do it because I like moving, and to get up in the morning and get on a spin cycle and pedal and watch the news or a movie or something, and just, I like moving. I like walking, I like playing tennis, and I just the act of movement is so good.
00:42:24.739 --> 00:42:52.119
So I'd really and I'd been a runner, and I ran three miles, kind of every other day for 30 years in the middle of my life, all of a sudden, at age 50, I just could no longer run. And you put it down to Huh? I guess that's old age and but it was kind of a on off switch where I just could no longer run. And I lost some energy playing tennis.
00:42:47.079 --> 00:47:08.940
I recognized it, and I'm not healthcare Doctor avoidant. And so I went in and I got tested. I did stress tests and, you know, dyes in my system, and brain scans and bone scans and cancer screening and and did everything. And I had a rich history of family heart health issues. You know, my mother died of congestive heart failure, my grandmother, my sister as a pacemaker, and lots of cousins, and I knew that, and so I didn't want to be naive, and I told all that to my doctors. We did all the appropriate tests, but could never put our finger on anything. But meantime, my my health kept slowly winding down over over that in a 10 year period from age 50 to age 60. At age 60, it got worse. And I was teaching at the university, I had a stretch, oh, I had a full on stroke. And December of 2015 I really went into a bad heart rhythm, atrial fibrillation, atrial fibrillation, afib, and really irregular arrhythmias, and it wears your heart out, and your heart muscle is just pounding so much, and it gets prone to blood clots in it, and blood clots are what cause strokes. I had several mini strokes called tias, oh, yeah, trans ischemic, yeah. And so I would be teaching in a classroom, and I would black out, not faint and follow the floor, but black out and lose my brain. And I would, gosh, I would look up and I've got 75 students in front of me, and I would not know who they are or why they're in Gosh. And I would look at my PowerPoint slides, which I created, and I thought, what are those? And I'd have two or three minutes of having subtle awareness, but no idea awareness that I was somewhere, but no idea where I was or what I was doing. They would ask me questions, and are you okay? And I was in a brain fog, and then in about two three minutes, I'd come out of it, and they'd say, are you all right? And I said, I think so. And I'd be tired and exhausted, but I would finish the lecture and go on with my day and do another couple lectures. I had this happen a couple of times. Even went to a doctor. And at the same time, I was playing a ton of tennis, and I had a torn rotator cuff and torn labrum and bone impingement in my shoulder, and such dominating pain I couldn't even lift my arm like that. And so I was in such extreme pain morning to night that I ignored all the heart symptoms, and I ignored the tias and the mini strokes, oh, and I would go to the doctor and say, you know, what can you do for my painful shoulder? That was my window. I had 400 students that semester and seven classes, and I'm grading papers till midnight every night with one arm with my left hand, oh, my gosh. And I started taking Ambien so that I could sleep through the night. And for me, Ambien was effective for a while, but scary. I mean, I'd find myself wandering out on the street, you know, and my gosh, but it led up to a full on stroke, you know, sitting at a friend's house and watching a Broncos football game, and the room closing in and getting dark, and I couldn't talk and I couldn't stand, and all of my symptoms of stroke, you know, speech, arms, couldn't raise my arms, you know, just slowed down brain. And I had a full on stroke, and I didn't know the symptoms, and my friends did not, and I did not get to the hospital in time to reverse the stroke. And I thought, I thought it was, you know, naively, stupidly, very stupidly, you know, I think I'm a reasonably smart but I was so stupid in that I did not know the symptoms of stroke and and under underestimated the magnitude of what was happening to me.
00:47:09.300 --> 00:47:16.139
I think a lot of people do that when you're in it. You know when it's actually happening to you?
00:47:12.360 --> 00:47:27.920
You're just not coming to that realization necessarily, and if your friends weren't educated about it. I mean, we just recently have become aware of what to look for. I think that's kind of natural. It's hard to know what's happening when you're going through it.
00:47:28.699 --> 00:47:50.860
Yeah, yeah. And you and, you know, what are those steps of grief? You know, denial is one of them. And yeah, so I'll, we're on the air. I'll take the time Lynne to to remind people of the five, or, excuse me, the four symptoms of stroke, F, A S T, F, A S T, and they stand for face, ask the person to smile.
00:47:50.860 --> 00:48:35.119
And if you've had a stroke, normally you cannot smile. And and you know your your mouth is or your face is paralyzed. A is for arms. You know, can you lift your arms to the person who's having an incident? And normally they cannot lift one or both arms. S is speech, ask them simple questions, and if they're really slowed down and they cannot talk intelligibly. And then t fast is for time. You got about two hours to get to the hospital. And there are reversal drugs that can negate and reverse the effects of a stroke, but only if you get there in that two to three hour window.
00:48:30.980 --> 00:48:39.440
And so, F, A, S, T, face, arms, speech time, you know, I teach it to a lot of people now.
00:48:40.039 --> 00:48:59.980
So glad that you mentioned that I was going to ask, what are the signs that's so good, F, A, S, T, so when did you get to the hospital, or did you go that night? Well, well, I My girlfriend was not with me. She came and picked me up. I talked my friends into just let me lay down, you know, I think I'll feel better. You know, very stupid, very naive.
00:49:00.159 --> 00:49:13.559
My girlfriend took me home, and the next morning, we went into urgent care, and I thought maybe I did get a painkiller prescribed for my shoulder pain.
00:49:08.940 --> 00:49:33.199
So I thought, I'm having a reaction to that painkiller. It was new in the last couple of days, I self diagnosed, not the right thing to do, and we went into urgent care, described my symptoms, and they said, get to the emergency room. I think you've got a stroke. So that's what we did. And yes, it was a stroke. I lost a lot of memory.
00:49:33.440 --> 00:49:48.400
I lost a lot of vision. A stroke is neurological. It's a traumatic brain injury. I wasn't able to process the things I I couldn't drive for six months.
00:49:42.820 --> 00:50:10.380
The system in your in your brain that automatically closes and filters your eye so that light doesn't flood it was knocked out for about four months. So any amount of light, even in a dark movie theater, I. Had to wear dark sunglasses because the tiniest amount of light caused my eyes to tear up and hurt extremely. I was really scared.
00:50:10.920 --> 00:51:01.500
And I was scared, you know, my girl? A, my girlfriend will leave me. B, I'll never drive again. C, I'll never get to work again. You know. D, you know, I'll never play tennis again, which I love, I'm going to have impaired vision, and I'm going to be all alone. And so that that that's where I went, you know, cognitively for a number of months. And, you know, my my girlfriend, just stood up and said, you know, stood up metaphorically, and said, come stay with me. I'll take care of you and, and it was an incredible you know, and just the connection we have, and that was from 10 years ago, you know, just from her leaning in and, you know, and just care taking me, you know, I can just about cry now. It's just so amazing.
00:51:01.920 --> 00:51:11.340
Sometimes you don't even know until something like that happens, you don't even know how much someone is there for you. I'm so glad that she was and that strengthened your relationship.
00:51:11.639 --> 00:51:17.280
Now, this would all be bad enough, and these are enough things to have to deal with, but you have more.
00:51:18.480 --> 00:51:21.079
Well, I'll speak a little bit.
00:51:18.480 --> 00:51:52.719
I'll speak a little bit probably, of all the things I've done in my life. You know, if you were to ask, what are you most proud of? And I would say my recovery from stroke, because it was debilitating, and losing my memory and driving and tennis and eyesight, I had an occupational therapist come to the house about two weeks after I got out of the hospital after a stroke, and she said, Jay, there is something called neuroplasticity. They used to think the brain was hardwired.
00:51:49.000 --> 00:54:22.639
There are these pathways where signals go down. If you damage them, they can't repair. And now they believe there's neuroplasticity, and it's a lot more fluid, and things can change and adapt. You can have a signal in your brain, and instead of having it blocked, it finds a new path, just like water finds a new path. So she told me that, and gave me some information, and I studied it, I decided, and they call it rewiring your brain, and you find new neural pathways for those signals to go. What she put into my head, and what more I put into my head was I need to create as many stimulus and as many new signals as I can, as frequently as I can every day. I need to stress my brain, and that will make all those signals find new pathways, and they'll create new neural networks. And I might even be wrong, but I think I'm generally correct in how I thought about it. And so I did two to three hours of brain rewiring every day. I would take a big red bouncy ball like you use on a grade school playground, and I'd throw it against the wall 1000 times high and low and right and left, to make my vision compensate, to make my brain compensate, to make those signals find new pathways. When I went for a walk, I believe movement is medicine, I'd go for a walk, and I'm here in Colorado, I would find trails. I knew trails that are littered with stones that you have to step across and over. They have tree roots. The leaves are filtering the light from the sun, so it's hard to see. Those are the trails that go on because I wanted the most stimulation possible, and so I rewired my brain two to three hours a day, I lost a lot of memory. I couldn't remember the names of friends and family. I got out photos. I studied traumatic brain injuries, and it's like the brain has a lot of geography, and there are nooks and crevices and cranny crannies, and so the memories were still in there, but they were like in a filing cabinet, stored away. And so I believed I needed to refresh myself. And so I started looking at my old lectures, which I couldn't remember, like old lectures, meaning I'd done them one year ago, refreshed myself, and looked at my camera roll on my phone to to remember my own relatives. And so, you know, that's how I got my memory back.
00:54:22.639 --> 00:54:27.679
You know, maybe it would have come back on its own, but I worked really, really, really, really hard.
00:54:27.860 --> 00:54:35.239
You have every right to be proud of that. My God, most people don't have that dedication. Two to three hours a day. You were determined.
00:54:35.840 --> 00:55:04.920
I was I was and on. I really wanted to play tennis, and so I went to my tennis club, and my tennis pro, he teaches wheelchair tennis, so he's into helping so cool people with disabilities. He he said, I can teach you strokes and how to play to overcome I still have vision loss over here, and when a ball would be hit to my forehand. It goes into a black hole, into a black void, and it still does, even a decade later.
00:55:05.159 --> 00:55:44.920
And so I need to turn my body, shift my field of vision. And so I would get on the ball machine and have it hit me 2000 balls a week. For hours, I would just create muscle memory of turning my body and how to overcome, how to overcome, you know, lost vision and lost balance and all those things and stimulate new neural networks. So that was that was a workout. And how long did it take me to recover? Well, I'm 10 years out, and I believe I'm back 90% I'll never hit 100% and I lost some memory, I'm sure that I won't get back. And I lost vision that I will not get back, my 90% is pretty good.
00:55:45.280 --> 00:56:03.300
Are you kidding? That's amazing to me, and I bet there's people out there who just haven't done what you've done, and are living with these devastating losses that they don't have to so I hope somebody hears it and tells somebody and helps them to understand you can, you can restore. I think that's amazing.
00:56:03.420 --> 00:56:22.159
It's so funny how, you know, we're about the same age, and what we were taught in school, a lot of those things are different now, and one of them, a great example, is neuroplasticity. We just had no idea. And we were taught, you know, very empirically, it's it's always going to be a loss, and you're never going to restore that. But there you go.
00:56:22.400 --> 00:56:41.079
And I think, I think maybe people understand it better because of networks and computers. And, you know, because when you were talking, I was thinking, yeah, the the memories there, but you can't access it. You don't have the the right connection or permissions for that folder, thinking of it like a computer.
00:56:36.800 --> 00:56:42.039
So that's ridiculous. That story is amazing.
00:56:42.099 --> 00:57:57.760
One other thing Lynne, I'll mention that helped me, and I think could help others, you know, and I've had some problems, but everybody has problems, and everybody's biggest problem is their biggest problem. It doesn't matter if it's asthma or cancer or heart failure or an ingrown toenail, right? And when I get in those situations, I buy books and I want to hear stories of people who have overcome it. One book I bought I've read three times. It was called the stroke rebel and a woman, oh, my god, had a stroke, way, way, way more debilitating than mine. The level of her neuroplasticity, recovery and routine and regimen was puts mine to shame. And so, you know, I am proud of mine, and it worked for me, for everybody. And not everybody's body responds the same, but what she did and how she studied it, and she taught me so much in terms of, educationally, how the brain works, resilience wise, how determined she was to get through it. And I would pick her book up and read it again and again and going, I can do some of that.
00:57:58.599 --> 00:58:03.539
So good we I'm going to put that book in the show notes. Do you remember her name?
00:58:04.320 --> 00:59:01.199
Um, no, but I, I've got the book and I can, yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to really pass that on, because that sounded like it was such a help. One, one other, one that people can relate to, I'm sure, is, um, Kirk Douglas. And Kirk Douglas, the great, great actor, he, he had a very debilitating stroke, and he wrote a book called A stroke of luck, a stroke of luck and and he won a lifetime achievement, you know, from the Oscar Academy, he was asked to come and give an acceptance speech, and his speech was so, so so bad at The time, so disabled. He he studied, he got a speech coach, and he worked for like nine months to be able to say 20 words at at the acceptance. And I watched that, and I still cry. I watch it, oh my God, because he can hardly talk, and he's going bang you.
00:58:54.880 --> 00:59:29.659
And just unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And then he writes a book called A stroke of luck, you know about his life. So people amaze me every day. They really do. But this is not the end of your health issues, and I cannot believe that you've been through all this. It's kind of freaking me out. I didn't know all the details about your stroke recovery, so alright, I feel like I should pick up speed on this stuff. So I feel like, I feel like, you know, we saved the big one till the end here.
00:59:29.719 --> 00:59:50.980
Yeah, so, so, as I had a stroke at age 60, it made it fully aware to me that I was in congestive heart failure, and that, gosh, I had inherited this, you know, that's why I had the stroke. I was in a bad heart arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation.
00:59:46.780 --> 01:00:12.179
My blood clotted coming out of that, I started getting treated for being in heart failure. And heart failure means your your heart does not work as effectively as a. Should you know when you hear the words heart failure, there's actually a medical doctor or practice called Heart Failure doctor. I told him, You know, I'm in the world of branding and marketing.
01:00:09.300 --> 01:00:20.119
I said, That's a terrible name for that. I always thought it was too my father had heart failure. And then they tell you the percentage, right? They have a, oh, don't worry, you're only 30% Yeah.
01:00:20.119 --> 01:02:08.760
So, so I got labeled. You know, America is a world of labels. So I got labeled. You've got heart failure, advancing heart failure. So I had that for 10 years, and you treat it through medications. Initially. There's kind of levels of of attack. One is medications anti arrhythmia, drugs that try to keep your heart in a good rhythm. And I did a lot of them, and they worked for a while, until they don't. And then the next level of defense is surgical intervention. And it's things like ablations. They go in and map all the irregular signals in your electrical signals in your heart, and go in and zap them, cauterize them, and serum create a like you sear a steak on a grill. They sear the the heart wall, the heart muscle, so that those electrical signals cannot come out and mess up your heart rhythm. And so they did that several times, and they would work until they didn't. That's the nature of all these it's not just me. They can have great success and and be helpful for a number of years or not. And so you're buying time generally with heart failure. You know, I don't want to scare people and I don't want to make them feel bad, but heart failure is a tough one, where your heart wears out over time, and you can prolong it a long time through a lot of different therapies and medications, and so that's what I did. But over that 10 year window, my heart did wear out, and the medication stopped working, and the surgical interventions and heart valve replacement surgery, they stopped working. And ultimately, my doctor heart failure doctor said, Jay, you are going to need a heart transplant at some time.
01:02:04.920 --> 01:02:16.739
And, my god, yeah, that's what I said. You know, probably a little more dramatically, but more profanity, but just unbelievable, right?
01:02:13.019 --> 01:02:20.659
You want to hear it's like, how can that be me?
01:02:16.800 --> 01:02:28.219
I'm, I'm an Exercise guy, modulated my drinking. You know, I drank a fair bit in college.
01:02:28.219 --> 01:02:56.380
Man, I drank quite a bit in college and but I've tapered it down over the years and kept exercising and stayed fit and didn't smoke. And I thought, can't be me. Lo and behold, it was. I think that's a great point that we have to make. I think it's a wonderful point that you always did everything right. You have amazing discipline, you've always been healthy, you've always been athletic. Sometimes that's we can't control what happens to us, you know. And you were probably, well, you were probably healthier longer because of your great habits.
01:02:56.619 --> 01:04:11.280
But yeah, sometimes things happen, and it's not our fault at all, and we can circle back to that about, you know, you think you know. And you and I talked earlier, Lynne, somehow you lead yourself to believe that you're in control exactly, and and you ain't, you know, you can influence, but not control. And so I think good habits that influenced and staved off things, but I had heart health issues and and turns out, even beyond a rich history of heart issues, I had a genetic mutation, which I just found out about a year ago, which a cousin tested who has the same problems I did. I've got, I've got, like, nine cousins with the same heart issues I have. She did genetic testing and found out we she has a gene mutation that leads to cardiomyopathy and a lot of heart disease. She said, cousin Jay, I suggest you and your sister, Donna, cousin Donna, that you guys take this genetic test, and so we did, and that was just over a year ago. My two brothers tested negative, you know, knock on wood, thankfully.
01:04:07.500 --> 01:04:32.900
And my sister and I tested positive. So we are carriers of the gene. We got the cardiomyopathy. We have defibrillators, pacemakers in our chest. My mother had it and passed away from it my grandmother, you know, goodness, half of 11 out of 23 cousins all had the same gene mutation. So it's my healthy habits were an influence, but not a control.
01:04:33.199 --> 01:04:46.360
So, and that is so true. I mean, I I'm a control freak. I mean, I'm working on it, but it's so easy to think you are in control. You know, you see the evidence the way you want to, like, Oh, I do this so, you know, I don't have this problem.
01:04:46.360 --> 01:04:59.019
So it must be something I'm doing, right? But that's just, you know, wishful thinking, I think most of the time. So what did you feel like you were not going to get I mean, how did you wrestle with that idea that you might need a heart transplant?
01:04:59.079 --> 01:05:16.800
Well, so. My doctor, great guy, and so I've been with him for 10 years, you know, because I've been in heart failure for that long. And he's local and and so I trust him implicitly, and he's very honest and very direct and very knowledgeable, and he kept putting it off into the future.
01:05:13.440 --> 01:05:31.159
You can deal with health stuff when it's not here and now as much. And so I could kind of stay in denial and avoidance, but it started going down much more. He said, you're probably going to need a transplant. And I said, you know, thanks, but no thanks. I've led a good life.
01:05:31.219 --> 01:06:13.440
I've had a really good run. I thought there'll be more inheritance for my kids if I die. Now I reconciled. I reconciled a belief in an afterlife. I've got a glorious belief that I'm going to be a spirit guide and be able to time travel and teleport, you know, around the world and onboard people as they move into the spirit world. And I'll be able to connect with my kids. So if I forgo the transplant, because that looks hard. Looks really hard for somebody who's been through stuff, I thought, I don't need more of it. I'm tired. Heart failure really wears you out. And you are so tired you're taking two, three hours of naps a day. I thought, I am just worn out, you know?
01:06:09.840 --> 01:06:21.320
And if I want to just go to sleep and not get a heart transplant, you know? I named things. I named it. That option, door A is the slow wind down.
01:06:21.619 --> 01:06:25.400
I'll just do the slow wind down.
01:06:21.619 --> 01:06:34.400
Get run out of gas, run out of energy, fall asleep and be a spirit guide. Option B is, door B is, roll the dice, you know.
01:06:29.599 --> 01:06:57.460
Door B is, get a transplant. You know, take all these immunosuppressant drugs, go into the hospital a lot. Have it be really scary, pull my family, you know, through all this stress, and get upside and it's like, no thanks. And so that's how I thought about things, you know, I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm taking up to it, yeah, I'm taking two years of stressful, worrying, and I just condensed it into about 60 seconds.
01:06:57.699 --> 01:07:26.480
Oh my gosh. But that's what was going on. Well, it makes sense, right? I mean, you probably were worn out by all the work you did coming back from the stroke, and now you're tired all the time and dealing with the heart failure, you probably just were not up for it. So that was the thing. You're making peace with it, right? And then I went in December 16 of 2023 so nine months ago, I went into an appointment with my heart failure doc. And he says, I have good news and bad news.
01:07:22.760 --> 01:08:20.220
He he had asked me to go down and meet with the heart transplant evaluation team in Denver. He said, I know you're still thinking you don't want to do it, but go down and meet with them. Get yourself knowledgeable, be an informed consumer. It's your health. He said, Jay, I work with many patients, your heart health may go down even faster, and you may want to change your mind. And if you don't create the option to have a heart transplant, you won't, you won't even have that, that choice. And so I thought, I'm a smart guy, that makes sense. So I did the transplant evaluation. It's, it's eight hours a day for three full days and a psychological and financial support. And, you know, medical testing, and they don't take everybody you your body has to be, you know, in shape to accept a heart. You need to be the right blood type.
01:08:16.800 --> 01:09:09.600
You need to have financial support and insurance, and you need a support network. If you're on your own, they say there are not enough hearts to go around. And if you don't have, if you're not going to make good use of a heart, they'll say, we want to save it for somebody else who can make better use of it. And 20% of people pass away without receiving a new heart, supply and demand is an issue. Let me give a plug for everybody on your driver's license, please sign up to be an organ donor, because there are not enough hearts, kidneys and livers to go around for people. He told me that, and on December 16, I'm seeing him. He says, Jay, I have good news and and not so good news for you. He says, The good news is you got on the transplant wait list, barely.
01:09:03.300 --> 01:09:54.819
And he says barely, because you ask so many questions when you went through the three days of evaluation, they don't think you're very enthusiastic about getting a heart transplant. They want, they want somebody who's, you know, excited about it and sees it in a certain way, and and you seem trepidatious and hesitant. And I said, Well, that's because I am and and he says, he said, their team of 32 people I talked to and interviewed me, their team rejected me and said, Not I'm sick. I was 68 years old at the time. The cutoff is generally 70 to get a new heart. You know, they're not going to give a new heart to somebody, you know, who's got limited runway left.
01:09:50.260 --> 01:09:54.819
He said, I advocated for you.
01:09:55.060 --> 01:10:01.859
And he said I told the team, how resilient you are, how disciplined, how dedicated.
01:09:58.720 --> 01:10:18.060
Created, and you just happen to ask a lot of questions, but that once you decide you want to get a new heart, and you decide you're all in you know, you will be the best patient they ever had. And and so he talked him into getting me on the list.
01:10:13.800 --> 01:11:37.819
That was the good news, but that he's so that he knew you so well too, that he could speak to with confidence that you would be wonderful, that you would comply, that you would do all you needed to do. So that's, that's, you know, a real plug for knowing your doctor well and him knowing me well. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, oh my gosh. So all of a sudden, now it's real. So now he gave me the the harder news, he said, and I know you thought you had 12 to 18 months of of the slow wind down and and your your heart failure slowly, gradually declining, and you're just running out of energy and stamina. He said, that's no longer the case. All all the diagnostic tests that we ran as part of the transplant evaluation indicate that I'm trying to find remember his exact words, the the trajectory of your heart status is downward and extreme, and the word trajectory just stuck in my mind, the trajectory of your heart decline is extreme, and you won't be able to walk out to get your mail fairly soon, and you're going to be hospitalized and on a balloon pump, and it will not be pretty at all. And so take, take the concept of the slow wind down out of your mind.
01:11:38.300 --> 01:12:35.060
He said. So instead of having 12 to 18 months to decide on a new heart. It was a Friday afternoon at 4pm he says, You got till Monday morning, morning to decide. Yeah, so that that that kicked, that kicked my decision process into gear. I'll, I'll condense it, you know, I, I'm a business consultant, and and, and so I kicked in gear, you know, I'm going to make a list of pros and cons and trade offs and probabilities and statistics and and so I did. I made this massive grid, you know, of all those things hard or if I don't, and I found myself with analysis paralysis, you know, that that was not getting me to a decision. And then I thought back, how will I make a decision? And I had a client who was 20 years older than me, and a wonderful man and and wise.
01:12:30.319 --> 01:13:12.060
You know, sometimes in your life you meet a sage, a guru, and somebody who's just wise that that man was, and he told me, another way to make decisions is, he says, if you got a couple hard choices to make, he says, Try both of them on, like, like a coat of clothes. Oh, and he said, Put on decision number one and and put it on and see how it fits and how it feels, and just kind of walk around the room and let yourself feel and experience it, and What emotions do you have? And and so I tried his technique with both my choices.
01:13:12.359 --> 01:13:42.039
And first I did the slow wind down and and I put on that coat of clothes and walked around the room and went for a walk with my puppy dog, and, and I thought, you know, I can be, I can really have equanimity, imperturbable calm. And I've, I've reconciled my belief about the afterlife, and I'm going to be a spirit guide and, and I think that's going to be a good gig, and I will be an example to my children of how stoic I can be.
01:13:42.279 --> 01:14:05.399
And I thought, and how does that feel? And I thought, that's kind of a downer that doesn't feel like much fun. And can I be good? And can I show people how good I would be at it? Yeah. And I thought, Okay, let's try on the other one. And I put on this code of close of roll the dice.
01:14:00.239 --> 01:14:12.239
And my personality type is a high extrovert in adventure, the enthusiast. I welcome discovery.
01:14:12.420 --> 01:14:19.800
I lean into uncertainty. I want new experiences. This feels so good. There is so much here.
01:14:17.220 --> 01:15:15.720
I've never had a heart transplant and and only three and a half 1000 people a year get a heart transplant. And so I'm in a small, just this tiny, small, exclusive club, almost nobody's in and and I'm in a new tribe, and I might live and I might die, and I'm going to be on drugs, I might hallucinate, and I'm going to feel pain, I'm going to endure suffering. And BB King, the great blues singer, said you can't sing the blues unless you pay your dues. And this is me and, and I'm so excited, and I felt myself surging with adrenaline, wearing that coat of clothes, get a heart transplant, dude. And, and it just. Became obvious to me, you know, very in a matter of of one day, that that this is what I'm going to do, and there's no guarantees, but there's no guarantees in life anyway. Yeah, you know, none of us have a guarantee for tomorrow, exactly.
01:15:15.720 --> 01:15:41.920
And this was your ultimate adventure. You realize it was an adventure as painful and as weird as it could be, and it was hard. It was an adventure, and that's what you're about. So it has been all of that, and I did get a lot of suffering, and I did get a lot of hallucinations, and I have got a lot of side effects, and they diminish over time. I'm eight months out from my transplant, and it gets better all the time.
01:15:42.159 --> 01:15:49.119
You know, I still take a lot of immunosuppressant and nasty drugs, but they are going down all the time. I am in a tribe.
01:15:49.239 --> 01:16:05.760
I'm in a heart transplant recipient tribe. There's only 30,000 people alive in America with a new heart in their chest, and I'm one of them. There's a Facebook support group with 11,000 people in like me, and every day it's very active.
01:16:05.760 --> 01:16:20.960
There's hundreds of posts every day. And there are posts like, Hey, I'm on a wait list. I'm really scared. What is it like those of you who've had a heart transplant? What advice can you give me? Anybody have regrets?
01:16:16.199 --> 01:16:26.899
And they'll post that at 11am on a Tuesday, and they will have 220 responses within two days.
01:16:27.199 --> 01:16:57.579
That's amazing. And the community reaches out and said, You know, John, I was where you were two years ago, and it is scary and it is hard, and you can do it. And the level of support and honesty and intimacy and vulnerability in this tribe is off the charts. That's so good. It's so good that you found that because it's just a huge thing to go through and then, like you had pointed out afterwards, is really hard.
01:16:54.460 --> 01:17:09.779
Like, people don't think about that. It's like, it's not like, Oh, now I have a new heart. I can just move forward. It you have to go through, I'll jump through a lot of hoops to get better. And people, the more they know about it, the better.
01:17:07.380 --> 01:17:26.479
Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. One of the things, and it's how you and I met, Lynne, is, is through a book writing workshop. I've, I've got more time. I'm retired, and I've had this, you know, BB King stimulation. I've paid some dues, and I got stimulated.
01:17:26.840 --> 01:17:52.239
And you're not going to waste your time. That's what I love about you. You're not going to waste your time. You are grateful for what time you've been given. Yeah, I It is you. And I have read, you know, the book by Susan Kane called bittersweet, which talks about you don't get all ponies and rainbows in life. You know you're going to get a mix of ups and downs and twists and turns and good stuff and hard stuff.
01:17:52.420 --> 01:18:10.920
Don't gloss over the hard stuff, but lean into it. Learn a lesson from it, and it will provoke you and stimulate you. What do you get from it? And what is the upside of loss? When I first read that in in her book, it's weird language, the upside of loss. And so I thought about it.
01:18:07.859 --> 01:18:17.880
And, you know, with all my health stuff, you know, I really don't, I think I've led an absolute blessed life, you know.
01:18:15.000 --> 01:18:37.640
So I don't sit around going, Oh man, I got a bad, you know, I got a gene mutation and heart disease and, you know, stroke and heart transplant. I think what an unbelievable, believable, lucky, exciting, interesting, take a, you know, trap, a path less traveled life I've had. And what is the upside of all the hard health stuff?
01:18:37.939 --> 01:19:08.880
And it's, it's, it's made me reflect a lot more. It's dialed up, as you said, it's dialed up my gratitude. It's it's my empathy for my fellow man. We all go through really hard shit, and it hurts and it makes you cry, and but we're all doing it, so we reach out to each other, and it can just bring so much meaning and purpose. When you feel bad, it helps. You know what good feels like? That's exactly right.
01:19:09.239 --> 01:19:40.600
It adds a depth and a richness to the good things. You just don't have that same like, if you think about when you were younger, you didn't appreciate in the same way you do now, because there wasn't that depth and richness of having experienced loss to add those colors and that, that unbelievable depth of richness, of this of the sadness makes the joy so much sweeter. And that's a lot of what's in her book, what I loved is that dichotomy.
01:19:35.359 --> 01:19:58.479
You know, it's it's just, it's life, right? It's love and it's loss, and it not necessarily balanced, just it's a rocky ride sometimes. But I look forward to doing this again when your book is out and I hear about it. Um, thank you so much. Is there anything else you would like people to know?
01:19:58.840 --> 01:22:13.920
No, no. And the I'll just I'll speak to an area I'm working on now, which is the concept of hope. Hope. How do you and so I'm buying books. And my nature of of learning things is, think about it. Think of my own experience, and then buy some books from other learned people who've moved through it and studied it more than I have. And so I'm buying books and reading about hope and stories of people in situations where it looked hopeless and and you know, Victor Frankel, you know, in in a holocaust camp, you know, that type of thing. How do you find hope in the face of overwhelming odds. And I think about, you know, What? What? What can I give to the world from my range of experiences, just, just as you are, as you write a book and and trying to get my arms around hope, and I have no I have no belief that I'm going to come up with the answer for anything, and that I will ever write a book that says, and here are the seven tips to do, to do this or do that. That's bullshit. You know, I can share the things that helped me, and they may or may not help you, and suggest things, and you can try your own. And maybe I can give you some tools, and you can develop your own. But even bigger, that I can give hope. I went through some hard stuff and came out the other side and, and if I found a way, and other people have found a way, you know that that's what I hope to work on, is hope. I don't have my arms around it, yet, I love that and, and it's so meaningful, if you've been through things to try to reach out and help other people, you know, and just say, look, I learned this, and this worked and this didn't. And you're always going to attract certain people will get the lesson, you know, certain people will, and certain people might not, but you know, it's not meant for everybody. It's meant for people that it resonates with. So it's very much worth doing. And you're not the expert, and there's not 15 ways, but you know, it's it's very connecting with other people. It's that connective, wonderful sharing of information, and if anybody can take anything from it, it's worth it.
01:22:14.340 --> 01:22:15.779
Why go through all these things?
01:22:14.340 --> 01:22:32.720
I always say, why go through your life if you can't share what you learned? So you certainly are doing that. Thank you for coming on. And I'll put the info in the show notes, and we'll talk to you probably next, I don't know, maybe in six months. Alrighty.
01:22:34.039 --> 01:22:38.720
Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Appreciate it. Have a have a good weekend. Bye. You too. Bye. Bye. Don't
