I want to tell you about the night I almost gave up. Not almost in a dramatic, figurative sense — almost as in, I was lying in a hospital bed wondering if I had anything left.
I was about a year into my surgeries. Things weren’t going well. Major infections had taken hold, and I was hooked up to a PICC line, pumping heavy antibiotics into my system daily that made me feel like absolute garbage. This jacked-up nose you see on me now? It’s the third one they built. The infections were so bad they had to cut out all the previous tissue and start over, which meant, for a while, I literally had a hole in my face. I looked like Skeletor.
They’d taken bone from my leg to rebuild my face, and now that reconstruction was in danger of failing too.
I remember lying in that bed — broken mentally, emotionally, physically — thinking: I don’t want to do this anymore. This is too hard. I feel like a freak. I feel like a monster. I don’t want to go out in public.
I was crying, snot bubbling out of the hole in my face, fully in a pity party. Full victim mindset.
And that’s the thing about life’s hardest moments, that’s exactly the mechanism behind SEAL training. We apply enough pain, pressure, and discomfort, and 80% of guys ring the bell. Not because they’re weak. Because in that moment, the desire to make the pain stop overwhelms everything else, unless you know exactly who you are and why you’re pushing forward.
Two things happened that night that changed everything for me.
First, my youngest daughter, three years old at the time, walked into the room. I’d barely had a relationship with her because I’d been gone her entire life up to that point. But now I was home, wounded, and she’d become my little buddy. She crawled into that hospital bed, snuggled up right next to me, always careful to avoid my injuries and hardware, and we watched Dora the Explorer together. “I’m the map!”
That healed something in me. You don’t understand unconditional love until you feel it from a child who doesn’t care how messed up you look. My older daughter said it best once: “Daddy looks funny, but he’s still Daddy.”
Second, I looked up. Across the room, on the wall next to my door, was a sign I’d written back in the hospital, a reminder of who I was and what I stood for. By this point, that sign had taken on a life of its own. It had gone viral. It had been on the news. People started calling me “The Overcome Guy” because of it.
I looked down at my daughter, then up at that sign, and something clicked. I thought: I have to pull myself together. I’m an overcomer. I’m a leader. I have to set the example… and right now, I need to do it for that little girl right there.
So here’s my question for you: what do you want YOUR sign on the door to say?
Every one of us needs one, a written reminder of who we are, and more importantly, who we want to become. There’s the version of you right now, and then there’s the elite version God intends you to be. You may never fully close that gap, nobody hits 100%. But the pursuit of that gap, and having a written reminder of what you’re chasing, is what carries you through life’s worst storms.
That sign is what stopped me from becoming one of the 80% who ring the bell. Write yours down. Don’t tell yourself “I already know who I am, I don’t need to write it down.” Humans have the shortest memory of any creature on this planet the moment real pain shows up. You will forget your why unless it’s staring you in the face.
If you want the exact sign that got me through the darkest night of my life, we made it available for you. Get your own Sign on the Door right now at the shop: jasonredman.com/shop.
There’s no yellow brick road here, guys. Life is hard. You’re going to get punched in the face. Write down who you want to be before that happens, not after.
Go get after it.
YOUTUBE LINK: https://youtu.be/ZDrdmJELk0c