How to be a Great Escape Artist
10 takeaways from Houdini
Your legs are shackled. Handcuffed behind your back. A crane picks you up upside down and lowers you into a glass wall tank. You have one minute to escape or drown.
I can relate to his escapes because throughout my life I felt like I was in the Water Torture Cell.
Houdini — a name synonymous with a man who defied gravity. He walked through walls. Crammed into milk bottles. Shackled in a straightjacket. Handcuffed, (usually all three at once) and buried alive. The ultimate was the Water Torture Cell.
There’s been no one like him since and no one crazy enough to try.
Houdini turned 198 years old on March 24, 2022. He died at 52 years from Peritonitis. He could escape anything except Mother Nature.
Even though his tricks were staged they required a lot of skill, fearlessness, and craziness.
I wasn’t lowered into a glass cell, head first, and feet shackled. Holding my breath hoping I could get out.
My torture cell looked like the front lines of American urban war. Homelessness, familial estrangement, poverty, violence, hate, and a resounding feeling of hopelessness.
If I couldn’t escape the cell, I had no assistant ready to break the glass.
What does it mean for you?
Houdini’s escapes are symbolic examples of reinvention. Survival reinvention means how to start over again after suffering a traumatic loss.
I became a survival reinvention escape artist.
Escaping by changing the background is not escaping. It’s moving your luggage from one location to another.
Escaping reality is checking out.
What is survival reinvention?
The action or process through which something is changed so much that it appears to be new. From changing your business to survival, the reinvention idea applies to many situations.
A popular checklist for personal reinvention
*Challenge assumptions
*Reimagine your core competencies
*Develop an ambitious and inspiring dream
Good ideas but what if you lost everything? There is no solid ground to launch into the new?
The reinvention I’m talking about is the survival kind. Not the job change kind.
How to be a Chief Reinvention Officer of life
Reinvention and change are part of the same energy. You can’t have one without the other.
Change is never painful, only resistance to change is painful. Most of the time, when any change happens, the outcome will not turn out the way you want. By refusing to accept this change, we make it worse because we’re fighting against it, against the flow of life. -Buddha
When disaster strikes there isn’t always time to make plans. You have to grab whatever you can and run.
The straw that broke the camel’s back happened when I lost a good-paying corporate job. I spent the next years unemployed and lost everything. A storm blew the roof off my life.
It was too late to reinvent myself in the job market.
I had no one and nowhere to turn.
I was upside down in the water torture cell.
Not an answer for everyone I chose to develop an ambitious and inspiring dream.
I liquidated everything and expatriated to Bali.
Years later, I published what I learned about survival reinvention in the book “Guitarlo.”
Kirkus Reviews called it “The best reinvention story on the shelf.”
I took the teachings of my book and became a reinvention coach at the Bali Spirt Festival and other places.
The chapter “Journey to Nomadland” documents the beginning of my reinvention story.
I would love to hear your story.
If I could compress my experience into a handy checklist
*When there’s nowhere to go you have arrived
*You can’t always get what you want but you get what you need
*The man who moved a mountain was the one who began carrying away small stones
*Quit clutching at life
*Reinvention means marching off the edge of our maps
Houdini will always remain a source of inspiration. He was a great escape artist. And you can be too without getting too wet.
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