What a Man Who Battled Cancer Four Times Taught Me About Life
He’s still alive and his lessons will teach you to live not exist.
In 2018, I was captivated by a Facebook video of a man in his 30s who battled cancer three times and survived. Not long after, he battled cancer again for the fourth time when doctors found four tumors in his throat.
His video struck me because he was of a similar age, had a wife and kid, loved inspiring others, and worked in a bank just like I did at the time.
The video of him speaking about his life moved me so much that every time I rewatched his speech, I cried.
These tears made me share his video on LinkedIn. Sharing his video was an accident. There was no intention behind it from my side. Within a few days, the video went viral and the short commentary I wrote about it reached millions of people.
The Law of Attraction then caused the young man to message me directly on LinkedIn. He thanked me for sharing his video and we exchanged messages regularly after that.
About a year later, he mentioned that he was coming to my hometown of Melbourne for a day to speak, and invited me to spend the afternoon with him.
These are the lessons he taught me that afternoon after battling cancer four times and winning.
Speak your truth and don’t edit out the emotion
I sat in the room that afternoon at Flemington Racecourse and watched him speak. It was a room full of real estate agents wearing their best black suits and hiding their feelings behind invisible masks.
What he did that I’ve never seen before was share his story unfiltered.
He didn’t edit out any of the difficult bits. In fact, he shared the harshest of circumstances and cried as he told the story. By the end of his speech, he must have cried at least ten times.
I asked him at the end how he felt. He said: “It’s an emotional rollercoaster but it’s the only way to get the audience to listen. They won’t believe me otherwise.”
At the end of the speech, grown men and even stronger looking women with biceps they earned at the gym, were crying. I caught one guy looking at a photo of his family on his phone while the speech continued in the background.
We hear the same old lessons all the time. The best way to go from hearing advice to taking action on it is to have emotion intertwined into the story.
Emotion moves us to motion.
Tell your story; share your lessons; just don’t edit out the emotion.
Nobody in life will tell you what you can do, only what you can’t do
As a teenager who narrowly escaped death, this man managed to survive and travel to America to live out his dream of playing baseball.
Everybody told him it was a stupid idea because of the state of his health. His advice to me was to ignore the critics. People only tell you what you can’t do because they don’t know themselves or are scared to make the same choice.
It’s rare you’ll be told to move forward. Give yourself permission and choose yourself.
I was told for years to give up writing. Last week my former boss and good friend told me over lunch “Your writing was some of the worst I’ve ever read. I’m so glad you kept writing because now your writing is some of the best I’ve ever read.”
That statement left me gob-smacked. Nobody has ever told me how bad my early writing back in 2014 was. If that advice was given to me back in 2014 from people who mattered to me, I’m not sure I would have kept going.
You know what you can do. Follow your intuition, not other people’s opinions.
The choices we make can change our life
I asked the man in the car ride to the event how he was able to speak on stages in front of thousands. He told me it was a conscious choice.
Early in his banking career, he was forced to give up work because of his poor health. Instead of sitting at home, he started to call up Community Clubs around Australia and offer to speak for free about his life story. He repeated these speaking gigs for many years. As his bank balance depleted, he kept doing his speaking gigs. Slowly he started to earn a bit of money.
Every time he got offered more money, he made that paycheque his new minimum acceptable threshold for new speaking offers. Over many years, after speaking on many stages, he built up a reputation and developed a speaking skill at a professional level.
My naive view that afternoon before this chat was that his story — beating cancer multiple times since childhood — got him the speaking gigs.
After he told me this story of starting from nothing, it became obvious: it’s the choices we make that change our lives and make our results look extraordinary to outsiders who weren’t there at the start of our journey.
Choose your goal and put in the work.
You can reach a pinnacle and it can get taken away in a heartbeat
When he was at the height of his baseball career at the age of eighteen, he suffered a career-ending heart attack.
All he could do was pray each day that he wouldn’t wake up. These suicidal thoughts haunted him.
This experience was a solid reminder for me. When we met that afternoon, I was still dealing with the sadness of getting my dream job as a people leader and then having it all taken away from me at a moment’s notice. It hurt like a rusty army knife to the back of my kidneys.
You can climb all the way to the top and achieve huge, audacious goals, and still fall back down again.
It’s not whether you will fall down; it’s what you do when it happens.
Do you stand still or do you get up and keep taking tiny steps forward? The latter option will determine what new highs you can achieve beyond the initial setback.
Everything you’ve earned will get taken away at some point but that doesn’t have to be the end. It can be the start of a new beginning.
What we can give back is what counts
The life this man now lives is based on one simple idea: what can I give back rather than take from this world?
It’s a tiny shift in thinking. We spend our entire life taking from this world. What can you give back?
Writing is my way of giving back. What is yours?
Make your future self proud
This is another one of the mottos he taught me.
The way to motivate yourself is to make your future self proud. What could you do today that your future self would be proud of?
One action you can take is to do something that makes you uncomfortable. If you want to go one step further, do something that makes you fearful.
As an example, this week I got on stage and gave a mini-speech unrehearsed. When my name got called, my heart started beating like crazy. I was given the option to opt-out. In that moment, I said yes, felt the fear and did it anyway.
Looking back, I’m proud of the outcome. You never know what’s going to happen when you take a risk. But when you do, you make your future self proud and that feels ten times better than doing nothing and wondering why your life feels like it’s missing a vital piece.
Make decisions your future self will be proud of.
It’s not about the number of days you live but what you fit into those days
This is the final lesson the man who battled cancer four times taught me. He doesn’t measure his days on Earth based on how long he lives and continues to battle cancer.
He told me walking back to the hotel that afternoon in our final few minutes together that he realized he would one day stop escaping death.
He beat cancer four times, but he has realized that his good luck won’t continue forever.
“It’s not the number of days I live but what I fit into them that counts.”
For him, he wants to fill his days by giving inspiring speeches that change lives and building a legacy he can one day leave behind. I realized that the answer for me was to continue to write for people so that I may be helpful in some way. The answer is perhaps different for you.
Whether you live until 104 like my grandma did or for much less time, don’t measure your life in years. Measure your life by how many activities you get to fit in that bring you, and those around you, joy.
Schedule family time, love people even if they hate you, inspire people with your story, take risks, reach the top and fall back down only to later rise up again, and remember: you can’t cheat death.
Don’t wait for your expiry date on life to be due before you start living instead of existing. That’s what a man who battled cancer four times taught me.
