A fall off a ladder at Wendy's led to a chiropractor's office, a voice outside his head, and the first thing he ever truly finished.
I once heard at a seminar that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. My first reaction was to dismiss it completely. But it's one of the truest things I've ever been told.
I was managing a Wendy's in Miami, spinning my wheels in a failing marriage, bouncing between jobs I disliked in varying degrees. Fast food. Real estate. Renting cars. I even dressed up as a dragon at a kids' amusement park called Castle Park. None of it clicked. I kept moving because when things got hard, I moved on. I had never really finished anything in my life.
I disliked the restaurant business the least of anything I had done.
Then came the ladder.
We had one of those old marquee signs out front, the kind where you had to climb up and change the letters by hand. I'd told my crew to go do it. They were joking around, screwing off, and I got frustrated. My philosophy back then was simple and wrong: if you want something done right, you do it yourself. So I climbed up, grabbed for the sign, couldn't hold on, and fell.
When I landed, I couldn't breathe. I had a crowd around me and nobody moved. I'm lying there asking someone to call 911, and one of the girls working for me says there's a chiropractor right around the corner and she'll call to see if he can see me. It was almost dark, around 6:30. I said, whatever.
The chiropractor waited for me after hours, sent his staff home, and worked on me until I could breathe again. I thought, what kind of doctor does that? But I kept coming back.
A few visits in, he started doing muscle testing, talking to my body, telling me things about my adrenal glands and stress symptoms that nobody had ever been able to identify before. Everything he said was accurate. I was genuinely amazed.
At one point he turned around to write something on a chart, and I watched him and thought: that must be the coolest job in the world.
I said to myself, man, that must be the coolest job ever. I wish I could do that. And then I heard a voice outside of me, outside my head, and it said, "Well, why don't you?"
It scared the hell out of me. I kept it together in his office, walked out, and couldn't stop thinking about it.
The very next business day, I went to the library. This was around 1993. No internet. If you wanted to learn something, you went to the card catalog. I started writing letters to chiropractic colleges. A few sent catalogs back. I spread a map out and started crossing schools off: too far, too cold, wrong fit. I was almost ashamed to ask my own chiropractor about it, even though he would have loved it and pointed me straight to Palmer, where he had graduated. I kept the whole thing close.
Eventually one school called me back and invited me for a tour. I drove up from Miami on a beautiful fall morning and walked onto the Life campus. I saw the fall colors — something a guy from Miami doesn't see much — and I got emotional. I just knew I was in the right place. Then I sat in on some speakers and heard things I had always believed were true but had never once heard said out loud.
I'm hearing these speakers say things that I always knew were true, but it was the first time I was ever hearing them.
Chiropractic school was the hardest thing I have ever done. But it was also the first thing I ever genuinely finished. Before that, when things got tough, I found a reason to quit. This time I didn't. And I've been asking myself since why this one was different, and the only honest answer I have is that it was the first time something actually felt like mine.
The ladder fall, the chiropractor who stayed late, the voice I couldn't explain — none of it was supposed to happen. But the way I handled every small frustration before it, the "if you want it done right, do it yourself" thinking that put me on that ladder in the first place, all of it was connected. The way you do one thing really is the way you do everything. And sometimes it takes hitting the ground to figure out what you actually want to do when you get back up.
