If there is one skill I think more people need to acquire, it is the ability to turn something bad into something good.  I have had a lifetime of practice at it so far, and it has proven invaluable.  I am going to share a few examples that maybe you can relate to.

The most obvious one in the past few years would have to be my car crash.  On a Sunday morning at 5am I was headed to meet my Dad in a small town in northeastern AZ when I was hit head on by a wrong way drunk driver.  This guy drove approximately 12 miles on the wrong side of the highway and ended up crashing into me in a construction zone where there were concrete barriers on either side and no escape.  I was traveling about 65 miles per hour, and I assume he was doing about the same.  The impact was like nothing I have ever experienced before, deafening silence in the darkness immediately afterwards.  It took 45 minutes for the paramedics to arrive, no cell signal, just the two of us and the traffic slowly stacking up behind the crash site.

This became a pivotal time in my life, as many things have changed since this crash.  I was deep in debt at that time, engaged, and working a job that was not really paying me well.  While it is hard to say the crash changed each individual thing, it changed me as a person and I made the changes.  I made one more financial mistake before I figured things out; I took the check I got from my car being totaled and I bought a year newer model.  Well, I financed a new car and had the payment to show for it.  With the financing of the car, I had to have full coverage insurance, so tack on another one fifty a month and I just committed myself to about $550 a month not counting gas of course.  With my current pay, this was a strain.  I did it because I didn’t know not to, I followed suit as to want most people do and sure enough, I ended up just like lots of other people.  Seventy percent of the population lives paycheck to paycheck and has less than two thousand dollars in savings.  That was me and I just firmly planted myself into “average”.

After a few months and several discussions with my soon to be wife, I decided to sell the car, take the loss, and buy a very used vehicle to get by with for a while.  I sold the Camry for a five-thousand-dollar loss and added that to the pile of debt I was teetering on top of.  I found a 2001 Toyota 4Runner, a little beat up but running well.  It needed a new windshield immediately and a few weeks after I got it some transmission work was needed.  Luckily it was minor, and I didn’t pay much to have that resolved.  I paid cash for this vehicle, dropped my insurance to the minimum liability and reduced my monthly vehicle costs to about $80 plus gas.  So the money I now had access to starting going towards my credit card payments.

My credit history was patchy at best, I had lived beyond my means for a long time, all the way back to my first credit card I got when I went off to college.  They hooked me in right out of the gate and I never broke the cycle until after the car crash.  We started listening to Dave Ramsey and did the “Snowball Method” to eliminate the debt I had.  It was to the tune of $70,000 at that time and seemed an insurmountable climb out of that hole.  But little by little, we did it.  The first credit card balance we tackled was the smallest, and it got erased pretty quickly.  Remember, I now had in essence almost $500 a month to throw at the debt of choice while making the minimum payments on the others.  That first balance disappeared in four months, and then the next one was in the crosshairs.  The process continued until we had everything but the house paid off.  I drove for Lyft one summer and worked hard enough to earn a raise at work.  We were obsessed with changing our financial trajectory, and nothing stood in our way.  We didn’t eat out, we didn’t spend a dime we didn’t need to, all of it went to paying off the debt and changing our lives.  I sold the 4Runner for the same price I bought it and purchased a different used vehicle that was in my price range.  I paid cash for it, as I had finally learned my lesson.

If you want to read in detail more of my climb out from under the pile of debt, I have written several other blogs about that topic.  For this one, the focus is on the Personal Alchemy of taking a bad situation and turning it into something good.  Not only did I finally learn how to manage my finances better but I also became a volunteer speaker for MADD.  I now share that crash story with court mandated classes and other events, hoping to make enough of an impression on at least a few audience members to get them to think twice before getting behind the wheel after drinking.  This led to me pursuing Public Speaking in general, branching out to the corporate world and to speaking at universities and colleges around my home state.   It has proven to be a very rewarding pursuit and has also allowed me to do some coaching with the students I speak to.  The alchemy I did was to take what was one of the worst things that I have ever experienced and find a way to make good things come out of it.  This is the key to a happy life.  Bad things happen to everyone, how you handle it is what will make all the difference.  What do you want your story to be?

Stop listening to what other people have to say, especially those who have not been where you want to go.  Likely they are cautioning you for the right reasons, they don’t want to see you fail, get hurt, have to start over.  If you follow this advice, you will live an average life.  I know, I did for a while, and I was not nearly as happy as I am now.  My life is full of examples of this thinking, all the way back to age 16 where I declared I was going to become a Pro Racquetball Player.  I was an absolute beginner at that stage but didn’t let a detail like that deter me.  Nor did I listen to all those who said it couldn’t be done.  They never tried, so how would they know?  At 24 I turned Pro and traveled around the country pursuing the one thing I was sure of at that stage of my life.  The rest was just details.  I made it happen.  I turned all the negative feedback and the odds that were stacked against me into my story of success.  What do you want your story to be?

Here is the secret…there is no secret.  You just have to decide and then execute.  That’s it.  That is what I did and what you need to do as well.  The above are my examples, and you’ll have to bend this story to fit your life if you want to use it as a template.  The main thing is this:  Do the Alchemy.  You have the ability to turn the bad into good, the negative into positive, and to get where you want to go.  If you can see it, you can be it.  It’ll take time, but as long as you are moving forward, eventually you will arrive.

Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.

I wish you luck in your endeavors.