It’s inspirational speech day over at the Supreme Dark Lord’s blog, and I want to be able to refer back to this story told in the comments. It’s a story of determination and audacity, the kind that makes me feel like I can mow down any problem in my way.

Now we’ll turn it over to Dirk Manly…

For me, the most inspirational figure I know of is Douglas Bader.

1933 … crashed his fighter biplane doing a stunt-landing (in direct violation of RAF regs about such landings)… mangled his legs. Knocked out briefly — then seeing his one leg bent UP at the knee, his first thought was, “damn, I won’t be able to play rugby this afternoon.” Passes out again as they pull him from the plane.

Wakes up in the hospital, with one leg amputated just below the knee…

and the other leg just above the knee.

Goes through physical rehab. Doctors tell him he’ll never walk again without two canes. Typical fighter pilot mentality: “To hell with that. I’ll learn to walk without canes if it’s the last thing I do.”

Gets back into the cockpit in trainer planes with instructor pilot.

Eventually passes check flight, and is back on flying status.

Learns to walk without canes.

Determined to learn how to drive again (no auto transmission, so he has to move his leg to work the clutch)… because he admires the waitress where he and his buddies hang out for lunch, and wants to take her out dancing.

Learns to drive a car again.

Takes the waitress out dancing

Marries the waitress.

Gets kicked out of the RAF, the reason being “because we have no regulations for legless pilots.”

Several years later, Hitler invades Poland, draft notices go out. Bader doesn’t even wait for a draft notice to arrive — he’s depressed not flying airplanes… so he goes to the local draft board, and voluntarily enlists. Goes for his physical. Very cursory examination — doctor doesn’t even notice that he’s a double-amputee. Tells informs doctor of previously being an RAF pilot, and requests that doctor recommend he be assigned to the RAF.

Back in the RAF… refresher flight school course and then trained for, and qualifies to fly Hawker Hurricanes. Due to previous experience, assigned as flight leader over some newbie pilots. Battle of Britain commences. Gets promoted to squadron leader, and transferred to a Spitfire Squadron.

Promoted all the way up to Commander, 12th Fighter Group in charge of about a dozen squadrons.

Eventually shot down over France on a “rhubarb” mission (looking for targets of opportunity on the ground. [Bader always believed he was shot down by ground fire. Recently evidence has emerged that he might have been shot down by a friendly who pressed his gun-tit before thoroughly recognizing the shape of the fuselage about to enter his cone of fire]

Off to German POW camp.

Escapes from POW camp.

Returned to POW camp

Escapes from POW campe a 2nd time.

Returned to POW camp.

Escapes a 3rd time

Captured and Transferred to Stalag Luft III

Participates in “The Great Escape.” Manages to stay on the loose for nearly a week before capture.

Captured and sent to Oflag IV, Colditz castle — literally built on an outcropping of rock in the middle of a river (this is the place where a couple guys were building a glider in the attic. Fortunately, the war ended before they finished, because the main spar would have snapped withing moments of launching, and they would have dropped 200 feet into the river, and probably died either instantly, or of drowning while unconscious.

That’s right… they had to use up a spot in their only truly escape-proof POW camp for a man who had TWO prosthetic legs.

No matter how bad your life is going, it’s more than likely a lot better than the various situations Bader found himself in after the crash.

This image speaks to my inner six-year-old.

When you’re six, the world is full of possibilities and other people magically take care of the logistics–food, shelter, taxes–that you don’t even know about. Dreams are the entire world.

When you’re 16, and struggling to find a drug that will work to control your ravaging autoimmune illness, it’s less about dreams and more about living one day at a time.

When you’re 26 and the magic drug that you found allowed bacteria to start eating you alive, your dream is to get healthy and off meds–and even that dream seems completely impossible.

Once health is achieved, only then can you start to dream again. Really dream.

I won’t say that I didn’t dream when I was working on my health (because I did). I won’t even say that I tried to work towards those dreams during that time (because I also did). But those dreams didn’t go anywhere.

Why?

At this point, I would posit that it’s because all of my body’s energy was going toward keeping me alive and relatively functional. There were no reserves for extras like creativity. (Not the creative act–art is fun–but the creative germination. Bringing a new thing into existence.)

Tonight, for instance, I am so tired that I can barely think. My body has basically shut down, including my brain and my creative abilities. But I think about this time last week, when I was banging out words on my novel and making plans for the future.

For the first time in my adult life, my health is under control to the point where I don’t have to spend all my energy on managing it. (Thank you, carnivory.)

Looking back to see how far I’ve come underscores how much I tried. Oh how I tried, but I did not have the capacity to succeed. It simply wasn’t there. It wasn’t possible for me to sustain something bigger than me when I didn’t have the ability to sustain even myself.

Now, the objective is simple:

1. Continue health gains
2. Acquire more energy
3. Dream
4. Do as I dream

So for those of you who are struggling where I was a few years ago. Don’t despair. Keep dreaming. Do the work to get healthy. You can do it.

I knew it was coming, and still let it happen.

This happened to me after grad school, too: you have this big goal that you’re working towards. It fixes this big date in your mind, the date when it will be FULFILLED and you win, because you reached your goal.

Kind of like Christmas, only you’re Santa and you’re giving the gifts to yourself. Less of a surprise, but still fun.

But then Christmas is over and you have to clean up all the wrapping paper and wash all the dishes and then it’s a long time until something cool happens.

All that anticipation is expended. Hopefully it was expended into something that was worth it, like the time my brother and I thought Christmas was over but it turned out that ‘Santa’ had left us cross-country skis in the hall closet. That was pretty epic, ngl.

After all that excitement comes the doldrums. It’s natural and necessary (I believe that Newton’s third law of motion applies to most things in life), especially for introverts.

What goes up must come down, and all that.

And then you think, “Now what.”

The ideal plan was to sit down in the month of June and do an inventory of all the Batfort posts I’ve done so far, what they’re about and whether I like them, and then use that knowledge to shape future posts. What I didn’t anticipate was how much dang time that would take, and I stalled out around the December posts.

I still have a rough idea of where I want to take Batfort, and have the rest of the online business course I’m doing to help figure out exactly how I’m going to chisel the health stuff off from everything else, but I’m still floundering a lil’ bit.

My brain says “it’s over you can take a break now you’ve achieved your goal,” while my common sense says “Don’t let up now, you’ve only just started.”

In this case, I can see why some people advocate systems over goals. None of that pesky completion for your brain to get distracted by.

Regardless, I’m doing better than I was when I got my degree and had no idea what I wanted to do with it.

It’s like to succeed, you need an immediate goal but also a bigger goal that kicks into gear immediately after the initial goal is finished.

Staggered goals, maybe?

It’s interesting that during my 365-day mission, when I did not have permission to cheat, my mindset was usually “How can I get this done?”

Now that I’m “allowed” to not post every day, the mindset has immediately shifted to “I guess I don’t have to.”

Nope. Not the mindset I want.

Permission, or lack thereof, is an insidious thing. I find that I constantly wait for permission (from whom?) before doing something. Permission that will never come, because life doesn’t grant permission.

In life, you go and do.

Yesterday I wrote about psychic headspace, and why it’s important to get some breathing space inside your own head.

Today, I realized that the person I talk most about is my boss.

How do we demonstrate that something (or someone) is important to us?

We talk about them.

Yikes.

Let’s back up a little.

Many moons ago, when Twilight was cool and hating Twilight was even cooler, I was what you could call a Twilight anti-fan. I LOVED hating on it. The storyline was bad. The characters weren’t well drawn. The writing was awkward. The author had clearly done only a cursory bit of research into life in the Pacific Northwest. The fans were obnoxious and/or horrifying. The list goes on.

In fact, I loved hating on it so much that I made bingo cards to make fun of the overly zealous fans on opening night. Once I packed a vampire-themed picnic to smuggle into a Twilight triple showing, including a champagne cocktail called the “Vampire’s Kiss” (talk about obnoxious!). I used the bingo cards that I made…at a midnight showing.

Basically: I paid money to watch all the movies (in my defense I only bought the first novel). I knew all the books and characters. I had long drawn-out fantheories on obscure parts of the books.

It didn’t matter what my motivations were–out of love for the franchise or love-to-hate of the franchise–I still supported the moves, talked to people about it, and spent my free time thinking about those dang sparkly vampires.

The brutal truth: I was a Twilight fan.

Like it or not, what we do is what matters in life. What we do reflects our hearts.

Which brings me back to today, when I found myself talking about my boss. Again. To people with whom I could talk about nearly anything in the world.

Yet I chose to talk about my boss.

My boss was on my mind. My boss was what I wanted to spend my time and energy on. The way I’m acting sure does make it look like my boss is the most important person in my life.

If I rank-ordered the people in my life who I find most important emotionally, would my boss be on the top of that list? Of course not. So I don’t want to spend any more of my life emotionally processing boss-related things than I have to, clearly.

To change this, I need to fill my life with people that I give more emotional weight than my boss. For me, in my present circumstances, that means meeting more new people and deepening my relationship with God.

Yet if I rank-order my life in terms of people who have power over me, my boss suddenly rockets toward the top of the list. Which suggests to me that there is, automatically, some amount of attention that I’ll need to pay this power relationship in my life.

The trick is not letting the emotional bit overpower the work-related necessities.

To change this particular situation, I’ll eventually have to quit my job. Until that happens, my boss will always have power over me (even if I don’t let it get to me emotionally).

Fortunately for me, this is just more fuel to the fire of working for myself.

Onward and upward, my friends.

I like this passage so much I want to post it so it might reach a few more eyeballs than it would trapped inside Zero to One.

Recent graduates’ parents often cheer them on the established path. The strange history o the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then, when technological progress stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most elite Boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naive optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.

Malcolm Gladwell says you can’t understand Bill Gates’s success without understanding his fortunate personal context: he grew up in a good family, went to a private school equipped with a computer lab, and counted Paul Allen as a childhood friend. But perhaps you can’t understand Malcolm Gladwell without understanding *his* historical context as a Boomer (born in 1963). When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.

Consequently, those of us who were raised by the Boomer generation were given indefinite tools for a definite world.

Context isn’t enough. You have to have content too.