The Snowboard, the Subdural Hematoma, and the Secret of Life

The two nasty words that can hold you back from the life you want.

The massive pool of blood in my head pressed precariously against my brain. The doctors marveled that I was alive, much less walking and talking.

They looked and shook their heads in wonder at the MRI results. I politely reminded them I was indeed alive, awake, and actually in the room.

On May 9, 2005, they wheeled me in for emergency surgery, and I said goodbye to my wife, not quite three-year-old daughter, and newborn son. I knew that sometimes people don’t wake up from brain surgery, and this might be the last time I saw them.

Wait, let’s back up a bit.

The Snowboard

It’s the beginning of 2005. I’m working way too hard, which is not surprising considering I’m managing three service businesses and a handful of online projects. 

My real estate businesses are booming because I had learned how to use the internet to generate leads around the clock, but to be honest, I’m much better at marketing than I am at managing all the people it took to keep things going.

A buddy of mine from high school calls and says he has just the ticket — a ski trip to Tahoe. It’d been way too long since I got away, and given that my wife is seven months pregnant, I know things are going to get tougher before they get easier.

We agree to make it happen.

I’ve never been much of a snowboarder, and some might wonder why a 37-year-old would pursue an extreme sport at all, but things like that routinely escape me. What’s the worst that could happen? Who wears a helmet?

The intensity of impact is still burned into my brain.

I’ve never felt anything that comes close to colliding with the mountain on that picturesque, sunny day in Nevada. High school football, a few fights, and more serious car accidents than anyone is entitled to survive simply didn’t compare.

As I lay there in the snow, I want to let go. It’s the first time I’ve ever considered simply giving up and slipping away. When the ski patrol comes by and expresses concern, I wave them away, and that’s what convinces me to get up.

Get up, Brian. Get up now.

So I slowly get up and trudge away.

I feel terrible. Snowboarding is over for me, so I limp to the lodge to lick my wounds at the bar.

No blood, no foul, right?

So I thought.

The Subdural Hematoma

I get back home and back to the grind. A month goes by, and the due date for the birth of my son comes and goes, as he pulls a couple false labors just to keep things interesting.

I have a constant headache. It’s a bit strange, since I never get headaches.

But hey… I’m working my tail off while helping to raise a young daughter, and there’s a new little one reluctantly on the way. Who wouldn’t have a headache?

On April 13, 2005, the boy arrived. Everything is right with the world, headache or not.

Unfortunately, the pain in my head intensifies. Anyone who has children knows how tough a new baby can be, so I don’t think much of it.

As May rolls in, I’m racked with pain. It’s horrible and debilitating, and I once again wonder about giving up. I can’t live this way.

Then the hallucinations begin.

Somehow, I survive the weekend. On Monday morning, my wife literally drags me out of bed and takes me to get an MRI.

As I sit waiting for results, my biggest fear is not, “You’re dying.” The answer I fear most is, “We don’t know.” I can’t live this way.

The actual answer is: 

“You’re getting in an ambulance immediately."

A subdural hematoma is a traumatic brain injury where blood gathers between the outer protective covering of the brain and the brain itself. That snowboarding accident had sparked a slow leak in my head that became a bloody big critical situation.

We don’t know exactly how close, but death is definitely in the vicinity.

The Secret of Life

As the doctors explain the situation to me, I honestly have no fear. Given how badly I feel, I’m relieved. Either a craniotomy will save my life and remove the pain, or I’ll die.

Problem solved, one way or the other.

I can still see the brave woman in the doorway, the three-week-old baby in her arms, and the confused little girl at her side. As I say goodbye to the three most important people in my life, my attitude changes.

To the extent it’s up to me, I’m waking up after surgery and everything is going to be great. In a strange bit of cosmic irony, I’m more positive than ever as I roll in to have my head cut open.

The anesthesia hits, and everything fades to black.

~nothing~

I suddenly hear voices, yet everything is a dark screen in an empty theater.

Am I alive?

“I’m confused,” I manage to mumble.

“What do you want to know?” a disembodied voice replies.

“The secret of life,” I say, not sure if I’m joking.

“I think he’s okay,” the voice says, and the others laugh and clap.

A Life-Altering Awakening

Turns out I woke up after surgery in more ways than one.

You see, I had been working myself to death building businesses I wasn’t really interested in. What I enjoyed was writing, not running offline operations built on online content marketing.

For seven years I’d wanted to operate solely in the digital realm, and I knew I could do it. Why was I doing all that other stuff?

Because I told myself I was supposed to.

It’s all too easy to tell ourselves we can’t do what we want to do. That it’s not practical, or it’s too hard, or that our dreams are selfish and not the “right thing” to do.

I got over that really fast. Every delusional and self-defeating system of thought I had carried around with me for years was revealed for what it was — my own mind creating false limitations.

Some call that a moment of enlightenment. I call it getting on with living the life I wanted to live.

So during the three-month recovery period, I unloaded the real estate businesses, finally let the law license lapse, and launched two online projects I’d been putting off.

By the fall of 2005, I’m operating completely online. On December 11th, I came up with an idea for a blog where I will talk about how I used content to build my prior businesses. Copyblogger launches 29 days later.

From there, I launched three profitable seven-figure businesses in three years — 2007, 2008, and 2009 — all without investment or advertising.

In 2010, I combined some of those assets into a new company, which went from around $3 million in revenue to over $12 million in five years. My 40s were shaping up to be the most lucrative period of my life by far.

And then I lived happily ever after, right?

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Not exactly. While my business life was going better than I had ever hoped, the rest of my life was not so good.

I worked too hard, drank too much, and generally failed to take care of myself both physically and mentally. 

While my family enjoyed an amazing lifestyle that I never had while growing up, I wasn’t showing up as the husband and father I needed to be.

I alternated between high anxiety and deep depression, which made the money seem ultimately meaningless. In short, I was miserable and overworked all over again. 

Had I really learned anything from that knock upside the head? I did, but it seems I needed to re-experience the pain to remember that moment of clarity.

In 2017, I had a decision to make as I approached age 50. We had an offer for a substantial amount of funding from a private equity firm to take the company to $100 million in revenue and presumably a huge exit. 

This was the “swing for the fences” move, and it would require me to devote even more time and effort to a company that I never really aspired to in the first place. That may sound strange, given that I had made all the decisions that had led to this point.

But it’s true. I let my ego dictate my ambition and decisions, even when I knew the results weren't really what mattered to me. Year after year, I kept pushing forward based on what I thought I was supposed to do, because who wouldn’t keep this gravy training going and growing?

That’s when I recognized the presence of those two nasty words once again, just as in 2005. The malignant motivator I swore would never dictate my decisions:

Supposed to.

I sat there and thought about my kids, then aged 12 and 15. The reality of the situation was if I signed the deal, I was signing away the last years I would spend with them before they left to begin lives of their own.

Beyond that, I would be signing away my own health and well-being. And last but not least, I would once again be sacrificing what I wanted to do in favor of what other people thought I should do.

So I chose not to. 

Instead, I decided to begin the process of selling the company so I could pursue a different path. I wasn’t exactly sure what that path was at the time, but I knew it would be different from the one I had been on in every important way.

That meant that I would choose work that had meaning beyond the money. That I would integrate my life as much as possible, which meant my health, personal development, and relationships would be on equal, non-competitive footing with work and wealth.

But here’s the thing. My “radical” decision this time wasn’t prompted by something as dramatic as a near-death experience. Instead, it was a meaningful choice that people at midlife are often faced with.

My 40s were filled with discontent, which I later discovered is fairly common and to be expected. And the decision to go in another direction around age 50 is one that you may be contemplating as well.

The great news is that we tend to get happier starting at that milestone, and our level of general well-being tends to increase every year after. And while there are many variables in why that’s the case, one in particular stands out:

We stop doing what we’re supposed to do.

Midlife Reinvention, Just in Time

Collectively, doing what we were supposed to do hasn’t worked out for our generation so well. It feels like the rug has constantly been pulled out from under us whenever we had expectations of things that prior generations enjoyed.

So while midlife reinvention is absolutely a positive thing, it’s also an absolute necessity for Generation X:

• Retirement is out of reach.

• The United States is falling apart.

• Workplace ageism is alive and well.

• Artificial intelligence is stealing jobs.

And yet despite the necessity for radical adaptation and reinvention, it’s not all doom and gloom. That’s because the way to combat the ills listed above happens to be a solution that will allow you to live an exceptional life at midlife.

This isn’t about chasing a dream. It’s a highly logical decision in the face of real threats and downsides. It just so happens that the outcome will allow you to “live the dream” in a way that retirement can’t deliver to anyone other than those who are already exceptionally wealthy.

From our origins as latchkey kids all the way to our “sandwich generation” role providing support for our children and aging parents at the same time, the one constant has been change.

One thing we figured out early on is that “a job was for life” was a farce. We’ve known since we entered the job market that employers have no loyalty to us, and we’ve largely treated them the same way.

And yet, most Gen Xers are white knuckling employment in their 50s, praying that they can maintain a steady income until reaching a retirement that most can’t really afford. This is perhaps the most dangerous time to start thinking that a job provides security.

Getting laid off in your 50s is more likely than not due to entrenched ageism, and getting rehired in your 50s or 60s isn’t easy. Roughly one in five job seekers aged 55 and older is long-term unemployed, which means they’ve been looking for work for at least six months.

Worse, our modern idea of retirement was created by marketers based on a temporary set of circumstances that hasn’t existed in over four decades. Generation X will be the first group that can’t afford to retire en masse in our 60s, thanks to the death of pensions and the forced over-reliance on the 401(k) for retirement savings.

These two realities put us in a really tough spot.

Employers think we’re too old and are pushing us out the door, and yet most of us can’t afford to retire and coast for 30 years without working. Meanwhile, losing your job for an extended period further reduces your savings and stunts the amount of income you generate to eventually retire.

And we haven’t even talked about artificial intelligence yet. Companies are eliminating people in favor of AI, not shifting them to new roles as we were promised. They’re just doing it quietly because they know the optics are terrible.

The smartest way to deal with the threat of losing your job to AI is to own the company that uses AI — even if it’s a company of one. Taking control of your income, and working from wherever you want for however long you want, are the only rational moves.

And just as this time in your life is the worst time to lose your job, it’s also the best time to start your own business. Data from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania shows that the highest success rates in entrepreneurship come from founders in middle age and beyond.

Doing nothing is not an option. But where should you start?

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet become a free subscriber to Further, I’d like to invite you to join us. 

When you sign up, I’ll send you an in-depth, six-part series on tackling these unique issues in a way that allows you to start living an extraordinary life well beyond what traditional retirement can deliver.

And if you’re on board but haven’t joined Further Premium yet, I hope you’ll consider it. The program is carefully constructed to help you design your own version of freedom… along with a much brighter future.

Keep going-

Brian