Chapter 7: Purpose, Patience, Perseverance, Positivity
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Everybody wants to sell you a framework.
Seven habits. Four agreements. Twelve rules. Thirty days to a new you. Self-help is a billion-dollar industry built on the assumption that you're broken and some guy with a podcast can fix you.
I'm not selling you anything. I'm telling you what kept me alive.
Four words. No trademark. No merch. No keynote circuit.
Purpose. Patience. Perseverance. Positivity.
I didn't come up with them in some moment of enlightenment on a mountain. I came up with them on a Tuesday, probably, sitting on my couch, legs crossed underneath me in that position that freaks people out, trying to figure out why I hadn't given up yet.
Because I should have. By every reasonable metric, I should have. Twenty-four years old, C6-C7 spinal cord injury, can't feel most of my body, career gone, independence gone, future rewritten in a language I didn't speak. The math didn't add up. The odds were trash. And yet here I was—still here, still breathing, still stubborn as hell.
Why?
That's when I realized it wasn't one thing. It was four things, working together like an engine. Take one out and the whole machine stalls.
Purpose is the one everyone skips.
They go straight to the hustle. The grind. The "just keep pushing" mentality. But pushing without direction is just spinning your wheels, and I know something about wheels.
After the injury, I had no purpose. Zero. I was a guy in a wheelchair who used to be a guy who wasn't. That was my whole identity for a while—defined by subtraction. What I lost. What I couldn't do. What was taken.
You can survive on anger for a while. Spite is a surprisingly effective fuel source. But it burns dirty and it runs out.
Purpose showed up slowly. It wasn't a lightning bolt. It was more like... a leak. It seeped in through cracks I didn't know I had.
May 11, 2010. I walked — wheeled — into a hospital room as a peer supporter for the first time. Less than a year out from my own injury. I didn't have answers. I barely had my own footing. But I had the one thing the person in that bed needed most: proof of concept. Someone who'd been exactly where they were. Still breathing. Still cracking jokes. Still recognizable as a person and not just a patient.
I sat with them for maybe forty-five minutes. I don't remember exactly what I said. I remember what it felt like: the most useful I'd been since the accident. Like the injury had finally earned a return.
That was the first crack the light got through.
Then, February 22, 2011 — I stood up.
Technically, I got strapped into a standing wheelchair. But when you've spent nineteen months looking at the world from three feet off the ground, vertical is vertical. I posted about it: "I'm not 3'11" anymore." People laughed. I laughed. What I didn't say — because you don't say it when you're trying to be the tough guy — was that standing changed something fundamental. The world looked different from up there. Bigger. More like mine.
That's when purpose stopped being abstract. It had a height. It had a date. It had the specific feeling of a peer supporter sitting across from someone and saying: you can still stand up, in whatever way that means for you.
The first time I spoke at a school and a kid came up afterward and said, "I was gonna quit my basketball team, but I'm not gonna now" — something shifted. Not dramatically. Just a millimeter. But a millimeter matters when you've been stuck at zero.
Purpose, for me, turned out to be connection. Not inspiring people — I hate that word. Inspiring. It implies I'm performing. I'm not performing. I'm just telling the truth, and sometimes the truth lands somewhere useful.
But purpose didn't just show up in conference rooms and hospital hallways. It showed up in CT Solutions. In client calls. In late nights where I'm debugging someone's website or building out an AI workflow and thinking: this is mine. I built this from scratch. From a couch. With a C6-C7 injury and a laptop and seventeen browser tabs open.
That's purpose with a practical address. My brain still works. That turned out to be enough.
I went through a period where I didn't have a clear answer to the "what are you for" question. That was the scariest part. Not the pain — I've managed pain. Not the physical challenges — I've adapted. The scariest part was waking up without knowing what I was for.
There's a phrase I kept turning over during that time:
"Disability is my canvas, experience is my medium, and my brain is the brush. Now why do I keep painting this damn smiley face?"
I wrote that down in February 2016. It came out sideways, as honest things usually do. It was a joke that was also a confession. I had this entire apparatus — the story, the experience, the unusual vantage point that comes from living this particular life — and I was using it to perform "okay" instead of to create something real.
That's when the shift happened. Not a dramatic one. Not a TED talk moment. Just a quiet decision to stop painting the smiley face and start painting whatever was actually there.
Purpose isn't a destination. It's the daily decision to mean something. To someone. In some way. Even a small way. Especially a small way.
Patience is the one I'm worst at.
I'm an entrepreneur. A builder. I see a problem and I want to solve it yesterday. That's how my brain works. Fast, lateral, impatient.
But my body operates on a different timeline now. Everything takes longer. Getting dressed. Getting in the car. Getting through a doorway that's two inches too narrow. My mind moves at the speed of light and my body moves at the speed of bureaucracy.
That gap — between what I want and what I can do in any given moment — is where most of my frustration lives. It's where the "damn" in the title of this book lives.
Patience isn't acceptance. I want to be really clear about that. I'm not sitting here saying, "Everything happens for a reason" and lighting incense. Patience is the discipline of not destroying yourself in the space between where you are and where you want to be.
Here's a story about patience that I almost never tell because it's embarrassing in a way the spinal cord injury isn't.
In the years after the accident, I applied for things. Jobs, programs, opportunities. And I got turned down. A lot. Not because I wasn't qualified — in some cases I was overqualified. But because systems aren't built for people who look like me and need what I need. HR departments that didn't know what to do with the chair. Buildings that technically had ramps that ended six feet from the entrance. Phone interviews that went great until they saw me in person and suddenly the position was "no longer available."
Each one of those stings a little. Then a lot. Then you stop counting.
I negotiated with that feeling the way you negotiate with a bad hand in poker. You don't fold every time you get dealt something difficult. You figure out which cards you're holding and you play them as well as you possibly can.
CT Solutions came out of that. When the conventional path kept closing doors, I built a door. Then a hallway. Then a whole building I didn't have to ask permission to enter.
Patience isn't about waiting quietly. It's the understanding that some things take thirteen years. That healing isn't linear. That the body has its own schedule and your job is to show up every day and negotiate.
I negotiate with my body the way you negotiate with a toddler. Firmly. Repeatedly. With the full knowledge that I'm not really in charge.
The spinal cord stimulator — implanted February 14, 2023, Valentine's Day, because apparently the universe has a sense of humor — took months of insurance paperwork, evaluations, and appeals before it was approved. Months where the pain was what it was and the waiting was its own kind of grinding. Then they put a device in my spine that scrambles nerve signals and makes life more tolerable, and I remember thinking: all that waiting. And this is what I was waiting for. A device that makes a bad thing less bad.
That's patience. Not the Instagram version where you wait peacefully and it pays off in a photogenic moment. The real version where you wait angry, and tired, and sometimes hopeless, and then something shifts just enough to keep you in the game.
Perseverance is the one people think they understand.
"Just don't give up." Sure. Great. Thanks. Real helpful.
Perseverance isn't about not giving up. It's about giving up a hundred times and starting again a hundred and one. It's about the mornings where you wake up and think, I cannot do this today, and then you do it anyway — not because you're brave, but because the alternative is worse.
I've fallen out of my chair more times than I can count. Literally tipped over. Hit the ground. Laid there. And every single time, the question is the same: Now what?
That's perseverance. It's not the refusal to fall. It's the answer to "now what."
Now I call Delta. Now I use the wall. Now I figure it out. Again.
The GT-R was a statement about perseverance. A 2010 Nissan GT-R. Hand controls. Zero to sixty in 2.9 seconds, which is roughly the same amount of time it took most people to look at me in that car and decide I wasn't real. A Black man in a wheelchair in a GT-R doing a hundred and seventy on an empty stretch of road is not a sentence most people have assembled before.
But I was not trying to prove anything to most people. I was proving something to myself.
I remember the first time I really opened it up. The road was clear. I had the hand controls dialed in. The engine made that sound — that particular sound the GT-R makes when you push it, like something waking up angry — and I floored it.
For about fifteen seconds, I wasn't a guy in a wheelchair. I wasn't a C6-C7 injury or a statistic or an inspirational story. I was just a man going extremely fast in a very expensive car, and the feeling was a specific kind of freedom that I didn't know I still had access to.
Perseverance looks like that sometimes. Not noble. Not cinematic. Just a guy who refused to let the accident take one more thing, so he found a car that didn't care about his legs and drove it as fast as it would go.
Road Atlanta. Track day. Rolling onto that track and knowing that every other driver out there had to deal with the same tarmac, the same turns, the same physics. The chair stayed in the pit. On that track, I was just another driver working the line.
That is what perseverance buys you. Not healing. Not going back. Access to something new.
Positivity is the one people misunderstand the most.
They think positive means happy. It doesn't. It means oriented toward life instead of away from it.
I'm not happy all the time. I'm in pain every day. My body does things I didn't authorize. I take enough medication to stock a pharmacy, or at least I used to before I went cold turkey and got my personality back. Happiness isn't the baseline. It can't be.
But here's the thing about forced positivity — the performance kind, the "everything happens for a reason" platitude kind — I know exactly what it looks like because I did it for years.
I was the guy who made the dark joke before anyone else could. Who smiled through the worst of it. Who kept the room light because somebody had to and I was better at it than most. I built an identity around being the disabled guy who didn't make you uncomfortable. The one who had it together. The one you didn't have to worry about.
That costs something. It costs something every day, and the bill comes due eventually.
February 2016. I was alone in my apartment, late at night, and I wrote that thing about the canvas and the smiley face. And then I sat there for a while in the dark and let the performance drop.
There was nobody there to perform for. And when there was no audience, what I had left was just... the actual situation. Which was hard. Had been hard for a long time. The smile was real enough when I was making it. But the moment I stopped, what lived underneath was something I hadn't let myself look at directly in years.
That's not a rock bottom story. It's not dramatic. It was just a Tuesday in February. But it was the first time I'd been honest with myself about the difference between positivity as a practice and positivity as a mask.
Real positivity is a choice you make before the feelings show up. It's waking up and deciding — before the spasms, before the frustration, before the long, slow process of getting through another day in a body that fights you — that today is going to mean something. That you're going to find one thing, even a small thing, that makes the whole mess worth it.
Some days that thing is a conversation with Beka. Some days it's a project that clicks. Some days it's Delta in her prime, closing a door at eleven o'clock like she owned the place.
Some days the only positive thing is that the day ended and you made it through.
That counts. That counts more than people know.
The mask cracks when you stop having something to prove. And the thing underneath — the actual positivity, the one that doesn't need an audience — is quieter but it's real. It doesn't perform. It just holds.
Four words. No system. No steps. No guarantee.
Just the engine that kept a broken man running for sixteen years and counting.
Purpose. Patience. Perseverance. Positivity.
I didn't trademark them because they're not mine. They belong to anyone who's ever looked at impossible odds and thought, Yeah, but what if I don't quit?
I want to be honest about something that's underneath all four of those words. The thing the framework is actually built on top of.
I've had moments — more than a few — where I didn't believe my body was going to keep working much longer. Not as a medical diagnosis, just as a feeling. A quiet arithmetic in the back of my head that says: the math here doesn't run forever. I keep my circle small, partly for this reason. Not because I don't love people — I do, maybe too much — but because I don't want to make it harder than it has to be when the time comes.
I'm writing this because I think it's important to say it plainly: the reason purpose matters to me isn't abstract. It's practical. When you're not sure how much time you have on the clock, the question of what are you doing with it becomes the only question worth asking.
Some days what's actually there is ugly. It's pain and frustration and the specific loneliness of living in a body that the world wasn't designed for. Some days it's just gray — not darkness, not light, just the flat neutrality of another day managed.
But some days? Some days what's there is genuinely beautiful. The quiet math of still being here. The unexpected weight of a conversation that mattered. The weird, specific grace of having been forced to figure out what actually matters because the frivolous options were taken off the table.
"Only day we live is the day we die." — Sevendust. I wrote that one down too.
Here's what I've landed on, after all the frameworks and all the reflection and all the raw, unfiltered nights of trying to figure out who I am and why I keep going:
Purpose is the daily decision to mean something. To someone. In some way. Even a small way. Especially a small way.
You don't appreciate something until it's gone. That's not a cliché I'm deploying; it's the most literal sentence I can write about my own life. I lost the use of my body and I became a student of everything I'd taken for granted.
I'm here to talk to you about how to appreciate things before regret finds you.
That's as clear a purpose as I've ever had. And on the days when nothing else holds — when the patience runs thin and the perseverance is running on fumes and the positivity feels like a lie I'm telling myself — that sentence is still true.
I'm still here. That still matters.
"It took a broken neck to fix my life."
I wrote that too. And I mean it. Not because the injury was a gift — it wasn't. But because the person I became as a result of surviving it is someone I actually respect. Someone I wouldn't have become without the fight.
Here is what I know about frameworks: they are not the work. They are the map. The work is the territory — the actual days, the actual decisions, the actual moments when you have to choose between the person you're trying to be and the easier version of yourself.
The easier version hits snooze. The easier version stays home when there's a reason to leave. The easier version says I'll do that next year, when things settle down, and next year never comes, and things never settle down, and you look up one day and you've spent a decade waiting for conditions that were never going to arrive.
I don't have the luxury of waiting for conditions. My conditions are what they are, permanently, and the choice is whether to work with them or wait for them to change.
They're not changing.
So: Purpose. Get one. Doesn't have to be grand. Doesn't have to be legacy-level. Just has to be real and yours.
Patience. The hardest one. Especially for someone who was wired from birth to move fast and go hard. Patience as active practice, not passive waiting.
Perseverance. The muscle you build by needing it. I don't recommend my training method, but I can confirm it works.
Positivity. The real kind, not the performance kind. The kind that arrives after you've sat with the darkness long enough to know it won't kill you. The kind that's a choice you make, deliberately, every single morning, when the body reports in for duty and the day begins.
Four Ps. One life. Keep going.
Purpose. Patience. Perseverance. Positivity.
Four words that don't mean anything until you need them. And then they mean everything.