🟢 From life-altering injury to business opportunity

The collision that changed everything. Getting banned from Facebook. Business strategy tips. Making a difference to people.

Ryan Walsh 🟢

Mar 16, 2024

(5.5 min read)

The pain was unbearable. My knee had shattered in 6 places.

For the few brief moments I could open my eyes (between blacking out), I could see my twisted leg.

🤢

It's not supposed to do that.

I was on a scorching hot turf field in the final arena soccer game of the season at North Park Water Tower in San Diego.

The other team’s goalie had thought that I was a threat and so clobbered my leg.

The moment that started ruining my life.

(I had stopped running towards the ball because I didn’t want us to collide, but I guess the goalie loved collisions.)

An unknown person drove me to the hospital. I barely remember it.

In the hospital, as they gave me morphine, I naively asked them to pop my leg back into place so I could go home.

That’s what I saw happen in the movies.

They laughed.

They held themselves back from revealing the full truth.

The struggle ahead of me.

It would have been depressing to hear.

Too much.

Let him learn bit by bit.

So he can handle it.

That must have been what they were thinking.

Home from the emergency room, on morphine, wearing hospital socks, oblivious to how dark my life was about to get

How does this story help your business?
Read on.

The surgeon said it looked “like a motorcycle wreck.”

I didn’t need just 1 surgery but 2.

And what seemed like infinite physical therapy.

All I did was work (software engineering from my bed) and physical therapy and sleep.

They said I was lucky:

They had been VERY close to prescribing a machine that would continually move my leg 24 hours a day, even overnight.

They said it would have been even more tortuous (not just the physical pain but the impact on my sleep).

Maybe my leg would be able to heal without it, they hoped.

So I counted that as a win.

However.

Soon I developed excruciating back pain.

I couldn’t even hug Katie.

Headaches.

Wrist pain (diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome).

Bursitis in my hips.

Tendinitis in my elbows.

Finger pain.

Hemorrhoids.

[…]

31 symptoms.

At this point, I was living on the couch.

Peeing into a bottle.

Barely hanging on.

We were miserable.

We couldn’t even touch.

I was in my twenties but felt like I was in my 90s.

Was my life over?

Katie heroically took care of me.

All my various pains consumed our lives.

We somehow held down our jobs.

Other than that, we dedicated every waking moment to searching for answers.

Countless appointments.

Doctors, osteopaths, surgeons, physical therapists, massage therapists, etc.

What is wrong with me?

Their (overly confident) diagnoses often sounded like “You’re just weak. You should lift weights.”

Excuse me?

Sure, I’m no Olympic athlete, but I am in great shape, actually.

I play sports several times a week.

If I’m in bad shape, nearly everyone is.

That doesn’t make any sense.

I thought you were supposed to be an expert.

(I didn’t actually say that.)

I did all the prescribed exercises.

We spent thousands of dollars on ergonomic equipment.

Nothing helped.

No more sports. No more friends. No more watching TV. No more doing anything other than trying to get out of pain and fix our miserable lives.

It was the worst.

The turning point

Eventually, on one of the countless nights when we were searching the web for answers, Katie found a blog post.

The writer sounded like me.

Instead of Princeton, he’d gone to MIT.

He was a software engineer at startups, like I was.

He said that he cured his carpal tunnel syndrome by reading a book.

[record scratch]—WHAT?!

The opening lines from his post:

For two years I suffered from severe hand, wrist, and forearm pain while typing. After spending a lot of money on world-class medical professionals and ergonomic products but seeing poor results, I was ultimately able to cure all my pain by reading ⬛⬛⬛. Now I can type for as long as I want, on any keyboard, in any position, without stretching or taking breaks, all without any pain. All thanks to changes I made to my mind.

Listen, there is NO WAY I would EVER have kept that blog post open.

Except.

In the rest of the post, he sounded so similar to me (minus 30 other symptoms).

And I’d already tried everything else.

I was desperate.

I was at the lowest point in my life.

And when you get that low, you get open-minded.

Thank goodness.

We bought the book immediately.

Within days of reading the book, my symptoms started disappearing.

First the wrist pain.

Then the rest, one by one.

It felt miraculous.

I’m glossing over some details.

In reality, the one book led to many more books.

And to many helpful conversations with people who helped me understand mindbody interaction.1

Even though the first symptoms started disappearing within days, the dozens of them took a year or more.

Full recovery.

What a 180!

I went from feeling confused, defeated, depressed, and powerless to feeling strong and empowered.

In fact, my neighbor then asked me to fill in on a half-marathon relay.

I’d never run in a race.

And I’d never run 6.6 miles ever.

But I joined with no training.

We placed 8th in the San Diego Half Marathon!

I couldn’t believe it.

I definitely wasn’t feeling 90 years old anymore.

And the blog post was right:

I don’t need any ergonomic equipment or special exercises.

🙌 Do you want to get featured in a future issue? Let me know.

I ended up feeling so rejuvenated and uplifted that I quit my software engineering job and started a company teaching about this topic.

Unfortunately, I soon got banned from Facebook.

Oh, the irony.

Facebook ads are full of so much shit.

And here I was actually helping people.

But Facebook squashed me.

I wasn’t resilient or creative enough to figure out other ways of reaching clients.

So I needed to pivot.

I started coaching about productivity instead.

But elsewhere, I still share my story with anyone who is curious.

Why did I share this story here, though?

Reason #1: Goodwill

Someone’s blog post from 2010 saved my life. If my post here saves someone’s life, how amazing would that be!

Reason #2: Connection

These experiences significantly shaped me.

The more I open up about who I am and the peak emotional experiences I’ve had (good and bad), the more we can develop a relationship.

I want to hear about your life too!

Reason #3: Helpful reminder about mindset

As I wrote in “Impossible” transformations I needed to experience for myself:

“If something sounds too good to be true, it is MOST deserving of examination.”

Same with business.

I’ll keep reminding myself and others: don’t be too skeptical.

Imagine if we didn’t always wait until the darkest hour of our lives to open our minds.

There are a lot of predatory practices, for sure.

Shady get rich quick schemes.

But some wildly happy stories of amazing lifestyle transformations are true.

Don’t block those from your life, too.

Reason #4: Business exploration

Distribution

The smartest businesspeople don’t invent a product and try to find buyers.

They instead “start with distribution”.

Go where buyers are.

Ask what problems they have. Solve their problems.

It’s way too hard to drum up distribution after the fact.

So I’m writing these emails, trying to create a distribution channel and learn about the problems you have in your life or business.

I’ll want to figure out other ways of distribution too because just a newsletter would be too slow.

What kind of problem will I help people solve?

I don’t know yet. So I’m exploring lots of topics.

Perceived Value

Nate Ritter

reminded me in his recent mastermind:

You as a creator / businessperson might be tempted to build out nifty tools and gadgets and sell access to them.

But a better business strategy is to solve more serious problems.

Sell painkillers instead of vitamins.

⭐ If you want to work less, profit more, and enjoy fulfillment and financial freedom, you need to: ⭐

Identify people with a meaningful challenge (and how to reach them)
Learn how to solve their problem
Do it in a way that has leverage (such as an online course or group coaching or anything that can scale without more effort from you)

When Nate heard my story about my life-changing physical recovery and everything I learned from these experiences, he was shocked that I wasn’t creating a business around it.

THIS kind of transformation has true value. It’s nearly priceless.

So he said I should ask myself where I’d find people who are looking for this help.

If I figure that out, the rest of this possible business could be easy.

I’m starting by asking you HERE, and I’ll also look for forums and places where people gather who’d be interested in this kind of help.

Tight Experiments

It’s best to craft tight experiments (small bets with hypotheses) to gauge interest level.

That’s why I’m “all over the place”, talking one day about offering a copywriting course and the next day about offering coaching on chronic pain recovery.

Only once I find access to a river (or at least a pool) of people vocalizing a meaningful, common problem will I feel confident enough to go all-in.

As Alex Hormozi says, much of business success can be attributed to choosing a niche that matches all 4 ideal qualities: