Leverage Sick Days

Little did Andy Papathanassiou know that his career-ending football injury would open the door to the future. He describes his epiphany moment, laying in a hospital bed, in a new piece published in this month’s Stanford Magazine:

“I saw this uniformed group performing this coordinated team activity in competition with other teams, with one group ultimately helping bring their car to the winner’s circle with high-fives and Champagne and all that. It clicked for me as an athletic event, not a mechanical event.”

Here’s the catch: the event he was watching wasn’t considered an athletic event at the time, or really, even a sport. It was the early ‘90s, and NASCAR pit crew responsibilities had been perceived as a reward for a faithful, often donut-wielding, mechanic. It took an outsider’s perspective to see something different.

But here’s the catch: Andy never would have never had that paradigm-shifting insight, likely would have never seen the athletic possibilities of the NASCAR pit crew and transformed the industryI if he hadn’t been laid up in the hospital recovering from back surgery.

It’s often that way.

I couldn’t help but remember Diarra Bousso’s incredible story of the traumatic moment that led to the transformative shift to diarrablu: “I got into a really bad accident and left me in a coma for two weeks and I was in medical leave and bed rest for six months… For six months, all I did was draw nonstop and when I could work on crutches, I started taking photos…

“I opened a Tumblr blog because it’s the only thing that I had access to and I would just post the photos in there, it was all the beautiful, romantic storylines with it. The blog gained 19,000 followers in three months and some of the images got shared on the New York Times and Vogue Italia. While I was still on bed rest — unable to walk, I have no teeth, I have surgery every other week — I’m seeing my name in all these places…

“I’m literally supposed to be dying and struggling but I wake up every day super excited to check Tumblr and see how many new followers I got and which new painting I’m going to make.”

Aishe Dozie, Founder and CEO of Bossy Cosmetics, has a very similar story on how Bossy got started: “I ended up in the hospital. I was diagnosed with severe hypertension, and my father had died a decade before that of heart failure. So, I have heart-related issues in my family, and I found out then, I was diagnosed with severe hypertension, and my doctor was like, if you don't change your lifestyle, you're going to have a stroke, and you're going to die young, just like your dad did.”

Many times, when we’re sick, we see it as time we can’t work. Perhaps we should instead see it as a gift — to work on something different, to receive a new vision of the future.

Related: Preserve Your Perspective
Related: P&P Podcast Presents: Diarra Bousso
Related: P&P Podcast Presents: Aishetu Dozie

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