Latest / The Action Catalyst / Blind Ambition, with Chad E. Foster (Overcoming Adversity, Software, Business, Mindset)

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Blind Ambition, with Chad E. Foster (Overcoming Adversity, Software, Business, Mindset) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Dan Moore: Hello, everybody, welcome to the Action Catalyst. This is Dan Moore. I'm so excited to be
• 0:03
  with Chad Foster today. Chad is wonderful to have you on the Action Catalyst. Welcome to the show.
• 0:08
  Chad E Foster: Thank you, Dan, it's my pleasure to be here.
• 0:10
  Dan Moore: You know, we always enjoy hearing about people's backstory, because we can look at what
• 0:14
  you're doing now you're an author of a book, you're the first graduate who has sightless from
• 0:18
  the Leadership Management Program at Harvard University. You're a great software developer,
• 0:22
  you're a leader of many, many companies, you help the countless people, but the backstory?
• 0:27
  Chad E Foster: Yeah, I think we all talk about how life throws us curveballs and you know, it's going
• 0:33
  to throw us all curveballs. And we have all experienced our share of disruption. I started
• 0:39
  experiencing my disruption at roughly three years old. And it was there, my parents that Tom they
• 0:45
  had noticed that I was having difficulty seeing and really dark rooms. And so they took me to Duke
• 0:50
  University Medical Center, where it was there that they learned that that I had with the doctors
• 0:56
  thought was retinitis pigmentosa, which is an inherited genetic eye condition that gradually
• 1:02
  causes blindness, it's really hard to imagine what they were feeling as they were going through that
• 1:08
  and hearing that, of course, was oblivious to it at three years old. But this particular eye
• 1:13
  disease is evidently something that's in my family. But it's because it's an autosomal
• 1:18
  recessive trait, nobody had it. So it was sort of the hidden family eye disease, and only because
• 1:23
  both my parents are carriers, could I have the potential to be symptomatic, and eventually go
• 1:30
  blind. And so when I was growing up, I was pretty active. You know, I played sports, I played
• 1:35
  football and basketball and baseball, but I was constantly learning the limitations of my
• 1:40
  eyesight. And I would learn those limitations by bouncing off of something bouncing off of a wall
• 1:46
  or a pole or something that my eyes just didn't pick up. And as I was losing that that eyesight
• 1:52
  and it became worse and worse over time, you know, all of the objects around me essentially became my
• 1:58
  walking cane. And I spent so much time in the hospital there for a period, they questioned both
• 2:03
  my parents and me in separate rooms, wondering if I had been abused. And the truth of it is I hadn't
• 2:08
  been abused. I was just I was an active kid. And I didn't really let my lack of eyesight keep me from
• 2:15
  doing what I wanted to do. But the whole process obviously was a psychological journey and
• 2:20
  emotional journey, learning the limitations of what you can and can't see. And then finally, when
• 2:26
  I was roughly 21 years old, at the University of Tennessee, doing my undergraduate work is where
• 2:33
  all of my eyesight left, that's when I realized that I was I was losing everything that I had
• 2:38
  known and seen for my entire life. And we asked kids all the time, what do you want to be when you
• 2:45
  grow up? And none of them said they want to be a blind first? Well, there you go. That's exactly
• 2:50
  what was happening to me. And so I had to sort of rethink what I wanted to be when I grew up and
• 2:54
  reimagined my hopes and dreams for myself and my future. And so that that was a difficult time. But
• 2:59
  I think looking back, I think what makes it unique is the fact that I've lived a lot of my life
• 3:05
  outside of my comfort zone. You know, that whole process that I just talked about, was really
• 3:10
  uncomfortable when you're young and bouncing off of things physically, that's uncomfortable when
• 3:15
  you're in high school and not able to do things at night that you would like to do socially. That's
• 3:20
  uncomfortable when you go completely blind in college, and have to give up your self identity.
• 3:27
  psychologically, emotionally, that's uncomfortable, but the thing that I'll say that
• 3:32
  that has been more of a gift to me than I would have hazard to guess at that time. You know, it's
• 3:38
  helped me to develop a thicker, more resilient mindset, which is why I think I'm with you today.
• 3:43
  It's because I've had so much discomfort in my life that I've gotten comfortable with discomfort.
• 3:48
  Dan Moore: Comfortable with the discomfort.
• 3:51
  Chad E Foster: If you're never getting uncomfortable, then you never have a chance to
• 3:54
  grow, right? Where we experience discomfort. That's when growth happens. If you're comfortable,
• 4:01
  you're complacent. Right? And if you're complacent, you're not growing. And if you're
• 4:05
  growing, you may as well be dying. And so I think it's helped me to cultivate a mindset that seeks
• 4:12
  discomfort, which is why now you know, I go skiing on Black Diamond terrain, and even double black
• 4:18
  diamond terrain without being able to see Yeah, it was way outside of my comfort zone at first and I
• 4:23
  certainly didn't start on a black diamond. But the idea of strapping skis to myself and getting on
• 4:29
  the side of a steep mountain in Colorado that in and of itself was outside of my comfort zone. But
• 4:34
  you know, one thing I've noticed over my journey is that the more you push your comfort zone, the
• 4:40
  more things you do that are uncomfortable, you can just slowly watch your comfort zone expand, which
• 4:47
  is why now like I said, I do that also I practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a martial arts. So I enjoy
• 4:53
  you know, I enjoy pushing myself and I think that's one of the things that I really like about
• 4:56
  both of those hobbies or sports is that they they're as constant room for growth, which I think
• 5:01
  is a really important part of life.
• 5:03
  Dan Moore: Wow, that is absolutely incredible. Most of us, even sighted, are scared of black
• 5:07
  diamonds.
• 5:09
  Chad E Foster: I think that's probably what gives me an advantage. If I could see it, it might be a
• 5:12
  little too intimidating, right? You got to take advantage of your disadvantages, but we went
• 5:17
  skiing and six years into me learning how to ski. So I went blind at roughly 21 years old, I started
• 5:23
  learning how to ski at 38 years old. And about six years into it, we made such good progress that me
• 5:29
  and my buddy, who had been guiding me, so he's skis behind me and tells me which way to go. And
• 5:34
  we learned how to do this with the professionals out there. We've gotten so good at it that we
• 5:39
  decided, You know what, we're going to try an expert slope. So we go off, and here we are on
• 5:44
  this double black diamond, which, if your listeners aren't familiar with the double black
• 5:48
  diamond, it's literally the steepest and scariest slope, right? It's got all these jagged rocks and
• 5:54
  big cliffs and passageways that are about eight feet wide. Sounds like the perfect place for a
• 5:59
  blind guy like me, right? I mean, what did the possibly go wrong? So my buddy and I were standing
• 6:04
  at the top of the mountain, and we take a picture in front of the warning sign at the top, and he
• 6:08
  turns to be right before we get ready to release, and he says, You know what, Chan, you should be
• 6:12
  thankful you can't see what's around us right now, because it is absolutely terrifying. But I think
• 6:18
  while a lot of people are like my buddy, they're looking at the mountain. And they're looking at it
• 6:23
  from top to bottom. And they're seeing all you know, all these things that are really scary,
• 6:27
  right? There's this scary vision of of what could go wrong, or this bold vision of greatness, this
• 6:34
  huge mountain at 13,000 feet with all these incredible obstacles. But I think what gives me an
• 6:39
  advantage is that I don't see any of that. And I'm just focused on the next turn, right, I'm just
• 6:45
  literally focused on I have to make a left turn, and then a right turn, and then another left turn.
• 6:51
  So I'm not distracted by all of the terrain and how dizzying it can be looking down hill and
• 6:56
  seeing maybe 5000 feet of elevation like other people are doing, I just zoom in on that next best
• 7:02
  action.
• 7:02
  Dan Moore: Seems like you've really leaned into not just the remaining four senses, but also the
• 7:06
  medicines, which is your brain, how you implemented and taught yourself code how you
• 7:11
  develop technologies for people that are spineless, that's incredible.
• 7:15
  Chad E Foster: When I first went blind, I was in college, and I had to relearn how to learn. That
• 7:20
  was a really, it was challenging, but it actually turned out that I was a better blind student and
• 7:24
  sighted students. So I ended up making straight A's, you know, my mom went in, and she literally
• 7:28
  at that time, we didn't have the the internet had just come out. But it wasn't like you could go to
• 7:33
  Amazon and get a Kindle book, or you could get an audio book really easily. So all of my books, all
• 7:38
  of them, she literally read every single one of them to audio for me, and I listen to them on a
• 7:43
  tape recorder. And so I listened to all of my books twice, I listened to recorded lectures
• 7:48
  twice, ended up making straight A's and making the Dean's list and went on and got a job at one of
• 7:54
  the top consulting firms out there. So that all seems really encouraging until I get into the
• 8:00
  workforce. And I realized that the technology that I needed to use this piece of software that you
• 8:05
  put on a Windows computer, it's screen reading technology, it didn't work with everything out of
• 8:11
  the box. So you couldn't just log into a company system and expect it to work with everything.
• 8:17
  There were some obstacles, depending on how the software developers designed the application. And
• 8:23
  I learned this pretty quickly. I was working at this top consulting firm in the tech space, and my
• 8:28
  timesheets, something that's very important to a consultant here, all my job codes, Project codes,
• 8:33
  where I need to build myself across different clients that didn't work with my technology. So
• 8:38
  literally, you know, two weeks after graduating college and thinking, Alright, I've cleared a
• 8:42
  hurdle, I realized that, you know, the journey was just beginning. And so not really being able to do
• 8:47
  my job. At that point, I knew that there were a couple of options. Option number one was to have
• 8:53
  them hire somebody to come in and figure out how to write code to build a bridge between these two
• 8:58
  software programs. Right. And that would kind of set me up as a liability, they would have to pay
• 9:03
  somebody 150 250 bucks an hour to come in and do that or option two was and I figured out how to do
• 9:10
  it myself. And because I was 25 years old, hopefully had a long career in front of me, I
• 9:16
  thought you know what, I'm better off if I just learn how to do this on my own. That way, instead
• 9:20
  of being a liability, I can be an asset. And I don't have to rely on anybody else. So I sat down
• 9:25
  and started figuring out how to write code so that I can engineer my software without even being able
• 9:32
  to see my computer screen. I put some some code together that was a hack for me to use it
• 9:37
  timesheet program that I mentioned, but within a few years I was getting so good at it that I had
• 9:41
  people seeking me out. I started doing it professionally moonlighting a little bit doing
• 9:45
  that created a consulting company, and even had a friend of mine from this consulting firm called me
• 9:51
  few years later, so that was Gosh, that was 2001 When I first started learning how to do that by
• 9:57
  2007 friend of mine for This consulting company called me and said they needed some work done for
• 10:03
  one of their customers. And so I figured out how to write some code and make this CRM system work
• 10:09
  for one of their clients will come to find out Oracle, only that CRS CRM system and didn't think
• 10:14
  it could be done. And I ended up having to get on a call with Oracle, and with the screen reading
• 10:19
  manufacturer and explained to them, actually, it can be done, I've done and here's my client, he's
• 10:23
  up and up and running and successful with it. And, and so yeah, I think a lot of times just hearing
• 10:29
  somebody say that something can't be done is enough to kind of prevent you from even trying.
• 10:33
  But you know, I found that if you just apply yourself relentlessly and dig enough, eventually
• 10:38
  you can find this solution.
• 10:40
  Dan Moore: That is incredible story as well. Chad, somebody once said, people that say things cannot
• 10:44
  be done, often find themselves interrupted by someone doing it.
• 10:48
  Chad E Foster: I love that. I'm gonna borrow that.
• 10:51
  Dan Moore: Clearly you've done that so well. But talking about the Leadership Program at Harvard,
• 10:55
  and what that was like you were the first sightless person to graduate from there.
• 10:59
  Chad E Foster: Yeah, so I was working at the time I was leading pricing strategy and solutions, I
• 11:04
  was a senior director for a technology services company that provided services to the United
• 11:11
  States federal government, mainly. So we provided services to military to intelligence to civilian
• 11:18
  and other state agencies as well. Yeah, I was our senior director of pricing strategy and solutions.
• 11:24
  So my job was to go in on these very large programs, multibillion dollar programs and figure
• 11:30
  out what is the price point that we need to bid for this basket of services based on all the data
• 11:36
  that's there? And so you know, what's the market look like? What services are they asking for?
• 11:41
  What's the going rate for those services? How much are customers willing to pay? What is the
• 11:45
  competition going to do? And and how does that get influenced by the procurement process? Well, that
• 11:52
  was my thing. I've been doing that for a while it was very good at it. In fact, I'd gotten so good
• 11:56
  at it that I helped the company, which just with my decisions bring in over $45 billion in
• 12:01
  contracts. Wow. They were so blown away by it. My boss comes to me says, Chad, what can we do for
• 12:08
  you, you've done so much for the company? What can we do? And for some crazy reason, I said, Send me
• 12:13
  to Harvard. And for some crazy reason, they said, okay, so they agreed to write a check and send me
• 12:20
  to HBS. And so yeah, it was there that I became the first blind executive to graduate that
• 12:25
  leadership program there at HBS. But that was a really important part of my career for a lot of
• 12:32
  reasons. You know, first of which you're learning and growing with not only the professors, but so
• 12:38
  many fantastic minds who, who go there, you know, young minds, great leaders, great human beings,
• 12:44
  the people you're learning from, are not just the professors. Sure, you learn a lot from the Harvard
• 12:49
  professors, but you'd learn just as much from the students there. And learning how to navigate and
• 12:56
  manage through so many complex situations where it's not, you know, it's not a math problem. You
• 13:02
  know, it there's so many shades of grey when it comes to the real world of management, and really
• 13:07
  exploring that with those those fellow classmates was was fantastic. But the other real fantastic
• 13:14
  thing that I learned was how to find my true north. And I was learning there with Bill George.
• 13:21
  And for those of you not familiar with Bill George, he's the former president and chairman of
• 13:28
  Medtronic, which is one of the world's largest medical supply companies. He took them from a
• 13:33
  market capitalization of $1 billion to $60 billion. So he's fantastic transformational
• 13:40
  leader. He retired after 10 years at the CEO position at Medtronic decided to go and work for
• 13:46
  Harvard became a senior fellow there. And I'm sitting in his class, and he's teaching this class
• 13:51
  on authentic leadership, but it's all about how to discover your TrueNorth. And it really boils down
• 13:56
  to how can you find meaning in your life by examining things trials and tribulations in your
• 14:02
  life, and really threading that with things that you have a talent for? And so that you can combine
• 14:09
  purpose and passion and talent into a profession. And a lot of my classmates were grappling with
• 14:16
  this when mine just sort of reached up and smacked me in the face. And it occurred to me that I
• 14:20
  hadn't done anything with my story. I just always kind of taken it for granted, if you will, a lot
• 14:26
  of people would come up to me from time to time and say, hey, you know, you're inspiring. I
• 14:31
  appreciate what you do. And I didn't really know how to react to that, because I didn't really take
• 14:35
  myself. I didn't see myself that way. You know, I didn't see what I what I was doing as anything
• 14:41
  other than inspirational. I was just doing what I had to do, you know, my everyday reality was just
• 14:46
  that it was every day it was regular. For me. I was doing what I had to do to get by and, and sure
• 14:51
  I had some obstacles that were maybe a little bit different than what other people face but I just
• 14:56
  never really saw myself that way and, and so that moment I started to really reconsider that. And
• 15:00
  then there I was, I was elected to speak at our graduation. And that really was a crucial moment
• 15:06
  for me an Ignite moment actually, where I saw firsthand how much I could help people if I just
• 15:13
  tried to actually do that. So I gave a short little 12 minute talk. And people were really
• 15:19
  blown away by it. And I'll never forget one gentleman in particular, one of my classmates
• 15:23
  comes up to me afterwards. And I'm not a real soft and fuzzy person, but this particular gentleman
• 15:28
  come to find out he had lost his daughter the year before to cancer. Wow, something I had said. And,
• 15:34
  you know, I don't know exactly what it was that I said that resonated. But something I'd said
• 15:38
  resonated and it gave him hope. And it changed me and it moved me and it inspired me to kind of move
• 15:44
  beyond myself and, and to look more deeply at how I can have impact. And the really interesting
• 15:50
  thing that I learned from that is it showed me how experiences like that helping people like that can
• 15:57
  make going blind worth it, you know, because all of a sudden, now I'm taking this, this beautiful
• 16:04
  gift of blindness that was disguised in some really ugly wrapping paper. And I'm unwrapping it
• 16:10
  and I'm sharing those gifts and those lessons with the world. And I never really looked at it like
• 16:15
  that, before that.
• 16:17
  Dan Moore: I'm blown away, Chad, you know, plenty of people in your situation are facing different
• 16:23
  obstacles would have just let it control them, they would have felt sorry for themselves and
• 16:26
  said, I just can't do stuff. What kind of advice could you give to somebody that may be He's, um,
• 16:31
  they've had a legitimate issue, but they're caught up and feeling sorry for themselves instead of
• 16:35
  moving forward moving off of it?
• 16:37
  Chad E Foster: Well, you know, I feel sorry for myself too, for a little while. But then I
• 16:41
  realized, you know, what, I'm 20 something years old, if I'm gonna feel sorry for myself, for the
• 16:47
  rest of my life. Well, that's a whole lot of sorry, I just can't do it. I couldn't stomach the
• 16:52
  thought of feeling sorry for myself that much. It was just it was too overwhelming. And so one of
• 16:58
  the things I thought about is I did what I like to call and I didn't think of it in these clear terms
• 17:03
  back then. But now I call it the future you exercise. years from now, when you look back on
• 17:10
  your life? How are you going to feel if you don't get what you want out of your life? Is it okay? To
• 17:16
  make an excuse? And to feel sorry for yourself? In the moment when years from now, if you look back?
• 17:24
  If you know you didn't get what you wanted out of your life? Or is it better to hold yourself
• 17:29
  accountable so that you can make the decisions and live your best life and really move towards your
• 17:36
  dreams and your goals? And so I decided at that moment, I looked forward in my life. You know,
• 17:40
  when I'm if I'm so fortunate to live to 70 something years old, and I look back on my life,
• 17:45
  which decision can future Chad live with? Is it sitting around and feeling sorry for myself and
• 17:52
  not even trying? Or is it failing in pursuit of my wildest dreams? You know, I don't think I'm going
• 17:58
  to accomplish everything I want. But I want to know whether or not I can, who knows, right? We
• 18:03
  could have lived our wildest dreams, we could have achieved our most daring goals. But if we don't
• 18:09
  even try, then the regret really is not even knowing what could have been possible. That to me,
• 18:16
  was the fear that I allowed to drive me. You know, anytime in life when there's a fear, there's a
• 18:21
  counter fear. I've accepted that first job out of college, I was initially really scared when I was
• 18:26
  moving to Atlanta. I thought, Here I am, I've got to figure out, how am I going to get to the
• 18:32
  office, I've got to learn the bus and the train system, I can't see. I don't have family or
• 18:37
  friends in the area. It's just me and my guide dog, I just went blind a year and a half earlier,
• 18:42
  I've got to learn how to get to the airport, I've got to learn how to travel across the country.
• 18:47
  I've got to learn to get to different hotels and client sites and learn how to write code and do
• 18:53
  billable work. And all of these challenges. Like they were even something as simple as just getting
• 18:58
  my groceries, you know, we didn't have a delivery service back then. And we didn't have smartphones.
• 19:03
  So all of these things were incredibly intimidating. And I was looking at it my family
• 19:09
  and friends would ask me like, hey, Chad, are you excited? And I lied to them? I told them Yeah, I
• 19:13
  was excited. But the truth is, I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. But the thing I was more
• 19:19
  scared of than anything else was living my life with regrets.
• 19:24
  Dan Moore: We all have a future self in the future self still look back and say well done, or why did
• 19:28
  you one of the sayings in our company is that the person we're going to someday be we're now
• 19:33
  becoming
• 19:33
  Chad E Foster: You're absolutely right. And that the net of it all, every single person listening
• 19:38
  to this podcast, without exception will become the stories that they tell themselves about
• 19:44
  themselves. You will become your story I will become mine story. One of the most important
• 19:49
  lessons if any of us can learn is how to tell themselves the right stories. Now, look, the fact
• 19:55
  of the matter is I went blonde and when I was In college, okay, that's a fact. Now there are a
• 20:01
  couple of different stories that I could tell myself about that. One story is Chad look you
• 20:06
  wouldn't blonde because you've got terrible look poor you are an alternative story to that would be
• 20:12
  Chad, you actually went blind, because you're one of the very few people on planet Earth, who has
• 20:18
  the strength and the toughness to overcome that, and use it to help other people. Now, technically,
• 20:24
  both of these stories can be true. But one of these stories, the first one paints me as a
• 20:30
  victim. But the second story actually takes my disability, my misfortune and reframes it into my
• 20:36
  strength. It's a Jedi mind trick that we can use to it's called cognitive reframing. But it really
• 20:42
  is about taking a set of circumstances that we can't control and learning how to make those
• 20:47
  circumstances work for us. Instead of against us, all of a sudden, my blindness that happened to me
• 20:53
  because I'm mentally strong enough which that prepares me to deal with all of the other
• 20:59
  curveballs that life is going to throw at me. So if you can figure out how to tell yourself the
• 21:04
  right stories, then you can get better outcomes in your life. Because at the end of our lives, all of
• 21:10
  us will become the stories that we tell ourselves.
• 21:13
  Dan Moore: Woohoo. Now, just a question. Have you just given us a summary of your book Blind Ambition?
• 21:20
  Chad E Foster: That's a core message of it. That is a core message of it. Certainly, there's,
• 21:23
  there's a lot more in there. You know, when I get on stage, I've got 55 minutes when I in the book,
• 21:30
  I've got 55,000 words, there's a lot more detail to it. But that is one of my most core messages
• 21:37
  and themes from blind ambition, the book and blind ambition, my talk, it really does get down to, you
• 21:44
  know, how do you see yourself? What narrative Do you have playing in your mind? And it's, you know,
• 21:48
  it's, it's the meaning we attach to circumstances, what's the meaning we're attaching to those
• 21:52
  circumstances, the facts are way less significant than the stories that we choose to tell ourselves
• 21:58
  about those facts, because our stories are either going to keep us trapped, or they're going to help
• 22:01
  us bounce back. It's one of the two.
• 22:03
  Dan Moore: But we're really grateful for you. The message that you've just shared with me in
• 22:07
  particular, and all of our listeners is that it's more than inspiring, gets a kick in the head. It's
• 22:12
  a wake up that says we've got gifts, we've got abilities, what we can look at what we don't have
• 22:17
  a look at what we do have, and we can move forward and look for chances to help the world. That's
• 22:21
  exactly what you've done and continue to do.
• 22:23
  Chad E Foster: You know, when you can assign meaning to the circumstances that that give you
• 22:28
  purpose and give you a brighter future that really is where you can move towards acceptance. You
• 22:34
  know, I talk about visualizing greatness and sometimes unpalatable circumstances, right. If you
• 22:40
  can visualize greatness, in circumstances that you didn't really want. Like for me, how can I make
• 22:47
  blind look good. And I know that sounds a little paradoxical, making blind look good. But the
• 22:53
  reality of it is, if I could never visualize how I could make blind look good, the odds of me moving
• 23:00
  towards acceptance, and deep down in my heart, and bracing and even thriving in those circumstances,
• 23:07
  we're next to zero. But if I could at least paint a big bold vision of how I can make blind look
• 23:13
  good, no matter how hard it is to get there, at least that can give me something to work towards.
• 23:18
  And then all of a sudden, I can start looking at things inside my sphere of influence things I can
• 23:23
  control, whether it's writing a book, or learning how to give a talk, or creating a message or
• 23:29
  leading a company, all of those things are possible. But if you have that vision of
• 23:34
  greatness, that doesn't ignore things that you don't want in your life, you can't ignore things
• 23:39
  that you can't change it, you've got to, you've got to factor those into your vision. But having
• 23:44
  that bold vision can motivate you to do the hard work to get there to to learn how to write a book
• 23:49
  or learn how to you know, meet a publisher or give a talk to a big audience or any of those things.
• 23:54
  None of that it's easy, but if you have the right motivation, it's possible.
• 23:57
  Dan Moore: And with that, we're going to have to let you go Chad, this is fantastic. And speaking
• 24:00
  about makeup blonde look good. You really rockin the Morpheus lip today. I appreciate it. Thank you
• 24:06
  absolutely are. So thank you so much for sharing and for being who you are.
• 24:10
  Chad E Foster: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.