Tales from a life of battling pain—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. I’ve faced it all. Now, my purpose is to turn my experience into a roadmap to healing for others.
Good morning everybody. How are we doing? What a beautiful sunny day. I'll take it. Got some rain coming next few days. Take that too. But I'm here to talk about just hurry in life and in relation to pain for me and you know my relationship to hurry Gosh, when I think about it, it really did start with the injuries that I endured at a young age. You know, it started when I was 11, checked from behind on the boards, head first, taken off in a stretcher, taken in an ambulance, looking at my back, discovered that, you know, they said that I was okay, so I kept playing the rest of the year, and then two years later, I is when I had a torn ACL at age 13, right at the beginning of my bantam season.
So this is eighth grade now, and it's a really important time for a hockey player in Minnesota. Two years before high school starts, basically about a year before I come into this select program, which is really important if you're a really good hockey player to do well. So I tear my ACL as a 13 year old and that's when all of a sudden I have this unfortunate new frame of mind in a sense where I'm behind. I'm behind the rest of my teammates in my development. And it made me like really hurry to get back to playing.
And this served me well early on. I had surgery on November 4th, 1995, and I played in a full contact hockey game on December 27th. Yes, that's true. And I had an amazing doctor, Dr. JP Smith, who at the time was the orthopedic surgeon for the Twins, the Timberwolves, the Vikings, the Gophers, literally every sports team and top college team in Minnesota. So I was in really good hands. And even though I had this sense of hurry, it didn't affect me quite yet, but it was instilled in me, right? This sense of, all right, I gotta play catch up, I gotta play catch up.
I was able to catch up a little bit and had a really good season. And then I'm 14 years old, so this is later on that spring and I'm playing baseball and then I collapse running to first base and find out I have that when I was checked from behind when I was 11, that it actually did break my back, fractured my L4, L5 vertebrae and my spine slid forward, fused itself together, stunted my growth and created compensation patterns that led to the freak ACL tear, which was a non-contact injury. And you don't really get non-contact ACL tears in hockey, just the way that the mechanics are.
You're not planting like you are in football or in soccer where your knee can twist. You're skating and pushing off and it's pretty low risk for ACL and hockey. Unless you're getting just smashed into the boards, which happened to me later on. We'll get to that. So now it's springtime trying to play baseball and I can't even walk or run. Can't play spring hockey either because I'm dealing with this back pain and since my spine had fused itself together, there was nothing I could do except for just try to strengthen my body.
So now I'm playing catch up again and I'm really working hard, really working hard to take care of my body. And again, it served me well. So for the next few years, I was excelling in hockey. I was working so hard. I was just known as the hardest working guy on the team. And then come juniors. This is my year after high school, first year after high school, playing junior hockey up in Canada. And then I was traded into the USHL, which is the premier junior league in the country. And my team was doing well right before playoffs in, I think it was probably like February now of, this is 2003, February 2003.
And I'm going to hit somebody, check somebody. And my left ACL, my left knee goes in the same fashion that my right one did. So now I'm in the prime of my career, trying to attain a goal that I had set for myself as a child, which is to play Division I hockey and eventually some pro hockey. And now I have a torn ACL again. So I ended up driving home on my 19th birthday. I'm wrestling with the concept of, gosh, do I continue to play? Do I just hang it up? I'm going through another setback while everybody is training and improving.
I'm trying to just rehab and get back to normal. So this hurry mentality was coming at me again. And I ended up talking myself into playing again. Went through a rigorous rehabilitation for that ACL. Took the same approach as when I was 13. Didn't recover quite as quickly, being that I was older and the body's a little less resilient. But I recovered. I went back to playing hockey again. And it was kind of-- I look back at that season when I was 19 years old. primarily go back into 2003, 2004. And I was so focused on my goal of playing college hockey and getting to that next place that I regrettably didn't enjoy my hockey season as much.
I had a lot of fun. I was having a great season. I loved my teammates, but I just, there was something that I wasn't focused, I wasn't present, I was thinking off in the future because I felt like I had been set so far back behind. And as I reflect on that, as I've reflected on that years later, I'm really just sad that I wasn't more in the moment. I was living this hurried mentality and it hurt my growth in a sense. So this physical pain that I had been enduring was creating this state of mental hurry to catch up and make up for that lost time.
So I went back and played hockey again and essentially achieved my goal. I was going to go play at Boston University, which is my dream school. Incredible. And tore my ACL again, third time. This time I was smashing the boards. This time it took me out and took me out mentally. Took me out mentally, took me out physically. I ended up getting what was at the time was chronic patellar tendonitis after an infection during the recovery process and it just rendered my leg useless in my opinion and my left leg just couldn't perform like my right leg.
I decided that I needed to quit. I needed to stop playing and So my last hockey game that I ever played, I didn't even know. Didn't even know going into it. So I didn't get to have that proper goodbye for going in and giving myself a proper send off for the game I loved and put so much time and effort into. So now I lose hockey and now I'm two years behind all my friends in school. So if that doesn't create another hurried mentality of some sorts, I don't know what will. So now I'm just like toiling in my mind about being a failure because I didn't achieve my goals.
I feel like I'm a failure because I'm behind in life with my friends. They're all getting internships and moving forward and I'm starting my freshman year as a year old. So that was tough and I had to just, I didn't even really let myself have fun during that time period because I thought. fun was going to just set me back more, so I just tried to stay focused and not going out and being with my friends and being in the moment and being present really exacerbated this depression that I was settling into.
Now my physical pain created this hurried state and then this false belief that I'm behind in life and now I've got this mental pain from it. Tough. So now I'm in my early 20s and depressed. I had the wherewithal to just keep battling through it all and worked my way back into school, worked my way back into EU of M, the sport management program, which is where I wanted to be. I was running a high school hockey league that was great. It was a one day a week, no check league for high school kids playing at Mariuchi and Ritter at EU of M right where I was going to school.
And I started a lake weed removal business in the summertime. So I had two kind of gigs on my own that made me feel good. And then I was leading, right? I was leading those things. And it was almost like I was building a team in a sense for both of these businesses. I'm working with hockey and I'm working outside with physical nature our physical labor job with friends, and we're all working together. And it gave me this just wonderful sense of peace in a sense. So, yeah. And then I... Sorry, I'm a little distracted here.
And then I... Sorry about that. And then, so yeah, dealing with this depression, dealing with all that rushing through school, not appreciating the college life. When I graduated, I was just like, all right, cool. I don't even want to walk. I was just, it was just a formality that I thought I needed to complete. So didn't even enjoy that part of it because I was just hurrying through. And again, I don't like to say I have regrets, but I probably would have done things a little bit differently. Would have been more present, would have appreciated life more.
And I've kind of just stuck with this whole hurried mentality since then, especially as an entrepreneur, grinding, got to take advantage of every moment, got to fill my time with something so I'm moving forward. It's better to do it now than to do it later because now my schedule is going to fill up down the road and I'm just wasting time now. And I continued to operate like this as I built back channel brewing, just grinding, not wanting to miss the wave, trying to just be ahead of the curve, constantly hurrying, constantly hurrying.
And as I was moving through this identity shift in a sense over the past few years, I was hurrying in every aspect. I was hurrying in my leisure time, I'm hurrying in my work, and I'm just constantly just frustrating myself, spinning my tires. And as I was working towards moving into this next phase of my life, I was still kind of grinding, right? Even though I was going to change what I was going to be doing, changing who I am, how I'm operating, focusing more on wellness as opposed to operate wearing 1000 hats, running the brewery and doing tasks that don't really fill my cup.
You know, I get to the point now where I'm about to make this transition I was going to keep that hurried mentality and then my appendix exploded and changed all that for me. And since then, I've been forced to take things slow. Because hurry and stress, that can lead to problems such as inflammation and just a stuckness inside that just You know, imagine if you got an exhaust pipe and you crimp it and then just, you know, backs up and blows up. And that's kind of what happened to my body. And my appendix, which, you know, spiritually is associated with change and being stuck in relationships, saw it and pulled the plug on it.
So now I have this whole new approach and it's not like a flick of a flick of the light switch where it just changed. I'm working towards it. I still find myself saying yes too much when it comes to meetings, even just phone calls while I'm in the state of flow. And then it just disrupts me and all of a sudden I'm not serving my purpose. I'm just serving someone else's purpose. And there's a time and a place for that, but when I'm trying to be focused on this new me, I have to run things through a filter.
I have to make a decision on if it's providing value to my goals at hand, providing to my next set of goals within a year, or if it's just something that's going to take up my time and then create this new sense of hurry once I finish that task and then decide, oh my gosh, I didn't get done what I need to do. So I'm in this You know, this state of exploration towards rest and just proper recovery and being okay with not being productive. I used to say, you know, when people would be like, oh, how you doing?
I'm like, oh, busy. You know, busy is good. Busy is not good when it's all the time. If you're just constantly filling your schedule, you're draining yourself. You're not giving yourself the mental bandwidth to dream, to get into that flow state. So I went from, I've gone from scheduling meetings throughout my entire day to really trying to just prioritize one meeting a day, maybe two. I found myself breaking that rule and gone to three and four. Sometimes you do have to do that. But if you're going to do that, take a mental note of it and give yourself an even more extended break so that you can have time to recuperate and get back to that homeostasis of just contentment.
So I hope my story resonates with you. hurried state of life, a busy state of life is all too common and it's also not necessary. One of my favorite things to say is condense to enhance and too much of anything is never a good thing. Too many tasks in your day, not good. Too many activities that you're trying to fit in, not good. Less is more. So think about that and run things, run tasks, run activities through a filter and say to yourself, is this going to serve me now or is this going to just set me back and create a hurried state for the coming days or weeks?
So yeah, take that mental break, go sit in a chair, go lay in the grass, stare at the, not stare at the sun, but feel the sun and just be. It'll do wonders for you. Alright, well, hope you have a great rest of your week. Sorry that I missed last week. Life got the best of me, wasn't able to make it happen, but that won't be the trend. So, love you all, and we'll talk to you soon. Cheers!
