The Power of "Maybe": Why We Should Stop Labeling Our Setbacks

Things happen to us in such a profound way that we should never truly label them as good or bad; we should simply leave them as they are.

There is a well-known parable about a Taoist farmer. One day, his horse runs away, and everyone in the town says, “That’s terrible news.”

The farmer simply replies, “Maybe.”

A few days later, the horse returns, bringing a group of wild horses with it. The farmer now has six horses instead of one. The townspeople exclaim, “That’s amazing news! You must be so happy.”

Again, the farmer just says, “Maybe.”

The townspeople don't understand his lack of excitement. A few days pass, and the farmer's son is trying to train one of the new wild horses. He gets bucked off and violently snaps his leg. The town again says, “That’s horrible news.”

The farmer replies, “Maybe.”

Now the town thinks the farmer is completely crazy—until a war breaks out. The local warlord comes through, conscripting all able-bodied young men to fight in a brutal war with terrible odds of survival. Because of his broken leg, the farmer’s son is spared.

The farmer’s wisdom reveals a universal pattern: Things will happen in our lives that, in the moment, feel like catastrophic setbacks, ultimate failures, or absolute blessings. But they are just events. They just are.

When I reflect on my own life, I see this farmer’s story as a grounding reminder. My physical injuries over the years have been a story of Icarus: just when I think I am making a breakthrough and achieving new limits, something happens that feels like an irreversible catastrophe. To match the pattern of the farmer, I have to tell my story in the same format.

Strike One: Running on Rage

The first injury that really set me back—and gave me vivid trauma response signaling—happened during my sophomore year of high school. It was the middle of the regular basketball season, and we had an upcoming match against our rivals at Bingham High School. I was starting at power forward on the JV team, but I had just been pulled into a meeting with the varsity head coach. They wanted to start using me in the varsity games to score post points and provide better spacing for our elite guards.

I was training like a maniac. I was burning through toxic, adrenaline-fueled motivation—“no days off,” “sleep is for when you're dead”—completely fixated on the future, praying this hard work would eventually get me out of my current predicament.

At the time, my mom had been divorced from my father for two years, and my mom, my two sisters, and I were living in my grandma's two-bedroom condo. My dad had refused to leave our house during the divorce, and since it was in my grandma’s name, my mom walked away with nothing but a split share of the massive credit card debt my dad had racked up during three years of unemployment. That same year, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. We didn’t know if she was going to live. She was enduring chemo, radiation, and intense surgeries, recovering in one bedroom while my sisters slept on the floor in my grandma’s room. I was sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchen, or sometimes just on the couch.

I was so desperate to be something. I was waking up at 5:00 AM to drive to the gym and train before school. After team practice, I would go back to lift weights. Leading into rivalry week, I was doing an advanced plyometric program called “Jump Attack.” I thought I could easily recover from a brutal Wednesday leg day before our Friday game. Leading up to tip-off, my adrenaline was so spiked I was dunking effortlessly in warmups just to play mind games with the other team, completely ignoring the fact that my legs actually felt like unstable noodles.

In the first half of the JV game, I went up to pin a layup against the backboard. Right as I took off, my ankle rolled hard over someone’s foot. I felt a pop so loud and violent I instantly knew it was bad. It was a Grade 2 high ankle sprain. I lost full function for months, effectively ending my season.

The Lesson: Rage and desperation are not sustainable energy sources. The delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) from my reckless overtraining hit me on the biggest night of my life, causing my body to give out. It felt like the worst thing in the world at the time. But years later, that exact memory became the wisdom I use to coach my own overly driven athletes. When a client wants it too badly, I know exactly how to pull them back before their adrenaline turns into a catastrophic injury.

Strike Two: The Universe Repeats the Lesson

I had to learn that lesson twice. Years later, as a redshirt freshman playing college basketball, I was incredibly frustrated by my lack of playing time.

It was our last practice before winter break, right after taking two 35-point beatdowns from nationally ranked opponents in the same week. We were running a fast-break drill. I was cutting down the left side of the court, determined to dunk on our 6'10" starting center to prove to everyone I deserved minutes. I gathered off two feet and attacked the rim.

Our center went up with me. We collided at the apex, and as his body checked me in mid-air, I punched the ball off the back rim. I came down awkwardly, forced to land all my weight on my right leg while moving laterally.

I heard and felt my knee snap. My right foot physically touched my outside hip.

The gym went from the buzzing anticipation of a poster dunk to dead silence. The sensation of a joint snapping like that is beyond the comprehension of any normal pain; I was instantly nauseous, my body in total shock.

The athletic trainer told me I had torn every ligament in my knee except the patellar tendon. I was devastated. But when I saw a top athletic knee specialist, the X-rays revealed I hadn't fully torn the ligaments. I had partial tears and a massive bone bruise running up my femur and down my tibia. I made a full comeback exactly one month later and ended up playing some of the best basketball of my life.

The Lesson: Once again, what felt like the absolute lowest moment of my life revealed a crucial blind spot: I had done a brutal leg workout that very morning just to blow off steam, carrying that fatigue right onto the court. Surviving that injury made me mentally tougher than I ever thought possible, proving again that catastrophe is often just a harsh teacher.

Strike Three: The Death of the Athlete, The Birth of the Coach

My drive eventually morphed, but my ego remained. A few years later, I transitioned from basketball to training for D1 college football walk-on tryouts at Arizona and Arizona State. I was a 285-pound athlete grinding through three-a-days: skill work in the morning, weights in the afternoon, and conditioning at night.

Three weeks in, sick of the hamster wheel of the StairMaster, I agreed to cover for some friends in a men's basketball league. I justified it by calling it "cardio," completely ignoring my systemic fatigue.

Bringing the ball up on a fast break, I planted to jump for a massive dunk. I felt a violent pop behind my knee and collapsed. A physical therapist diagnosed it as a torn plantaris, but after four weeks of rehab, I took one hard cut on the court and collapsed in sharp pain. Frustrated, I finally saw a surgeon. He went in and found a torn lateral meniscus buried under severe scar tissue. I was out for another four weeks.

I missed my tryout window. My lifelong dream of being a Division 1 athlete was dead. I had been an athlete my entire life, and I had no idea who I was without it.

But at that exact time, in my second year as a personal trainer, I had just helped five kids secure college walk-on spots in hockey, football, cross country, and softball. I vividly remember realizing I was happier for their success than I ever was for my own.

The Lesson: My purpose shifted. I no longer wanted to be a professional athlete; I wanted to be the elite professional who helped others achieve their biggest goals. Missing my D1 window felt like a tragedy, but it was actually the exact pivot point that allowed me to find my life's calling.

The Final Test: The Law of Accommodation

The final and most profound chapter of this cycle happened in March 2020. I was having the best financial year of my career. I was a highly successful trainer at Life Time, setting departmental records no one thought could be broken. I had just been featured as one of the stories on the cover of Men’s Health. I was a Highland Games champion holding multiple records. I felt invincible. I was hitting substantial lifetime PRs and preparing to make a run at national and world championships.

Then the world shut down.

Desperate not to lose my peak strength when the gyms locked their doors, I decided to train outside on the concrete with dumbbells and resistance bands. I weighed over 320 pounds at the time and was still dunking effortlessly, so I made it my quarantine goal to touch my head to a 10-foot rim. I strapped on an 80-pound vest and attached over 100 pounds of band resistance from my hips to my ankles.

I didn't fully respect the Law of Accommodation back then. I didn't realize that transitioning a 320-pound frame from heavy, off-season maximal strength to explosive, concrete plyometrics required weeks of careful acclimation. Coming down on one of my final loaded scissor jumps, a black-out pain shot through my right knee. The workout ended instantly. The next day, I couldn't walk.

I saw a top-rated sports surgeon who diagnosed it as a bone bruise. But when I returned to lifting six weeks later, the agony of lateral loading was instantaneous. For two years, I was gaslit by this doctor, living in chronic pain, wondering if I would ever know what it felt like to be healthy again.

Finally, a change in insurance allowed me to see the surgeon who had operated on my meniscus years prior. He went in to clean up the joint and found a nightmare: I had blown out a quarter-sized chunk of cartilage. It was bone scraping on bone. My new surgeon had to perform a microfracture surgery on the spot—drilling holes into my femur to stimulate scar tissue growth.

A standard four-week cleanup turned into a brutal six-month recovery where I couldn't bend or load the joint at all.

The Lesson: For a strength coach, immobility is a devastating reality. But that dark period forced a profound evolution. The inability to train forced me to turn to reading, studying, and developing a completely new depth of insight. I dove deeply into philosophy, psychology, and biomechanics. Like Socrates, I operate on the premise that I know nothing absolutely—but I now have the deep tools and hypotheses required to calibrate my programming to the highly specific context of the human being standing in front of me.

The Ultimate "Maybe"

Because I spent two years trapped in chronic pain, medically gaslit, and stripped of my physical identity, I now possess a well of empathy and compassion for my clients that cannot be taught in a textbook. When someone walks into my facility broken down, burnt out, or terrified that their best days are behind them, I know exactly how to guide them back.

Every snapped bone, torn ligament, and shattered dream in my life felt like the end of the world when it happened. But looking back at the athlete I was and the coach I am today, I am endlessly grateful for the destruction. The universe had to break me down repeatedly to build the mentor I was meant to become.

So when the worst thing imaginable happens to you, and the world tells you it is a total tragedy, take a breath, look at the obstacle, and just say, "Maybe."