Eyes On The Prize: How Best To Avoid Distractions

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Many years ago a head injury caused neurological damage to my right arm, costing me my ability to juggle. This would have been hilarious to me, too, were I not a professional juggler at the time. Instead, I became preoccupied with regaining my lost ability.

Years passed with no progress. I tried everything: doctors, strength training, a makeshift rubber sling. Toward the end I was attempting to juggle by simultaneously pinching a throw pillow under my armpit.

It was then that my friend stepped in.

An accomplished performer and also a trained pilot, my friend printed out for me the transcript of the last conversation between the doomed pilot and co-pilot of Eastern Airlines flight 401. Like me with my arm issue, these pilots had allowed themselves to become distracted with something which ultimately had no bearing on their objective (the bulb of the landing-gear indicator had burned out).

If the pilots had focused on the task at hand – landing the aircraft safely – they would have noticed that the autopilot had been disengaged and that the plane was losing altitude.

My friend had taught me a profound lesson which has served well me ever since: by thinking of myself as a juggler, I had lost sight of the fact that I still had every tool necessary to do my real job, which is to entertain.

Similarly, if Smith Corona had realized in the 1980s that it was in the word processing business rather than the typewriter business, they may not be making thermal barcode labels today.

It was this realization that allowed me to greatly expand my skill set to include stand-up comedy, catching olives on toothpicks and even slow-motion juggling with plastic grocery sacks, to name three things which turned out to be more hilarious than anything I had dreamt up before my injury.

Sometimes keeping your eyes on the prize is simple. Shooting out a flaming candle with a gun at night is impressive to the layman, but an experienced shooter knows it’s actually quite easy because the flame is the only thing there is to see.

Oftentimes, however, distractions abound. And the best way to ignore them is by focusing on your objective. This sounds axiomatic, but too often we fixate on distractions in our attempts to avoid them. During an emergency landing it’s tempting for a pilot to focus on the myriad things she must avoid: water, telephone wires, mountains, other planes. But experienced pilots are always focused on one thing: the runway.

What is your runway? Focus on it incessantly and don’t let distractions like fear of failure cause you to come up short.

Do you have thoughts on avoiding distractions and achieving goals? Leave the in the comment section below.

Return to daviDDeeble.com or watch me kick a coin into my eye socket.

Dealing with Change

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Soccer fans know that that an injury on the field generally does not stop the game clock. Instead, “injury time” is tacked-on at the conclusion of the 90-minutes of regulation.

Similarly in life – or in your career – injuries do not stop the clock. I learned this the hard way many years ago while riding a tall unicycle through a doorway: I hit my head on the cross-beam and in an instant I went from world-champion juggler to a particularly-clumsy beginner. Because while the swelling on my forehead lasted only a few hours, the life-long casualty was my right arm, which simply stopped receiving the signals my brain would send it.

My friends – some of them world-class jugglers themselves – were fascinated. It was as if everyone was suddenly trying to set me up on a blind date. One had me attempting to juggle while clamping a small pillow in my right armpit, in order to “See what happens”. Another fashioned a rubber sling to help me ape the now-lost throwing motion of conventional juggling.

It was an anxious time for me. I was expecting my first child and for a time believed that I was experiencing some kind of psycho-somatic illness which, I hoped, would vanish once I was able to “work through” my life-altering transition to fatherhood and the greatly-increased financial obligation associated with it. I also read books on neurology and visited several neurologists, the last of whom removed his wedding ring, held it behind his back and then asked me in all seriousness to “Guess which hand it’s in”.

In hindsight, it was a good thing that I couldn’t tell life to “Stop!” while I reinvented myself into… what? I didn’t even know and had no time to figure it out: I had shows to do, contracts to honor, money to make.

The injury, more than anything, shaped me as a performer. “Shaped” isn’t really the right word: it essentially changed my occupation. The years I put into learning to juggle five balls was now for naught. My time would now be spent learning to catch an olive on a toothpick in my mouth, kicking a billiard ball into my eye socket and juggling slow-falling plastic grocery sacks.

Before my injury, audiences would ask “How do you do all that stuff?”. These days they ask “How did you think up all that stuff?” My answer is: “I had no choice”.

My talk, Winning With A Bad Hand, is the story of how I learned to roll with the punches. But more importantly, how to punch back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c012PpUi4Q

Questions? Comments? Angry screed? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

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