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Chad Foster is a motivational keynote speaker, sales/finance leader, and inspirational change agent who works at Red Hat/IBM. He was the first blind executive to graduate from Harvard Business School’s Program for Leadership Development and has been featured with NBC, CBS, Forbes, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, USA Today, and Chief Executive Magazine.

After losing his eyesight while attending college in his early twenties, Chad started at a top consulting firm and has built a career in the technology industry, directing financial strategies and decisions resulting in more than $45 billion in contracts.

Determination, ambition, and resilience are the key drivers of his incredible journey. The Atlanta Opera has commissioned an opera inspired by his life story and his first book, Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary. Today, Chad speaks to corporate audiences and professional athletes, helping them develop resilience and overcome their own blind spots.

 

In this episode, Jason and Chad discuss:

  • Overcoming blindness to build a billion-dollar tech career
  • Power of gratitude in rewiring the brain and finding happiness
  • Misconceptions about blindness and fostering patience and comfort
  • Role of family support and resilience in facing adversity
  • Pursuing ambitious goals through discomfort and incremental growth

Key Takeaways:

  • Gratitude emerges as a powerful tool for rewiring the brain and fostering a deeper appreciation for life's blessings, emphasizing the importance of daily practice.
  • Resilience and discipline are highlighted as vital in overcoming hardships, with loved ones playing a pivotal role in providing support and encouragement.
  • Embracing discomfort and viewing failure as a steppingstone reflect the transformative potential of continuous growth and incremental progress.
  • An ambitious vision is essential, encouraging bold actions even without certainty, while failure is a natural aspect of innovation and exploration.
  • The pursuit of purpose is framed as finding meaning through service to others, cultivating empathy, and inspiring intentionality and happiness in their lives.

 

“So, blindness taught me how to live a happier life. It taught me that success, similarly, is not some sort of destination that we arrive at. It's a way of thinking, it's a way of being. You know, it's not an event. It's a mindset.”

 - Chad Foster

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Listen to the podcast here:


Chad Foster- From Victim to Visionary

 

Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. Let me tell you about today's guest, Chad Foster. You may or may have not heard of Chad. If you haven't yet, you will soon, not only because of this podcast, but because there's an opera that's being formed based on this guy. There's a documentary that'll be out within the next year or so, based on this guy. So, let me tell you a little bit about Chad. After losing his eyesight while attending college in his early 20s, Chad started at a top consulting firm and has since built a career in the tech industry, where he's currently responsible for sales in the billions, not the millions, but in the billions. Chad has even written a book on his life experiences thus far, because I think Chad's got a lot more experience ahead of him, and you'll know what I mean when this guy starts talking. But his book is called “Blind Ambition, How to Go from Victim to Visionary.” Chad was the first blind executive to graduate from the Harvard Business School executive program, and I think you're gonna like this guy. Chad, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate the opportunity.

Chad, we ask every guest the same opening question, and then we're gonna just see where it goes from there, but just to get us facing in a particular direction, we like to ask our guests as we open the show, as you and I engage one another today, who or what are you grateful for?

Wow, there's a lot. I'm a deeply grateful person. I'm grateful for my family, kids, wife, my parents, who gave me leadership and guidance growing up. I'm grateful for the 20 years of eyesight that I've had. I'm grateful for the cognitive abilities that I've had. I'm grateful for the hearing that I have. We have a gratitude session literally every single day at my house. It's mandatory at my house. We all have to go around and share three things that we're thankful for each day, because it rewires the brain. It teaches you how to pay attention to the very things that many of us take for granted, including myself, and this is something that originated after I lost my eyesight and went to get my first seeing eye dog. I discovered there, there were people there who had it far worse off than I did, and I'd shown up with this victim mentality, like poor me, and I'm losing my eyesight, none of my friends are losing their eyesight, and you know very much the victim. And then I was around these people, many of them were on dialysis because they had diabetes that had robbed them of the right side, a few of them had mental impairments in addition to being blind, and then there were these girls there who were deaf and blind. And so that just completely and profoundly changed my perspective on life and on gratitude forever, and from that point forward, I learned that that happiness is not some sort of feeling or some sort of emotion, it's a perspective that you take. It's the gratitude that you have for the things that you've been given, and all of us can kind of naturally take for granted. So, you hit a hot button with me there on what am I grateful for that? I mean, there's a long, long list that I'm appreciative for, but it starts with family, friends, my health, the things that I've been given that it's easy to kind of overlook a lot of those things for many of us who get caught up in the day to day reality. But that's why we do what we do at my house, is to create that instinctive muscle memory to bring your attention to the things that we take for granted, because nothing's ever guaranteed. Tomorrow's not ever guaranteed. That's why I think that's why they call it the present, because it's a gift, right? It's what we have right here, right in front of us right now.

You and I agreed prerecording that we were probably going to end up in the deep end of the pool at some point in time during our conversation, and brother, I think we're there.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s real though,.

Yeah, no, it's good, it's good. Let's get out of the pool for a second though. I want to ask you about growing up. What was it like growing up for you?

It was hard. It was hard. Yeah. I was an active kid. I was very active, as in, I played sports all the time. You know, there weren’t those screens when I was growing up. We had an Atari or an Odyssey, and you might have to look up in the Smithsonian what that actually is, but we didn't really have screens back then. And so, what did we do? We played ball the time. We were literally outside, playing basketball, playing football, soccer, you know, wiffle ball or baseball, pretty much all the time, and I was learning the limitations of my eyesight, when stuff would happen, you know,? Losing my eyesight, I was bumping into stuff. I was running into things, ending up in the hospital so much that they would question me and my parents in separate rooms whether or not they're abusing me. And the truth is, I wasn't being abused; maybe I was abusing myself because I just couldn't go halfway into anything. I've always been a 110% kind of person, and I learned the limitations of my eyesight when I would bounce off stuff, and so that was hard. Physically, that was uncomfortable. Socially, it was uncomfortable. I couldn't do the things that I wanted to do. I couldn't drive a car at night, I couldn't play sports at night, i.e. under the lives of the football games. That was hard socially and then emotionally. Going blind in college, that was really difficult. And, you know, getting a dog, you know, I'm 23 years old, I get my dog and changed my life, my attitude changed, but it's still pretty uncomfortable when you walk into a university classroom with a German Shepherd. When you walk into a job interview with 100 pound German Shepherd, or a boardroom, you know, leading a large team, or traveling across the globe, and you know, not being able to see and doing it all with just a guide dog, whether that's, you know, going to Singapore for a series of meetings or Shanghai to give a keynote, and still getting up at 5am to try and find the gym to get your workout in. But I feel like my whole life, from childhood onward, has been this huge experiment of living outside of my comfort zone, and I think that's been a large part of what has shaped who I am today and how I'm able to continue to grow and push myself further out of my comfort zone. It's because my whole life has been pretty uncomfortable.

Just for reference, Chad, how did you lose your eyesight?

I have an inherited eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa that nobody in my family knew we had. Meaning, it wasn't something that my mom or dad expressed. Obviously, it's genetic, so they're carriers, but nobody else in the family was symptomatic; I was the only person. So, it was this hidden family eye disease, and the only way we knew about it was when I started having problems seeing in poorly lit situations. So, they took me to Duke University at three and a half years old. It was there where they diagnosed me with RP. Doctors told my parents they should sign me up for a special school for the blind, and instead, they signed me up for soccer. Yeah, because that's what you do right?

Now I fully understand why in our opening question about gratitude, you mentioned your parents. They sound like some of the coolest people ever. They went against the grain. That sounds like that's maybe where you got a lot of how you go against the grain now, where you got that from.

Absolutely, yeah, I think I try to help people in my situation too, whether they're dealing with RP or some other eye conditions, some other disability, and oftentimes, the most important and consequential people to influence aren't the protagonists navigating the situation, it's the parents, the family members, the friends of the people navigating the situation, because unwittingly, people think they are raising kids, but they're not, you know? They're raising adults, and if they don't have their eye on the prize long term, they can end up disabling their kids with the mindset and culture that they raised them with, and I was very fortunate that my parents didn't do that. I would say that in fact, they probably expected a little bit more of me, because they knew my life was going to be harder. So, growing up, my dad was pretty old school, you know? He was raised on a farm in Knoxville Tennessee, and he would make me trim the yard. I remember one time I was going to go and get the trimmer and he's like, no, no, I don't want you to use the trimmer, I want you to use these, and he handed me a pair of, like, garden clippers. I'm like, for real? For the yard? I mean, I gotta use it. We got a weed whacker. Can I not use that? He's like, no, I want you to use this. And it was that, you know? Wash the dishes. We got a dishwasher. Don't use the dishwasher. Wash them by hand. It's hard on the dishwasher. I'm like, what? Seriously? That's why we have the dishwasher. And he was like, nope, you do it. And so, when I went blind, and then I had to learn how to write code and engineer my software just to be able to do my job without being able to see my computer screen, I literally had to learn how to write code without being able to see my computer monitor just to do my job. I had a work ethic and a foundation of work where it wasn't too much for me. I learned how to do that. I taught myself how to write code to engineer my software that talked to me that I needed to use to do my job at a high level. I ended up engineering my own software, and before I knew it, I had Oracle coming to me, sending me business because I had engineered a software solution for their own application that they thought couldn't be done. They literally thought it was impossible. They were going around telling everybody that it was impossible, but I had clients that I referred them and others to where I had actually done it, and I they were sending me business after that point. So, Oracle started sending me business because I could make their software work in a way that they cannot.

I definitely want to get into the business and leadership aspect. I mean, heck the Insight Interviews, the podcast that we're on right now, most of our listeners are C suite executives, you know, leaders in some capacity, in all kinds of industries. But I want to ask some more. Is it okay man, if I ask you some unorthodox questions?

You can ask me whatever, man.

I learned from our prerecording time you said you wanted to have fun and I don't know, I feel like I want to ask you some questions that are maybe a little different than your normal run of the mill questions that people ask, you know, blind executives that are doing really cool things in the world. So, in my research, I saw you said something, and I may not get this exactly right, Chad, but something about the fact that you're not begrudging the fact that you're blind, in fact, it's an asset to you. Like, you’re grateful that you're blind. And again, I might not be getting that exactly right, but if I'm halfway right about that, what's the coolest thing about being blind?

Well, I think what it does whenever you have a life shift like that, it forces you to reevaluate a lot of things in your life. And I think what it did for me is it caused me to rethink my perspective. You know, before, like I mentioned earlier, when your intro question, the gratitude question, I didn't really always appreciate what I'd been given, and when I went blind, you know, it called into question, hey, look, you thought it was bad when you had poor eyesight, how about no eyesight? And so, it really forced me to reevaluate my perspective on things, whether it relates to gratitude and what I think true happiness is, so, it taught me what true happiness is. That it's not some feeling, it's not some emotion, it's a decision, it's a perspective, it's anchored to gratitude. I don't know that I would have experienced that had I not gone blind. So, blindness taught me how to live a happier life. It taught me that success, similarly, is not some sort of destination that that we arrive at. It's a way of thinking, it's a way of being. It's, you know, it's not an event, it’s a mindset, and hopefully, it continues to evolve. Our definitions of success should continue to evolve as we continue to redefine what's possible and who we are and how we show up, and what's our image of greatness that we have for ourselves and for our lives and the impact that we're creating on the world, and I'm not sure any of that would have happened had I not gone blind. And so I think forcing me to reevaluate those perspectives and show up with greater focus and greater effort and greater determination has been a huge asset to me, because it's forced me to get really comfortable with the uncomfortable situations that I found myself in in my life, which has caused me to grow in ways that otherwise would not have been possible.

Yeah, one of the things that I just wrote down from what you said, Chad, was success is not an event, but rather a mindset, and boy, we can nod our heads to that and go, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It's all about the journey. You're embodying it, you're living it out, and that's very different than just hearing that from a talk or reading it in a book, but you're actually living it out. Let's go to the shallow end of the pool for a minute. Again, we'll get into business, I promise. Since you've given me permission to ask a little off filter question, any funny stories with being blind? Anything funny that's happened or fun as a result where you're like, oh, man, I didn't expect that. I mean, I don't know, maybe there's 100 stories, but as I asked that question to you today, what one or two stories stick out?

Well, one that sticks out is a a guy comes up to me one time and he asked me, hey, man, is that one of those blind dogs? I said, man, I hope not. If we're both blind, I'm screwed, right? The number of things that you hear from people at times is pretty astonishing. Another time, a lady comes up to me, and you know, she's asking me, I'm at the mall, I'm there with my wife, and she's like, hey, you training the dog? I said, no, no, this dog is trained, he's a service dog. And she's like, well, what's the service? What does he do for you, sir? And I said, well, I'm blind, you know? So, he guides me around. And there's this really long pause, and you could tell that she's very puzzled, and finally, she comes back to me, she says, yeah, but you don't look blind.

Oh boy.

And this time I couldn't help it, right? So, I'm like, Oh, thank you. And you don't look stupid.

Nice.

So, you know, that's my growth area. You know, I'm still trying to have a little more patience for people who let their eyesight impair their judgment. But, I mean, I've got so many, so many stories that, you know, some of them are funny and some of them are astonishing, but there's no shortage of stories. Whenever people are, you know, they meet somebody like me, and they, you know, I'm sort of outside the bell curve, like, what do I say to this guy? And that's why, when I'm giving a keynote presentation or I'm doing a workshop, or whatever the case may be, leadership session, I try to help people get really comfortable in it first. So, I'll drop a few blind jokes and let people know, like, hey, look, I know this is an unusual situation for you, it's not for me. Let's just move beyond sort of the obvious, you know? Let's get beyond the words and get down to whatever it is that we're here to talk about today. Getting people comfortable, and that's kind of priority number one.

Yeah, that's a that's an excellent segue to go to a place that I was hoping we were going to go today. I mean, the title of your book, Blind Ambition, the subtitle, how to go from victim to visionary, man, that thought process of victimhood versus, you know, you're saying visionaries, sometimes I'll say spirit of abundance versus scarcity, just that idea, you know? To set the table for this in the intro, I called out some of the things that you've done, but when you and I were doing some talking prerecording, man, you listed off for a minute or two some of the things that you're currently doing, and for any human being, I don’t care what their situation or what their lot is in life, like you're doing a lot, man. Will you just rattle off some of those things? I mean, you did some athletic stuff, some jumping out of airplane stuff, some leadership business things, like, will you just rattle off some of those things, please?

Sure. Yeah. So, my favorite pastime outside of family and work and that sort of thing, is, I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu three years ago, at the tender young age of almost 46 years old. For whatever reason I decided it was a good idea to get on the mat with some grown highly skilled man trying to choke me out, and so I started doing that. I've got my purple belt now. I train every day. Basically, if I'm not traveling, I'm training every day. So, I love that. I've competed in tournaments, and it's a lot of fun just to get comfortable with discomfort. I started skiing at 38 years old. I thought it was a good idea for a totally blind person to strap on a pair of skis and start hurtling down a mountain at a high rate of speed, and so now I regularly ski black and sometimes double black diamonds. But we go do that, you know, at least now, I don't know, two, three weeks out of every year, we make time to go do that. I'm filming a docuseries in partnership with some folks from PBS. So, we've done things like I've gone skydiving over Palm Island in Dubai. I've done some training. BJJ drove dune buggies over some sand dunes in the desert of Dubai. We've rode some camels while I was out there too, done some gladiator training while I was in Rome. I was in Rome to was in Milan actually doing a keynote, like I was in Dubai, doing a keynote, and went to Rome and did some gladiator training, hiked Vesuvius, explored Pompeii, checked out some of the iconic sites there in in Rome as well. We've got on the agenda. We're going to go do some skiing in the Rockies. So yeah, perfectly great idea for a blonde guy to jump out of helicopter and ski down some back country terrain. Why not? Because that's what you do. So yeah. And so, yeah, there's a few things I'm working on a training course. Obviously, I speak professionally. I mentioned that. And so, I'm an opening closing keynote speaker. I talk a lot for leadership teams, all company meetings, sales, organizations, that sort of thing. And so, the book is one element of that, and the keynotes and workshops are another element of that, but I'm also working on a training course to bring into some learning management systems, so that we can reach people regardless of where they are, so they don't have to be at the conference to get the lessons of what I'm teaching. So, how do you shift people's mindset and how they approach and attach themselves to circumstances, hold themselves accountable? Really empowering people to not feel like victims of their circumstances. And certainly not everybody's going blind, but everybody's dealing with something. Maybe that's digital transformation, maybe that's generative AI and the fear that that creates. What is that going to do for jobs? Maybe it's mergers and acquisitions or divestitures, new product launches, new ways of working, you know, remote hybrid work environments that we found ourselves in over the last couple of years. Or, you know, maybe it's something just as simple as contemplating a career change. And so, how do you help equip people to not feel like victims of what's going on around them and empower them to emerge from their own stuff better off than before?

So that last point is exactly where I want to settle in on for a minute or two. As you answered my question, you listed off those things, so you didn't come into the interview telling us all these amazing things that you're doing. I gave you permission. I asked for those things. As I listened to those things, it makes me think of when I was a young mortgage banker in my 20s, I went to a conference where there was an expert panel, you know? These are all the best of the best in the industry, and they're rattling off how great they are, which was one of the questions. That's fair. And then some of the things that they're currently doing, and I remember sitting in the back, as just this young mortgage banker starting out, almost with my arms crossed, going, that's great for them, but I’m not even close. It almost had the opposite effect on me, Chad, where it was like, I can't aspire to that. They have these teams of people, they're all so good looking, they're all so articulate, whatever. Like, I'm just me. I just got out of college, like, I’m trying to start this thing. So, yeah, my point of that is there is the rest of that story, and we've done podcasts on this. There was one guy at the end that, he said some really simple things, and I'm like, that I can do, and I started doing those things, and things ended up working out pretty good in mortgage banking for me, but that that's not part of the story I want to focus in on. Where you just rattled off those things that you are involved with and doing, I mean, by any measure of humanity, dude, that's just a lot. I mean, that's an understatement that that's a lot. And so, for those that are listening to us, going, yeah, this dudes just different. I mean, he’s doing so much, where do I even start? And what I think I want to ask you, with that setup, with the that context, that background, is, there are people listening to us right now going, man, that's great for that guy Chad, but, man, I got this issue that I'm dealing with, and I got this, I don’t know, this health issue or this business issue or this relationship issue. That's good for him that he's got all those things, but I don't even know where to start. Like, where would you point somebody that says, Chad, your dad had you doing dishes when you had a dishwasher, and I didn't have parents like that. Like, I don't have that Mojo that you have. Like, where does somebody start?

When I was going blind in in college, let me assure you, there's no way, shape or form that I thought I would end up anywhere close to where I'm at today. I was terrified. I was woe as me. I was at best, mediocre, you know? I was scared to death. You know, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. I've yet to find one of them who say they want to be a blind person. I was angry and I was bitter and I was resentful, and I learned to channel my frustration into things that helped me with, you know, becoming an outlet and to become productive for me. And so, for me, it was going to the gym, it was working out. Once I ended up getting a path to learning, i.e., I had to relearn how to learn, because I was a visual learner. Not all that helpful when you go blind. So, I put all of my energy into my effort. And so that's the one thing that every single person listening to this can control is their effort and their willingness to tolerate the things the way that they are. And if I had to put my finger on one single distinguishing characteristic of why I'm at where I'm at today, it's the fact that I was unwilling to give up. It's just that simple. I was unwilling to give up. Now, had this happened to me when I was in my 70s or 80s? Maybe I would have thrown in the towel. Maybe I would have said, you know what? I lived a good life. It was a good run. Let me just kind of wallow in self-pity for the next 5- 10, years, whatever it is. But I was in my 20s. I couldn't give up. Like there was too much living to be done. And so, I would encourage you who are listening to this right now, when you fast forward in your life and you do the “future you” exercise, what can you live with? Can you live with trying something new and something different and failing in pursuit of that goal, whatever it happens to b, or would you rather fail by not even trying? Oh, and never even know how successful that you could have been. Because either way, like, if you don't try, your odds are zero. Okay? They are zero if you don't try. If you do try, maybe your odds aren't good. Maybe it's only 10% but that's 10 points higher than zero, and you'll be surprised at how much you can do once you start stacking wins together. And so, I always talk about having a bold vision for yourself, and certainly when I was going blind, my vision for my future would never have been where I'm at today. Even if you'd said, hey, Chad, give me a bold vision of you, it would have been something like, okay, let me become a successful leader, and, you know, maybe have a decent income, and not starve to death. Lke that would have been huge for me. At that point, I wouldn't have guessed where I'm at right now all the things that I'm doing. But what happens once you start stacking small victories on top of each other, you start getting this incremental progress. You start to realize that, hey, maybe I can do more than I thought I could. Maybe I can do this other thing that I hadn't even before contemplated., and maybe it's possible and I haven't been really giving myself enough credit for what I'm capable of. And I think that's true for all of us, right? None of us are fully aware of what we're capable of, and so it takes us looking at what's in front of us and just figuring out, like, what is the next best action I can take? You don't have to have all the answers. You're never going to have all the answers. If you're waiting for all the answers, then you're going to be waiting indefinitely. And so, if you don't have all the answers, are you willing to just sit around and wait and fail by not trying? Are you willing to fail by taking action? And then maybe, you know, course correct. Okay, that didn't work. Let me try something else and let me try something else. And so that's what my life has been. That's how I ended up from being in the depths of despair, the poor me victim mentality, life's not fair, this sucks, to where I'm at right now. I was willing to figure out what's the next best thing that I need to do. Okay, I need to figure out, how am I going to learn. Had to relearn how to learn. Okay. I need to make straight A's. Okay. I need to graduate with a degree. Okay. I need to get a good job. Okay. I need to get a promotion. And just they kept leading to more and more and more opportunities that unfolded in front of me. But if you're looking at whatever it is that you want to accomplish, and you're thinking in big, big, big terms, that's great to inspire you to take action, but when you're out there trying to do the next best thing, like it can intimidate you from taking action. It can be too scary, and, you know, almost too daunting for you to take that action. And so, whenever you're out there and you're trying to figure out, what am I going to aspire to, okay, find something that motivates you to do the work, but when it's time to do the work, just zoom in on the next best action. You don't have to have the whole plan baked out. Just do something positive and in the right direction. If it doesn't work, course correct. But keep going. And again, you know the difference between success and failure really is your willingness, or lack thereof to give up, and so that’s what has fueled me, that's what's driven me, is I'm just not willing to give up and willing to continue taking the next best step, whatever that happens to be.

If someone were to only listen to five minutes of this episode, that would have been it. Dude, all of your answers. I mean, usually, I'm a page of notes per interview type of guy, but I've taken two pages so far, and we're not done yet.

Thank you.

No, thank you. That next right thing, that idea of the next right thing, there's an author by the name of Emily P Freeman, who wrote a book called “The Next Right Thing”, and it's all about getting in the weeds of exactly what you just said right there, of what is my next best step? Because life can be so overwhelming, whether you've got some things stacked against you the way that you have, or different life scenarios, or things aren't going your way, or it's a season of life that that's not great, or you're overwhelmed by some business decision. All of us can take just the next right step, even though we might not even know the next step after that, but we can do that one, and then that one leads to another one, just like you so well-articulated. Man, Chad, as we round third and head towards home of this conversation, are there, oh man, I'm going to invite you right now for another episode some some time in the future. I don't know when, maybe it's when your docuseries is done, or whenever. I've got so many more questions that I want to ask you. But for now, what is it that you're most excited about? You know, in this world that we live in, in 2024, right now, there's so many things that, gosh, you could not be excited about, whether that's climate or politics or economics or war, I don't know, just different things. You strike me as a guy that's pretty positive, pretty forward thinking, pretty visionary. What are you excited about these days?

What excites me the most is I found my purpose, and I found meaning in the work that I do, and when I found that, suddenly, work became a lot less transactional. It felt a lot less like work. And so, Viktor Frankl, I don't know if you know Viktor Frankl, but Austrian, born psychologist.

Sure. Read the book.

Yeah. “Man Search for Meaning”. Born in Austria, imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. He talks about how people made it out of those concentration camps, and a lot of it has to do with why he founded logotherapy, which is all about the branch of psychology focused on finding meaning and the suffering. And so, what meaning do we attach to the circumstances we find ourselves in? Is another way of saying and thinking about that and that book really affected me early on in my professional career. And then when I went to Harvard Business School, I was studying authentic leadership with Bill George, who is the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, which is one of the world's largest medical supply companies, and he was there for 10 years, and he took their market cap from 1 billion to 60 billion. Pretty good leader.

That works.

That's not bad for 10 years' work.

Yeah.

And so, he decided to step off and do something different. So, he started teaching at Harvard, and he teaches there at HBS, and through his own leadership schools, he teaches the true north leadership framework, and it has a lot to do with finding the intersection between what you do, where your talents lie, and what affected you at a visceral level, an emotional level, during poignant moments in your life. And so, it occurred to me at that point that I'd never really done anything with the journey that I've been on, my unique experiences, the hardships that I've experienced. And so that's when I really started contemplating how I could help people, and I was elected as our speaker there. It changed the way that I looked at everything, because no longer was I looking at it through my own personal lens. Because there was a guy who came up to me, I'll never forget. He's like, literally breaking down in my arms, he's bawling. Right after I'd spoken, I found out that this guy had lost his daughter the year before, and it's unimaginable what this guy was going through, but something I'd said helped him, and what I hadn't anticipated was okay, it was, it was impactful for those people, but this particular gentleman, it pierced through me like a knife through butter. I'm a pretty hard-edge guy. Went blind, you know, I had to have a hard-edge exterior to make it through some of the stuff that I went through in my life, but that moment was one of those moments that you just never forget. I could never forget the impact that I had on this particular parent, and so that is what gave me I think the courage to step through my fears and try something new to where the work that I do now is anything but transactional. In some bizarre sort of way, it makes going blind worth it, because of the impact I'm having on human beings. So, I'm helping people live more intentional, happier, more successful lives, which is contributing to corporate performance. So, the companies are doing better, the people are doing better, and so it's giving me more emotional fulfillment. I get to send my kids to school at the same time. And so, it feels, you know, really, really purposeful work and I wish everybody could find that, where they find something that really resonates with them at that deep level, because then the work that you do doesn't even feel like work. I do this, and this doesn't even feel like a job. It feels like the reason that I've been put on the planet, the reason that I went blind and came out of it better off than before. And when you find that, you don't really run out of energy, you don't really get burnt out, because it's not a job, it's the reason that I've been put on the planet. And so that's what I get excited about is I’m just now sort of at the early innings of this, you know? I'm probably in the second or third inning of this, just getting used to this and getting sort of accustomed to the impact. I use that lightly, because I'm not sure you ever really get fully accustomed to it the impact that you have on people navigating things, but to me it excites me that I found something that contributes in a positive way to what's going on in the world and makes my journey sort of worth it, you know? It gives it new meaning; new value and I get to make money doing it. I kind of felt like I have hit the lottery, to be honest with you.


So good. I've got a feeling people are going to want to reach out to you as a result of this conversation. Chad, what's the best way for people to find you these days?

Yeah, they could just go to my website. Go to ChadEFoster.com/InsightInterviews and there's a special page you've got there for folks listening to this but check that out. From there you can find all my social media profiles as well. Lots of videos, links to the book, speaking topics, all those things. It's all there if they just want to go to that website. Again, that's ChadEFoster.com/InsightInterviews.

So good. Chad, it has been such a pleasure, such a gift, to get to know you, to get to have a conversation with you. Thanks for impacting people the way that you are. I wish you the best, and grateful beyond measure for your time today, brother.

I appreciate you, man. Let's do it again. We can button up the second half next time.

Oh, you can bet that you're going to get a request from us. We got a request from you or your folks to be on the show, but you're going to get a request from us in the future to be on for chapter two.

I welcome it.

All right. That wraps today. Thank you so much, my friend.

Appreciate you. Thank you.


All right, folks that was Chad E Foster. Such an incredible guy, such an incredible interview, insights, I've got to boil them down. It looks like I starred 12 different items here, but here are the ones that stick out to me. Dude had to learn limitation of his eyesight by bumping into things. There are so many things in life that are that way, and just as we bump into things, whether it be we're bumping into things from our leadership journey, whether we're bumping into things from our relationship attempts, whether we're bumping into things with how we parent, with how we lead with our health and wellness activities we learn, and he's using that to learn. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think we've all heard that before but hearing it from Chad just hit different to me. He talked about putting all of his energy into his effort, because that's something that he can control. Being willing to put up with not ideal circumstances, being unwilling to give up. And he asked the question, you know, thinking about doing great things or doing anything for that matter, would you rather fail than without even trying? I thought that that was a very, very good question. And what can you do now? What can you do? That's the next right thing. That's the next right step. There are so many other insights from that episode. So good. So, I'm grateful to Chad for being on the show, but as we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what me as the host, what my insights were, but what really matters is, what were your insights?

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