Last year I asked my friend Barry about what lessons he learned from his highly-respected father, who lived several decades in a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident:

Bob wasn’t big on lectures or life lessons, but he taught me a couple of hugely important things by example:

(1) Persistence and focus will beat the living shit out of undisciplined genius 99 times out of 100 (not that Bob wasn’t plenty smart, understand, but he was one of the most determined people I ever met.) Even after a grievous injury, he bounced back and went about all the things that were important to him, hammer and tongs, like some kind of demented blacksmith – and God help you if you got between him and his anvil.

(2) A sense of humor, especially about yourself, is one of the most important survival skills in life. Humor will get you through bad times when nothing else will.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Outside Insights, Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.