Losing The Battle To Win The War

Over the last few days, I found myself thinking of the other time I nearly died. I’ve told the story of my coma a lot, but this one I now find kind of embarrassing, so I don’t talk about it much. However, you know me. If I realize that something I’ve been through can help others, it doesn’t matter if I’m not proud of it, I’ll still share the story. So, here we go:

I was at my wife’s (we weren’t married at this time) apartment that day. It was supposed to be a nice relaxed Saturday night, we had planned on watching a movie. Then, I heard from my best friend and he asked me to go out to the bars. For some reason, Jaime was dead set against me going out. She said “she had a feeling” that something bad was going to happen. Me being me, I told her “everything will be just fine, relax”. Of course, I went out with the boys.

We went out to “our” bar and I got so drunk that I could barely walk straight. At the end of the night, we walked out of the bar towards where we parked our cars.

A few weeks prior to our night out, a new bar had been setup. It was built to attract a latin crowd. The morons put it directly across the street from one of the larger hick bars in the city (this specific city has more bars per person than any other – it’s in the Guiness Book of World Records). Needless to say, a bunch of drunk hicks and a bunch of drunk mexicans didn’t mix very well.

As we’re walking up the street, we see the mexicans arguing with the hicks between their two bars. Somehow, one of the mexican guys decided that it was us that was yelling racial slurs at them (We were over 100 yards away from the hick bar, these guys were that drunk).

The problem with this situation is that there were 5 of us. Of those 5 guys, 4 of us were very deep in gang life and none of us walked away from fights. As we watched the bar empty and 20 guys rush us, we looked at each other and quickly realized that there was nothing we could do to stop it from happening.

My best friend started tussling with one of them and, as stated before, I was beyond drunk, so I looked around me and tried to figure out what I was going to do next. As I’m looking, I see a car come the wrong way down the street we were on (it was a one way). They screeched to a halt on the other side of the street from me and a guy got out of the car with a pistol in his hand and began moving very quickly towards my best friend. At that moment, I stopped thinking and moved.

I began yelling to this guy – “Hey! What are you going to do with that, we live in Wisconsin?” “You want to shoot somebody? I’m right here, pull the trigger!” I’m pretty sure he did, but I didn’t notice.

As I got close enough, either I hit him, then he hit me or he hit me first (I don’t clearly remember). He hit me with the butt of the pistol and missed my temple by about a half inch.

You see, the pistol was a BB gun. I hadn’t noticed him shooting me with the BBs, but when he hit me with the butt of the gun, it knocked a portion of my skull up against my brain. BB pistols have a small metal nub on the bottom that you spin to pierce the CO2 cartridge that puts the power behind the firing of the little metal balls. That is the piece that hit me.

I immediately hit the ground and blacked out for a few seconds. He got me and he got me good.

This is the part that I can’t recall, so it’s a bit of hearsay from those that were there. By this time, some of our friends from our bar had come out to help and we were only outnumbered 2 to 1.

I got back up. The guy that had hit me was still close, so I got up and proceeded to annihilate him, gun and all. Next, I got up and rushed 3 of the other guys and took them out, too. Pretty quickly, I heard police sirens.

When the cops pulled up, my favorite detective got out of his car and I immediately went to fill him in on what had happened and tried to keep myself and my friends out of jail. He looked at me with very wide eyes and patiently listened while I told him as much of the story as I could. Everyone else, including bouncers from our bar (who had a little extra authority with the local police) came up and pretty much repeated what I had said and filled in some other blanks I didn’t see (I was a little busy).

This specific detective was the head detective for the night hours and knew me and my buddies very well. For some reason he would always ask me what had happened, I would proceed to lie and cover for my buddies, and he would arrest the other guy (or guys).

This time, I didn’t have to lie. We got rushed by 20 guys and did whatever we could to not end up beaten to death.

What I didn’t realize was that a head wound bleeds – A LOT. The entire left side of my body was totally and completely covered in my blood. As he listened, he had radioed for an ambulance. Me being my belligerent self, told him I was fine and going home to my girl. He threw me on the ambulance anyways.

I watched them arrest the guy that hit me. What I didn’t know is that after I beat the crap out of him, another friend of mine did, too. Then, the biggest bouncer from our bar had held him against the wall while me and all of my buddies kept kicking him in the face everytime we happened to walk past him.

He had to be dragged to the police car.

He got a year in prison.

Roughly two years after this happened, I received a subpoena to appear in court as a witness against him. He had cut someone with a knife and nearly killed them. He ended up deported.

The moral of this story is that I had to lose the battle to gain the adrenaline to snap out of my drunken stupor and protect myself and those I cared about. If he hadn’t hit me and knocked some sense into me, a lot more of my friends could have been badly hurt.

I got $30,000 worth of neurosurgery to put my head back together and was good as new in a few weeks.

We won the war.

I failed in the beginning to win in the end.

I’ve had 3 separate product launches that were “supposed” to do $100k in sales that only brought in a few thousand dollars in the end. I failed.

I have had 3 business relationships cost me over $100,000.

Yet, I’m still here (and most of the others involved in those relationships are not).

I just hit best seller status as an author.

Thousands of people use my software.

I have a TON of crazy things planned for the next few months.

If it weren’t for my failures, none of my current successes would have happened. I learned from every failure. Every bad decision gave me the experience to make better decisions the next time. Every terrible sales letter I wrote, pushed me to learn more and gave me the ability to write a letter that brought in 2 million dollars.

The key with failure is to accept it and move forward. FIGHT! You have to have the ability to bounce back from the bad things and use them to propel you to success that much faster.

I’m not going to start blabbing self help stuff anytime soon (eventually, but it’s not time yet), but I thought this story may help some of you get up off your asses and do something good for yourselves.