Arctic Explorer, Pilot, Survivor, Inventor, Soldier, Gambler, Teacher Author, Artists, Musician, Entrepreneur, And Lover: Wayne D. Evans aka “Sir. Evans” – S1E8 (#8)

S1E8 – Arctic Explorer, Pilot, Survivor, Inventor, Soldier, Gambler, Teacher Author, Artists, Musician, Entrepreneur, And Lover: Wayne D. Evans aka “Sir. Evans” – S1E8 – powered by Happy Scribe

And if you work at it, you will find out two things will happen, you’ll either achieve that goal and that dream ultimately, or you won’t. Now you say, well, that’s pretty stupid. Well, when I’m coming down to is somewhat.

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Welcome back to Boss Uncaged podcast. Today’s show is a special episode, I had an opportunity to interview W.D. Evans. You’ll learn that I call him Sir Evans, but this guy I don’t even know where to begin to explain who he is and what he has accomplished in his life. But he’s 84 years old. His tagline is The man with more lives than a cat, his business card, instead of just being a CEO or founder on it says Arctic. Explorer, pilot, survivor, inventor, soldier, gambler, teacher, author, artist, musician, entrepreneur and lover. On this episode, he drops so many beautiful nuances to life that you could learn from, not just from business, not just on building companies, not just filing patents. But he’s 84 years old and he’s accomplished more in his lifetime than a dozen people combined in their lifetimes without any other spoilers. Sir Evans, welcome to the show, sir Evans as the nickname that I have for you, sir. Sir. Sir. Evans,

thank you.

Got it. Got it.

So the first question I have for you just, you know, we met with a couple of weeks ago at a writing workshop and just the magnitude of your life and the things that you’ve accomplished, you have things on here from Arctic explorer, secret agent, unique musician, surviving pilot, entrepreneur, experienced lover.

I mean, who are you?

My wife and I are just. Plain ordinary people have been fortunate enough to be put into extraordinary circumstances to look at the challenges and not just accept those challenges, but try to take each of the challenges and learn from it and use it as a kind of food, if you will, to ward off we know fears and challenges and changes and stuff in the future. So we just live each day sort of the best we can and we try to come out the better of the day for us and for our family and our friends. And we just believe that we’ve been here, put on purpose life for a purpose. And I’m still kind of searching. But that basically has to, like the Lord says, to serve mankind in the general sense and woman and just trying to find ways that we can make things life better and really pay back. There’s so many people so many times, so many events that we have learned from. We’ve enjoyed even the hard times. So we’re here kind of to pay back to those that have been so generous over the years. And using our little phrase, it’s never too late to make your dreams come true. If we can show people that even no matter how old they are, young they are, they can make changes in their life. And the first one doesn’t work again, try another one. So that’s basically and we like to feel as if we’ve been put here to serve some need and that we’re doing pretty good at the helping people and our family and might have some legacy that maybe the tombstone can say something like they made a difference.

Hmm. That’s very, very interesting. I mean, one of your taglines and you actually got a trademarked as well, is a man with more lives than a cat.

That’s true.

I mean, how did you come up with that?

Well, after I had unfortunately land our little airplane, my wife had helped me build in a tree when we were encountering a storm and burning up fuel, we ran out of fuel. So we had to go through all the manoeuvers that you were trained to do, nose down, keep your speed up, whatever, and look to the left and their houses down there and look to the right. And there was some sleek look forward to the landing field was way up ahead and the only place we had to land was down and that was in trees. Anyway, when we finally got down and we thank the Lord says if we get down, we’re going to stay on the ground and do something. And my wife said, what are you going to do? And I said, what do you suggest? She said, Well, I want to write books about all your crazy adventures that we’ve had together. So I said, oh, OK, that was really the beginning of books. But actually it was a rewind of stories that I had told the children and the grandchildren over many years. And one event, one side was telling stories with my one grandson and he said, Grandpa, you live more lives than a cat. And I said, Oh, that could be a great tagline. That would be something that could attract attention. And it was so true. And so at least 16 different events in life. So we trademarked it. And that’s what we put on all of our literature and everything and a lot more lives than a cat.

So you’re definitely a forward thinker, right? I mean, you’re always thinking what’s coming up next? And we’ve had a couple of discussions and I’m sure a period of time knowing each other that I could definitely tell that you’re always on the next thing. What’s coming up next? If we can kind of go back a little bit in time and kind of give people a little understanding of your entrepreneurial insight, you know, you’ve created patents for GPS. You were an artist. You were many different things. Let’s go ahead and describe some of those things

Without saying, oh, woe is me and feel sorry for me. I was born during the Great Depression and my father couldn’t support us and the government. Thank goodness President Roosevelt had a program that could help mothers and children where there was no father. And yet if there was a father there, regardless of the fact the twenty- five per cent of the males couldn’t find a job if you had a father there, then the father was expected somehow and. Mostly to support a family, but the father wasn’t there then the government subsidized food and a place to stay and whatever. Well, I’d like to believe when I was one, my father, one of I was the last of three children. I’d like to believe that he, in his own mind, had to leave to go and try to find a job. He never came back. I don’t know what happened to him, but that put a terrible strain on the family. My mother worked two jobs and my siblings are older. And even in their teens, they had my sister was a car and drive-in. It was not an easy life. Well, that gave me this feeling that if I want her to amount to anything, my father did give me the legacy that I had to do it myself. And so I had a lot of dreams and I didn’t have much material goods. But I thought about many of the things you’ve just seen going to be an artist or could I be an inventor or I could be a pilot or all of that. And those were the dreams that kind of kept me going. And I always looked to a better tomorrow. I had hoped that tomorrow would be better than today. And I would say, what can I do to help make that happen? So one of the books we wrote has a tag line on there that says in a better way. And so my whole life has been searching for a better way because I didn’t like early on and the young kid, the way I was living, it was difficult to go to school with their little brown bag and a half brown apple. And like when you were a little kid and the people you went to school with generally had lunch buckets and stuff. But my mother would tell us that you may not have the fanciest clothes but be clean. So I took pride in the fact that no matter what we had, we were doing the best. And I said, it’s not the outside what you wear, what you look like, it’s how you’re inside. So I said, well, I can how can I make friends? And the idea was to help them whenever they need help with. So besides helping myself, I in turn trying to help others. So that started a path, basically looking in the future. In fact, in one of my jobs, RCA was accused of being able to see the future because I always looked for what’s next, what’s around the next corner. And so in the book we’re writing a book is called The Man with the Man that Saw the Future. OK, it’s called a futurist. So I’ve always had that spirit or drive to look beyond today and look at what can be. And I hope that’s not too long. And the conversation in that area.

No, I think it’s definitely a great insight and it’s a good Segway. I mean, you’re talking one of your taglines is Misery to Millionaire. Yes. So, I mean, you just gave us essentially the beginning, the dawn. How did you get into the point to where becoming a millionaire, how did that journey happen?

I was five years old. And again, it’s one of the books. I was five years old and I thought my much older sister had to forget about me and a public swimming pool. And of course, I was in the baby pool and she was in the big kids and I couldn’t find her. So I started to walk home. And there in the book, it talks about walking miles and miles and was probably a couple of blocks, but he’s only five. Then he says that he couldn’t tell where he was, so he felt he had a good sense of direction. So he just turned around. And however he stopped, he started walking in that direction, which is pretty silly. but there anyway. So he says, I’m going to have to call people, I’m going to have to. And he was crying and he jokes that he says that they can’t see the street signs because of all the tears and everything, but that makes any difference because they saw, you know, you can’t read anyway. So he says there’s got to be a better way. I’m crying. I’m hollering. And unless you’re very close to me, you can’t hear me. So he says some day and this is the key point, some day I’m going to come up and make something that can get people help around the whole world. I’ll on a vision that they can be found and they can get the help in life and far beyond them just being a. The cry for help, so in the back of his mind, he has this goal of a lifetime to come up with something that can help people across the entire world that need help. So does he think about that all the time? No, but there’s this driving force that whatever he does, looking backwards in retrospect, it was always one more step, one more level towards that unknown goal that he has and not knowing how to get there or when it’s going to happen. And so he’s always had this thing about trying to help people that can’t help themselves. And so that started the ultimate road for him to get into what we call today wireless in the early days of so-called radio. So everything he did, everything he studied in the back of his mind, he had this desire to find the secret, to communicate, have people communicate their needs around the whole world, know that one too much.

No, I think you have a really good art of storytelling. You’re talking about yourself in third person and you’re depicting a story in a visual sense that I can see it in your eyes that you could actually remember step by step when these things actually happen. So it’s really insightful to see that you can actually do that. And it’s a good gift. My next question is so today, what is your business?

OK. I have what I would jokingly call a consulting business, but in reality, it’s taking my experiences of the past and providing through books, through guest speaking engagements, through workshops as appropriate to get the message across that whether you’re young or you’re old, there’s always hope for a better tomorrow. And that was my driving force. My whole life was always looking for a better way. And it was that thing, as we discussed earlier, that kind of forced me to look beyond today. I mentioned the fact that some people said I could see the future and which were writing a book. But it’s the fact that I saw what happened yesterday, what happened today, and barring any major catastrophe, projecting that out and say, well, where and what could be at some point in time, most of the time, it worked out pretty good in terms of projecting new products for RCA and G.E. ahead of other people by at least a couple of years. And that’s why you saw some of the inventions that were made on the forefront. So at times, it gets a little difficult to put words into it because I literally still have a pretty good brain and I literally relive many of the events and some are very positive and the other ones are not. We’ll talk maybe later occasionally suffer from post-traumatic stress. And that’s a story in itself. So I’m always was always looking for a better way. And eventually, which we’ll probably get to in my 70s, I found a better way. And you can ask me about that later.

Got it. Got it. So, I mean, coming from the military and he was telling me the story earlier of the transition from military into the real world.

Yes.

And then having to go back and work for the military. And the next step was for me, was kind of very impactful and very insightful. Like how many patents did you actually capture over your life?

18 patents and probably over 30 or 35 inventions, of which the rest of them of the 18 were never patented either because I was an independent and I didn’t have the funds to do so or the fact that the company I was working with, surprisingly, was not that they thought there was no value, but because I’m going to take a sip of water.

All right,

because in the case of at least two or three. They thought it was so proprietary. That they didn’t want to even file patents on it because they were afraid somebody would steal it. So that was, I guess, on one hand, disappointing, on the other hand, the government. So back to your question.

So with those patents, which one that in today’s world that people could kind of look out and realize they may not know you created a patent, for example. Are you talked about the GPS, right?

Yeah, we’re yes.

Three parts of the GPS.

And I was 70 years old, so it’s never too late. And now that you brought it up, that’s the climax of the little boy looking for something that can help people around the world. And back in the late 60s, early 70s, I had worked in some early, early GPS and once again said got a better way. So in spite of the lack of funds, whatever, I worked for my wife on it. And we had and the bottom line of that, what, you know, finally got found, if you will, and it took 15 years to get any funds out of it. And that’s the second part of Misery to Millionaire. So we went on the misery of the little kid corps and to Millionaire where we became millionaire. That may not be much in today’s world, but for somebody that didn’t have anything an awful lot and it did help my family, my kids with their dreams.

Got it. So that particular pattern, is that what we see in cars today?

Yes, that’s the math. It’s let me clarify the basic GPS. Yes, it was created through the government and everything, but there was a lack of seeing what the opportunity would be in the consumer marketplace and the government and the particular vehicles. And this was enhancements to the core GPS that helped it grow in terms of its ability to fit into the automotive industry. John Deere plowing fields, people who are carrying GPS up the Appalachian Trail, you name it. So it was the ability to see ahead of what could be once again, what what can be tomorrow in the late 60s, early 70s, put these patterns together. But as I told you, couldn’t get me anybody be interested because they didn’t understand it as one of the downsides of kind of I’ll call it a visionary or someone that could be. You talked to some people. And the joke is a John Doe has a vision of the future and his future is, what am I going to have for lunch? OK, in this case, mine was pretty far out. Two years, three years, four years sometimes. And it’s been a blessing because I’ve always had the opportunity to help create a number of things. And when they finally show up, I say, OK, my daughter, to this day, a little sidelight. I have a wrist watch, a prototype of a early communicating device. And so she took a picture of this little you can see all the electronics in it is covered in plastic. And she put her smartwatch next to it and with a high degree of pride. And she said, my dad did the prototype for this fifty years ago. And so anyway, I didn’t mean to get carried away, but it’s just another point we saw in the GPS. And so we had three patterns on that dealing with improvements. So I had to clarify that improvements in it, even though parts of it go all the way back to the heart of what makes GPS work in automobiles.

Yes, that’s definitely a great Segway to, like your daughter said. Fifty years to get to that point. We always hear about the overnight success story that took twenty years to become a reality. What would you have done differently to get you to where you are a lot faster if you could do it all over again?

Probably nothing, because we learned we had from everything that was a setback. We became, you know, I’m sitting here almost eighty five. I say maturity. We became more mature. The biggest thing was through all of the roller coaster rides, ups and downs and businesses. Fifteen years for things to happen to become a known artist, whatever it all stems from the fact that we didn’t have that much, either me or my wife, she was a lower, lower middle class, hard working steel mill type person, and that’s probably why we clicked, because we had such similar and so we didn’t have much to start with her a little more. He she had a father, a great guy, took me under his wings. But we always looked at things in terms of how do we turn this downside into something? Plus, so our whole attitude when we got married was when penny pinchers. But when you don’t have much to start with and you come out of the army, they don’t have any funds and you want to marry this girl, then you do the hard things, the hard choices. When I got a letter from the government saying you have to do just what we need in your communication skills to help protect the country in the Arctic during the Cold War of 1960. Was it easy to say to her, We have a job. I’ve got a job now. It’s going to pay us enough money to get married and go back to school. But you can’t come with me that she just spent two years when I was in the army and letters and stuff, and I’m going to tell him that they began. Once we got up there and went through so many things like storms and threats from polar bears and all of that, when we came back we realized we had this phenomenal life we could live in compared to some of the downsides we had gone through and many yet to come, that most of what life would throw in as a way to run away wasn’t really a big deal. So I know that’s hard to realize when you’ve gone bankrupt twice. And now the government has told you that your first any fine tuning was a scam and they are going to sue you for fraud because they didn’t understand it. OK, but that was in our core was having a difficult time when we were young and realizing every opportunity they came up to. We’re going to do the best we could to make that happen. Oh, I ramble a lot. I’m sorry.

No, I mean, I think you’re giving insight to who you are, and I think you’re defining a legacy and you’re telling a journey. So I mean, by all means, keep continuing doing what you’re doing. So do you come from an entrepreneurial background? I know you were saying that, you know, you came from a lower class family, but where did you get your entrepreneurial spirit and your insight?

My discerning father, so that I had no choice. No choice. I had no choice. OK, and then I said every day that goes by, I’ll try hard to make it better. The risk taking was that when you don’t have much to start with, then it’s not too difficult to decide to take a risk because what have you got to lose?

Very true, very true. How do you juggle your work life and your family life?

OK, and since I’ve had a few mishaps over the years and I’ll have to quickly go through, then I fall a number of times, I messed up my back, I had some strokes. I’ve had brain concussion. I can only stand for about ten minutes. I crash planes four times. That in itself is pretty bad. So within the limitations that I have physically, even though I can fake it quite a bit, then I have to watch where I go and how much I get involved with physical activities. And I do take a heavy hand occasionally. So with all of that in mind, I sit down and figure out what how can I take what I’ve done? I need tablets. I may have any message I may have and use them. And that’s where I come up with things like writing books where I don’t really have to travel a lot. But occasionally when invited or I run across somebody that says we might get to speak. And I’ve had about six speaking engagements in the last couple of years of book clubs and elder care, you name it. It’s things that I come up with. So do I. Wake up in the morning and I say, I’m going to spend the next two or three hours writing? No. I do I do that, then I do it by inspiration, I have multiple notebooks you passed no one coming in here and there, just you call them scribbles, but it thoughts. I get a thought and had some time little after that, like a new book. I’ll do a title. I might try to pick a picture of a number of things and maybe I’ll write what’s called the elevator pitch, first paragraph or so, maybe a little more than that, and I’ll put it on the shelf. But at least I got the idea down on something. So I write by emotion. I don’t write my schedule. So if I can remember it, there’s a saying that I had I don’t write. I have a script. I write from the soap. OK, so no, I don’t have a schedule in terms of writing as the family is concerned, when usually we have birthdays together, we have holidays together. My grandma, my one daughter lives only about less than a thousand feet away. And so we have had the chance to watch our children grow up. One of them was the young man that’s now in the military. I just got back from Korea. He’s the one that says we have more lives on the camp. So we get together on family occasions, but they have their lives together and we try not to interfere with my daughter next door knows that we’re not as mobile and so used to be so as she can. She does grocery shopping, but we still go to meetings where we met and but it’s just kind of oh, mama did a little bit. So we do things where we can do them here where we are. And that’s why we’re starting our little 12, 15 minute short stories about our lives that you were going to be recording visual with some pictures and using we started some YouTube’s. I don’t know how we’re going to get anybody to look at them, but that’s where you come into play.

Yeah, we definitely had you in the right direction. As far as a marketing strategy,

that’s ad saying we have the content and you have the ability to do something with it.

Yeah. To get it delivered. So this is this is a big one for me. It’s like, what is your morning routine, your morning habits.

Well when you’re turning eighty five getting up for one. Yeah. I had one of my businesses, I had an elderly gentleman and I said he had an Apple computer and he did all his finances and I said, what keeps you going? And he said, well when I open up my eyes in the morning and I see some degree of sunlight, I know it’s going to be a good day. So when I wake up in the morning and I see some sunlight, I said, that’s a good day. Plus, when we get up, we started a routine of looking at each other and smiling, OK, she’s been an angel. Sixty years of putting up a pretty much, but and we’ve had a lot of hard times, but it just made our love a lot better. OK, you really don’t when you’re young, young, it’s passion. And then after a period of time it becomes more routine and there’s downsides, upsides. But if you know how to tackle them and if your life had started pretty well hard, then you appreciate all the good times. So that’s pretty much it. Getting up, having breakfast. You my wife likes news, so I don’t care for that much. She tolerates me and my babbling all the time about news stories and I tolerate her watching news. But she does a phenomenal job of crocheting things you wouldn’t believe angels and all sorts of things. So we have our little hobbies. We do. And she helped me start to steam my green screen downstairs. So we have a true partnership so we don’t have to go where very much. We don’t go to much of any movies anymore, but we have a full life of doing things we both enjoy. She has a high level of tolerance, obviously, and I in turn have high level of respect for her.

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I think your life kind of you ever seen the movie The Big Fish?

No, I don’t believe so.

When you get the opportunity, I think your life kind of falls in line with that movie. And it’s about this guy that lived all these different lives. And he’s a big fish in a little pond.

Oh, yes.

So I think definitely you get opportunity. You definitely want to just look at that movie. I think that your life and your legacy is going to fall right in line with that movie. Almost identical.

It’s the fish.

Yeah, the big fish.

Oh, the big fish is the big fish or

metaphorically. Yes.

Oh, OK.

Metaphorically, he was the big fish in a little pond and he was in the military as well. And, you know, he lived all these different lives, all these different things, met all these different people on this long journey of his life. And it all comes to the end of his journey to where he passed that legacy on to his family.

That’s what I’m trying to do with my books.

So what do you see your legacy going 20, 30, 100 years, 200 years from now?

First of all, a big prayer like you. I think I said it earlier and said, I really like to feel that together with my wife, that we made a made the world a better place and that sometimes it gets very hard, secondly things like our political situation going on and all of that. But in our little way, my wife, my son said to me when we were discussing how do we know anything we’ve ever done in life made a difference. And he said, you probably never did well. But maybe if you believe and you get up those pearly gates, you might meet somebody that says, let me tell you the impact that you made on my life. OK, so we never know. It’s like the books. Am I writing books to make money? I know I won’t because I know 300 books you might sell to your friends and neighbors and family. But that’s not why I do it. And I do it because there are stories to tell and I hope somebody somewhere sometime will pick up on them. And maybe even with your help and the podcasts and whatever we can get the message out is don’t give up can be pretty rough. And if you have so many ups and downs and everything and you still are around and that should be a message that should be to people. So my legacy, I think, is just like we said, is simple. Adaptive says he made a difference in this case with my wife. They made a difference. So that’s now. Putting that aside from the right, a little conceit, whatever. I’m hoping that the man with more lives than a cat will be a little more known. So my distribution of thoughts, it’s never too late can be a little more widespread than just going to Amazon or one or two get- togethers. OK. Anyway, I would like that the band of more lives than they can’t be known while I’m still alive and allow me to be recognized enough to be invited to a few more talks and things of that nature. But at the end result that we made a difference and we’ve been packed with people. I have to one a particular video that I dug up from. Nineteen eighty-five, and we gave a talk to a weed called junior high or middle school, and it was during Science Week, so my son and I put on a one-hour presentation. And to these young kids, they think it’s difficult to keep attention. And, you know, they’re doing something when you can keep the attention anyway. We put on this presentation and now. When we got done with it, it was about technology, telephones, wireless that we had all done. The reaction was such that I really felt as if we had home and we titled the YouTube How to make science, how to get teenagers involved with science. And that was the thing behind it. So maybe if I think about it, I think positive that one of those kids to those kids. So I said this is cool and went on to really do something that other people would recognize and know. And they might remember the middle aged guy with their son putting on this this talk. So I had this video that makes me feel very proud and think about there is an impact by these young people. I have talked to him and talks to my grandchildren’s class colleges, businesses, grade schools, and I enjoyed the look on their face when they get it in the Army. I taught the technology classified microwave and don’t want to go too much involved in that. But there’s a book coming up. And the book that we’re putting together talks about this young man that’s a private and he goes in and because he has previous technology background, he gets thrown into eventually teaching sophisticated electronics to officers. And they the commanding general from out there, Jersey, tells him that while you’re in the classroom and he tells the students, this young man here is a major. And treat him as such and don’t take it out on the trail, because I still had to do all the drills, everything, and nobody did. But it’s the story of this young man that doesn’t realize until those later life the phenomenal responsibility that he had to teach the leaders of tomorrow that would be running the command and control on the battlefield and everything. And if he messed up, then he could be a phenomenal disaster if the communication systems didn’t work because he didn’t pass that information on to the officers running it. And so don’t know where I was going with that. Sorry.

What I take from that is I think that part of your journey and your destination is one in the same and you want to inspire people. And I can tell you firsthand, I’ve only known you went a couple of weeks and you’ve inspired me already.

Well, thank you. And not five dollars later.

But the inspiration was more so, you know, like, I just I just turned 40. And like you said, you’re creeping up on 85.

Yeah.

For me is like this 45 years to where I could potentially be where you are or execute the things that you’ve done in my own way and just seeing those pathways. And like you said, you didn’t create your first patent until you was like 70.

Oh, no, no. My first patent occurred when I was thirty-five.

Thirty-five. So you’re the last back in the GPS?

Yes. The piece de resistance, if you will. The one that I feel that made the most significant difference to the most number of people was the improvements in GPS when I was in my late 60s, early 70s.

So I mean, I think just by hearing that there’s people in the war right now that maybe eight years old, people that maybe 65, 55 and different journeys of their life. And to hear that when you’re 70, it’s still not the end of the road. There’s still way more to give, still way more to do. And you could you know, like your statement says, it’s never too late to make your dreams come true. So in all reality, I think you’re a spokesperson for that in all age groups,

if I can just add to that a little bit. That was one episode in later years that helps illustrate it’s never too late. I built an airplane with my wife, so I flew it. I crashed it four times. We call them off the landing. They crashes. Last one was on top of that tree. And I was in my later 70s. I started seriously to write books and I’ll try to give you a real quick. That happened anyway. I was now in my early 80s. I wrote six books and I got six more coming. So age has nothing to do with it. If you have a desire and you say, what more can I do? OK, not sit in a rocking chair even though I enjoy my rocking chair and there more can I do that can make a difference. And I had a number of pilots that had crashes and one of them said when he is engine quit in a club meeting, he said The first thing that came to my mind is what would we do? And this was after we landed in that tree. And that was such a thrill to me that there was one person that picked up on what we did and the episode we went through. And he said, what would we do? It was not what would Jesus do by a long shot, but it made me thrilled. So it was in my late 60s, 70s and 80s that I had all these other things that we chose to do and some so good, some not so good. But we took the risk and I think we were better off. I’m very proud of my bookcase with those multiple books and stuff on it. And thanks to a friend who said you need some lighting, so he added lighting to it. So believe in your friends and help them as much as you can. And whatever seeds you plant, they may just flourish and grow time and time and time beyond whatever may be. Your first intent was so never give up.

Yeah, definitely. And another thing that you brought up to that and realize that we share in common is that you said you have a stroke. Oh yeah. And I had one as well to twenty eighteen.

Oh well congratulations on the reason I talk so much now is I went for a year and I couldn’t.

Yeah. And I know exactly what you mean. It’s like this weird. Your brain is moving faster than your body can kind of catch up to it.

Yeah. All I did was mumble so. And

now I mean it’s you know,

now I overtalk. You’re making up for lost time.

Yeah, definitely. So it was a whole year that you didn’t what did you lose any motion in your body as well to know?

It was just the vocal part of my brain.

It’s my first podcast I talked about. Like, you feel like you’re captured in a situation. It almost feels like you understand what stuttering really is. You understand what depression really is in those moments because your brain is 100 percent fine. You’re moving forward but can’t get it out. You can’t get it out.

So my father, seven years in a nursing home, my stepfather, phenomenal body. He was a banker, my stepfather. So not one I don’t know, and was gone when I was young. But anyway, he had a stroke and he was in a nursing home. He recognized the children, our children when we walked in and he would cry. You look at his face. He knew what was going on, but he couldn’t speak it, he couldn’t tell you how he felt. OK, and when I had that, it was really a flashback to seeing him that way. I’d like to interject one thing, sure, as we’re talking about how you and I both have experienced things like that. There’s one topic which had been difficult for me to think about writing, but I am. I had my knee replaced, and that was five years ago, and I was recovering in a recovering facility, even though my wife wanted to take me home because I found out that I had also cracked my bone and they had to wait three months to replace the need for the bone to heal. But I also I walked in here and I twisted my leg answering the oh, I don’t run to the bone anymore anyway. So I was recovering from pain and the knee pain in my leg healing. And I had torn ligaments. So the pain level, when you go to a doctor says, what is your pain level? And he got smile of it and it goes up to 10. I was 20. It was the best. I’m in this facility. I could and I had to crawl because I had pushed the button and it rang for an hour, a two hour. I then got rolled out of bed and I crawled the bathroom and I had one of these. I just got out of the hospital at one of these Calamus that doesn’t work right in the back. And you see your but all of that. And because of medication, Mother Nature locked me up and I couldn’t go to the bathroom. The insides were like a brick and I’m laying on a tile floor. I bought freezing everything under extreme brain pain and crying out. Oh, nothing happened for three hours. And my wife shows up my angel with my son. And I know you don’t know her, but she’s got to level sometimes very complex and very understanding. And then the other side when she walked in and the alarms going and nobody’s there, all hell broke loose. So she grabbed me with my son’s help and got me in the car and brought me home for two weeks. I could not sleep because I had the fear of waking up. And that was the real world, the world of being there with her, getting up with the people five times a night and so on. That was a dream. I went into psychiatric help. Because I would get up and I would cry, got nothing, I mean, watching the news and they’d be feeding me soup and stuff and I just I start crying. Well, the reason I bring that up is even under that situation in one year, 80. There’s always hope so I went through a little one or two sessions, and it’s kind of the joke that they said, well, you must have hated your father. Well, I never did because I didn’t know him and I tried to give him credit for doing what he did. We come to the point that and I think that’s only part of the story that I was afraid of being alone does not go back to one of the books we read about the little boy, and he’s afraid and he’s by himself and he’s lost. I was throughout my entire life afraid of being alone in the one book, the full books, Searching for the Good War. There’s a section where there was a storm and my partner became ill and they came and got him. And the storm got to be 130 miles an hour and it was 95 below zero. And I was expected to run this most crucial site at 24 years old and. I finally. Was freezing literally danetta because it could be hitting, couldn’t keep up with the wind and everything was shutting down. So I pull up a table and I open up the radiation doors of the transmitter tubes, which were lower but very similar to virtually the radiation after the Civil War atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I was alone. So I was alone when I was a little kid, I was alone, freezing to death and being radiated when I was in the Arctic, and now I found myself alone, 80 years old, and all of it came back, the fear of being alone. So what it says is they finally find out what was the core. And the core was I was alone. So here the point is, it’s never too late once again to find out what could cause something dramatic. So occasionally I’ll get a glimpse back. The post-traumatic stress, not terrible, but just memories I don’t want to have anymore. But it’s never too late to recover even things as difficult as post-traumatic stress. So what did I do when I wrote that book after the Arctic experience about the argument I dedicated to all those that suffered with post-traumatic stress because I’ve been there and I’d done that and I apologize for eating up all your time.

But no, that’s something good information is definitely insightful.It’s a testament to who you are.

Yeah.

With that story that you just told. So look at. Your goal is to help people, right?

Yes,

and you’re looking at delivering a message of an insightful, inspirational destination.

Yes.

How would you help an upcoming entrepreneur? What words of wisdom would you leave behind for them? To utilize today, well, it’s is a cliche, but basically never give up. It took six business start-ups before I really had one. No. One, the third one. That’s when we did the eldercare. But then we got hit up with the first Gulf War and all the banking was shut down about that. They really honest one was literally the G.P.S… And even though you don’t know why you’re in the given path, that eventually I firmly believe there’ll be a reason why you take that year, some years and years past. And that was really never give up. It’s not easy. So my wife and I, time and time again would have a company that folded and we’d take, thanks to a friend, a little trip up north Georgia to some brain recovery. And then we had nothing. We had builds and company and folded. And we were coming back and we looked at each other and I said, well, what are we going to do now? And she looked at me because we had done this same conversation many times before and she said. Start all over. So start all over, OK? If it turns out it goes through the journey of having a dream and then having a goal and then in the process of trying to achieve that, you have some downsides. You have to believe. And if you work at it, you will find out that two things will happen. You’ll either achieve that goal and that dream ultimately, or you won’t. Now you say, well, that’s pretty stupid. Well, when I’m coming down to is so what? So you don’t that one doesn’t quite work out. So today’s they say you got a bucket list. If you have enough dreams and if you have enough courage to take one more risk, then you say, what do we do? Well, we let one out. That I know is going to get an artist award and be in a museum. No, that I know that I was going to grow up thanks to my brother that got killed in the war and play classical harmonica. You know, it’s going to be in Carnegie Hall, though. OK, did we know we’re going to do all of these things, start and failed businesses, invent this and that? No, but every time there was something, we either made it and said, hey, Ray for us or we didn’t. And we say, where do we go from here? And then we just pick another one. And that’s why there’s so many lives. So many of them were not quite. So I said, well, let’s try something else.

More lives than a cat. Right.

You got it. You got to. Hey, can I quote you on that?

Yeah, definitely. So where can people find you online? I mean, you have Facebook, Instagram, email, website, address.

Yeah, but I don’t do a lot of it. I’m not the person that’s going to sit down there and even weakly throw stuff into Facebook or Instagram or anything. I’m still learning. I say, well, OK, that’s nice. That’s cool. So within limitations like Instagram, a one minute video, don’t make it sixty one seconds. So I’m learning that terms the next one. I can do the videos that I’m working on now. Do I make a career out of it? No, it’s almost more the enjoyment of figuring out how to do it and do it once again. The challenge

keeps your brain motivated to keep moving forward

meant that you have to ask me one more question.

Well, I got two more question.

What caused me other than landing on top of that tree to become a month to month book author? And I’m going to take a couple of days. I tell you that story because I owe it to a teacher. So I’m 12 years old and she knows that I’m cross the tracks on the other side of the town. And so but she also knows that I have a lot of dreams and she picks up on that. So a contest comes up and it’s to enter this contest and write this paper. And she said, you can be a pretty good writer. OK, so I said, oh, well, why don’t you go ahead and enter it? So I did, and I’m 12 years old. And I want to know what the topic was, free enterprise for peace and prosperity. What the heck does a 12-year-old know about that? No one. So she said, yeah, you have a knack. And I said, well, what do I do? We’ll go, right? Well, what am I going to write about? And this is important. Piece of information, right, what you and I said, oh, she said, how many dreams do you have? I said, Oh no, I just got this. And this is a simple write about in your lifetime, right. About what your adventures are. People will find it interesting. And when you get your older age, then write books about them and let other people know what you’ve learned in your life. So it was not just landing in the tree, but it was this wonderful teacher that saw something in me that I didn’t see, and there’s a book that someday I’ll finish writing called The Invisible You, and it deals with people. That’s why it’s payback that that sees something in you you don’t see. And it’s that extra thing that they do that puts you on a path to improve your life. Now, you’ve written some books, continue to write because you’ve got you in your own way. You’ve got your own stories. But that’s how I became really an honest author. Someone says, did you win any awards? I’ll say one. OK, when I was 12, I didn’t spend my life writing books to go and spend the time and effort getting awards. I did it because of the message I wanted to put across and what I wanted to leave behind. So it’s and to make us feel good when you living life with my wife has been phenomenal love because. We cried when we wrote the story of the Arctic. She didn’t know what I was going through with storms and beasts and threats. So when I disclosed that it was very emotional, I didn’t know that she was for all that time, a bridesmaid, never a bride. And every time she would go and participate in a brother and a sister and a friend getting married, I was 4000 miles away. So we learned how to really know what true love was. Sometimes I go on ramble. Sorry, but I had to tell you the story of how I became an author and I did win one award.

Well, I definitely appreciate that story behind. I mean, you’re talking about 12 versus 84. And so the fact that you remember from 12 years old and what got you here today is as a great story to tell.I got a bonus question for you,

though, bonus question

bonus question. All right.

If you could spend 24 hours with anybody dead or alive, uninterrupted, who would it be and why? It’s always a tough question. As always, a tough one .You have to kind of like think about all the variables people in life

there’s, two but I’ll pick one, Anderson.

Why?

one example is he never gave up on my life,

so what was it like, ten thousand one lightbulb actually worked.

He’s got a thousand and some patents. There’s a downside to saying Edison. He never really gave credit where credit was due to those people that actually did his work. He was the creative guy. OK, but as far as the drive, as far as never giving up, as far as doing crazy things, no one would have expected, OK, he was in the agriculture business and he was in the oil business and all of that. He just had to I would I put it to see or hear something nobody else did. And I will say with some degree of pride, that’s something I feel very good about, of about people that have the ability to see things that no one else sees and they have the courage to go ahead and do something about it. Knowledge is one thing. Doing anything with the that knowledge to make a difference is something different. So many people have dreams. That’s all they ever are. And it’s the saddest thing is to have a dream. And let it die. Before it’s ever had a chance to live, but it takes a lot of courage and a willingness to take risks because without what’s the old adage, without risk, no reward. That’s not true. But I would pick Edison because it was a never give up and we’re not all perfect. But from the top side, the ability and the drive to say this is going to work, I don’t know how. And then to see, oh, wait a minute, if I put this little filament in some kind of a vacuum, that was the brakes or

a light bulb moment.

Yeah, it actually. And then to sit there for three or four days staring at this moment and it did not go out. So he said enough is enough. Crank it up. He does that. And it died a glorious death. OK, but I would pick Edison.

Well, I think that is a great way to end this podcast, and I appreciate you taking the time, sir. And so on the flip side of it, at the end of my podcast, always give the interviewer opportunity to become the interviewee and swap places. So any questions that you have for me?

Number one, there’s an appreciation that you spent some time at number two without the five dollars. And I joked about everything. You were extremely complimentary. You have given me the thrill of feeling that I gave you a little bit of inspiration, because that’s the food that kind of at times get me going when people go one way or another. Aha. OK. Appearance wise or whatever. Thank you for coming over. And I hope this can be the beginning of a long and hopefully say one way or another way, a mutually profitable relationship. And I appreciate your journey and the things you told me about all the things that you’ve done and how you could make things better and move on to something else. And you are a futurist, too, because you see where in your life you have gone and where you need to go. And they don’t have to be all right in a straight line.

Definitely not.

The number of things I came up with had sometimes nothing to do with what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I would like to believe that we do things at times. And this is President Kennedy. We will go to the moon by the end of the decade, OK? Not because we have to, but because we can. So thank you. And I’m looking forward to hearing your podcast and looking forward to further communications. And so the ideas and we went to see my fledging green screen thing. And you made some excellent suggestions and I hope to see you. We got one coming up on Saturday, another meeting. Are you going to be there?

I’m out of town this weekend with

no excuses. Excuses. Thank you, sir.

It’s a pleasure.

Same here. Thank you very much.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Boston College. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming a trailblazer if this podcast helped you. Please email me about submit additional questions.You would love to hear me ask our guests and or drop me your thoughts and ask @asksagrant.com post comments Schirò hit subscribe and remember to become a boss uncage you have to release your inner beast S. A. Grant signing off.

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