For this blog, I am going to take a quote from my brand new book, Big Dreams Take Small Sacrifices. Today’s quote is “Work with reality, because when you fight reality, you always lose.”

We all wish that life was a little bit easier, traffic in Los Angeles was not as bad, or that the boss was not an idiot, etc. There’s not a day that goes by where I wished I was not disabled. I’m surrounded by non-disabled people every day, I mean, they are all over the place: on TV, at the store, they’re everywhere! They kind of freak me out! Jokes aside, writing Big Dreams helped me realize that if I want success, I have to make sacrifices as a handicapped man and often times I feel that I am forced to pay a handicapped tax on my dreams. Like any tax, I hate to pay it but I do because I know if I pay it, then I’m closer to my dream. If I fight reality and don’t pay the handicapped tax, then the only person losing out is me.

Your reality is your reality. Every successful person has to deal with crap. One problem is we often romanticize success. We see motivational speakers with slick suits and combed hair and think they don’t have any problems. But what we don’t see is them taking a red eye with lost luggage.

With success come the good and the bad. There is no way to separate it. That’s not to say that we can’t limit the bad. Of course we can, but we can’t get rid of it. Work with reality, the way I work with my disability.