Chaos Spoken Here

By Scott Reddoch

I never thought about quitting in Marine Corps boot camp. There’s exhaustion and deprivation. Each day tests your limits more than the last. The drill instructors create an environment of chaos.

Turns out, I’m good at it.

Marine boot camp is three months long. The training is designed to break you. Anyone who completes it gets broken down and built back up. There is a lot of physical exercise. The exercise I hated most was climbing a really high rope. Once at the top, you slap the lumber it’s hanging from and yell out your platoon number. There’s a technique to rope climbing. I never learned it. I didn’t fall off, but I slipped a few times.

We had a few people wash out of our platoon. One guy nearly drowned and had serious lung damage. A few others just “lost it” and we never heard about them again.

At graduation, there’s a big ceremony. The commanding officer gave a commencement speech. I’ll never forget it. He closed with, “That will be all Marines. Godspeed and good luck.”

That was the first time I was called Marine. All of the pain and sacrifice was for that moment. Many people cannot understand the feeling of extreme accomplishment. It brings a self-confidence you don’t get anywhere else.

I spent six years in the Marine Corps. I learned that obstacles are meant to be understood. You don’t have to go through all of them. You just adapt.

Years later, I was managing a Hurricane Katrina recovery program in New Orleans. The program was valued at about $40 million with over 300 individual projects. The biggest part was funded by Congress but governed by the state of Louisiana. Apparently, we weren’t supposed to get the contract. The company that was supposed to get it was part of the program and was in bed with the state.

The game was to pay everyone but my company and make me seem like the problem. This would be a four-year project. The guy from the state was extremely difficult to deal with. He would change rules on me and outright lie. The state even contacted my employer and tried to get me fired.

They pulled every trick in the book. I followed the rules and was very organized. The uglier it got, the more energized I would get.

Nobody knew that I thrive in chaos.

One of his mistakes was emailing me a change to my invoicing procedure. This was a golden parachute. He requested a meeting with the owners of the company I worked for. My invoices hadn’t been paid in six months and the bosses were about to hear what a problem I was. This would normally have been a disaster, but I had that email. I had kept good records.

He met with the owners and bashed me as expected. His plan to get me fired would have worked if I hadn’t kept that email. Instead of being upset, I got sharper and more focused.

I had several audits from the Office of the Inspector General. There were some small findings in the beginning, but the final audit found no discrepancies. It said the program was well run and successful. I finished the program. From start to finish, I had people actively trying to make me fail.

Eventually, I left and started my own business with a guy I knew. In the early days, I missed at least ten paychecks. I went through all of my savings and had to borrow money from my girlfriend Emily to pay my rent. Small projects trickled in, but the business was slowly dying.

After about eighteen months, I landed a big client with a big list of projects. Naval Facilities Command. They were happy with my work. In eighteen months, I went from missing paychecks to looking for more people to hire.

Then I had two strokes and my world was shattered.

I feel my stroke survivability correlates with Marine training because I was in a pretty tough spot, but I had been in tough spots before and won. There aren’t many similarities between stroke recovery and boot camp, but you have to have the confidence to win.

You can’t really prepare for paralysis. You need to be in it to get better at it. There are some things you just have to get your hands dirty to be good at. Paralysis is one.

Look at my obstacle. Paralysis. I’m not going to get through it. I understand that everyday tasks are impossible for me. I can’t flip a light switch or scratch my nose. Early on, I tried to make myself do those things. You probably know how that turned out.

Getting through the obstacle is not the way. Understanding it and accepting the obstacle is. Discovery and acceptance come before adaptation. In my case, there’s no physical part I can adapt to change things. What I have adapted are the emotions I feel about paralysis and my thoughts. I’ve adapted my mind to accept the physical limitations while finding other ways I can accomplish things.

Looking back, everything I went through gave me a foundation to work from. You have to understand obstacles before you can beat them. Mental toughness comes from having confidence. It’s collecting the facts and making good decisions in the face of adversity.

It’s not easy, but I believe a lot more is possible than we think.