The Motorbike Accident That Nearly Took Everything—And the Mindset That Brought Me Back

 

In life, there exist points where all things are categorized before and after. In my case, this moment was the day of the motorbike accident, which almost took my life away, and all the dreams I had been trying to follow all my life. There are numerous moments in my life about trials, perseverance, and how to come out of them stronger, but none of them has brought me closer to my spirit than this one, which was a crash that changed my life.

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I learned to survive graciously by growing up in the Jamaican ghetto community of Shaolin. I had been hustling since childhood selling box drinks, operating a June plum business, farming callaloo, being a young barber. Struggle was familiar. Hard work was routine.

The accident hit at a moment when I was feeling stable in my life. I was performing well at school, doing well in sports that includes soccer, table tennis and chess, and I was in a position to balance the hectic life of a young man who was determined to be out of his conditions. The possibilities of the University of the West Indies were broadening my world and I was finding out the extent to which grit could go.

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Time appeared to stand still when that motorbike went down the road. I barely heard the sound of being hit and the agony spread throughout my body like fire. It was too terrible to think of; that, in the horrible silence that ensued, one idea was more resounding than all the bustle: Is this it? Is everything over? A boy of Shaolin, whose dreams were to become a world leader, whose hopes lay in the future, when he would no longer be a poor or a weak child of the system, now had a chance to realize that all those hopes would never come true.

Physical recovery was tedious and exhausting. Each day came in with fresh pain, frustration and fear. What if I never fully healed? What would have happened should I not be able to compete in sports again? What in case my academic life collapsed? What would happen should the momentum that I had developed just disappear? 

All these thoughts keep appearing back to back in mind and they just don’t seem to go away no matter what I do, those three and a half months became decades and everything around me just seem to be in black and white. But I decided not to give up and that was when I started working and throwing my muscles and bones into activities of the day trying to make a normal rhythm of life just like before. As soon as I got discharge from the hospital just two days after I took the next plane to Trinidad and that was where I realize that life is not about suffering it’s about thriving, giving your best to everything and then enjoying the fruitful outcomes.

My story, coming out of the ghetto up to the top of the world, has a single truth behind it: mentors are multipliers. They amplify trust, orientation, strength and prospects. They get the picture of what you will become in the future when you can only see what you are currently going through. And through them a lad who had two cemeteries about him learnt that his beginning did not fix his end.

When I look back today, I realize that UWI did not merely teach me, but got me ready. It developed the profession that brought me out of campus fields and lecture halls to boardrooms and the world leadership. And when I tell my tale in From Grit to Glory, I want the young people to understand that their own be it how lowly, can be the stepping-stone to something magnificent.

When I became a leader in some of the largest companies all over the world, I applied the principles that I was taught in Shaolin and that is how I dealt with my teamwork, mentoring, and decisions. I acquired that I should be a good listener, be resourceful in my thinking and appreciate the human face of leadership. I knew that you can be more successful with titles, but it is service, which barbering taught me well before I first stepped into my first office.

Being raised in Shaolin taught the writer that hardship can never make a person, it will only equip him. It taught me that a leader should serve and community is the basis of resilience. The experiences that I had acquired in that small, neglected neighborhood helped to take me through my most difficult moments and the most successful ones.

In From Grit to Glory, these are not just stories, these are the reflections of my life moments that shaped who I am today. Selling box drinks and bag juice is not much, yet they have shown me a lot, instilling discipline, strategy, consistency, communication, and resilience in me.