Eyes Wide Open with Isaac Lidsky
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Episode Summary
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Isaac Lidsky, the author of “Eyes Wide Open.” Isaac went blind at the age of 25. It was a slow process when he was in his late teens so he had time to get used to the idea. At first, he thought it was going to be a very sad and small life, but he said, “You know what? I might have lost my sight, but not my vision for what I want my life to be.” He really has great insights into the importance of combining nonverbal cues with verbal cues, so that people really communicate clearly.
And, he said, “You need to take full responsibility for your own definition of success, and if you’re doing something that isn’t making you happy, don’t let other people tell you have to stay doing that very thing.” He leads a life that his eyes are wide open, his heart is wide open, and he shares tips with us on how we can have our ears wide open, and even learn to listen like you speed read. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Eyes Wide Open with Isaac Lidsky
Hi, and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Isaac Lidsky. I have been waiting for a long time to get him on. As soon as I saw his TED Talk, I was completely riveted and moved, and have told everybody about this new amazing book, “Eyes Wide Open.” His popular TED Talk which I highly encourage you to go watch is “What Reality Are You Creating For Yourself?” He has literally done so many things in his life, from being on Saved The Bell as a teen star, to being an entrepreneur, to being a lawyer and clerking with two Supreme Court justices, and running his own business.
And now, he teaches all of us how he dealt with his information that he was going to eventually go blind, I believe it was at 25, and how he took that information, and he said a line in there that I think, well, I will remember the rest of my life which is, “I might have lost my sight, but I’ve not lost my vision for what I want my life to be.” Isaac, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me.
It’s just amazing to see I think some of us think, “Oh, maybe I’ll have two or three different lives,” but you’ve really had five different reincarnations of everything you’ve done, don’t you think?
Yes. I’ve been blessed to do a lot of really neat things in my life along the way, as you generously mentioned. In a remarkable way, slowly losing my sight, I was diagnosed when I was 13 and it took above a dozen years. I lost my sight from 13 to 25. In a remarkable way, of the many things I’ve been able to do, going blind was one of the best things that happened to me. It really was.
Source: Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
[Tweet “Going blind was one of the best things that happened to me”]
As you said, I lost my sight, but I gained a vision in the process, and that vision has brought me immeasurable joy and fulfillment and success.
And not only are you successful, but you also have an amazing wife based on what you describe in your book, and four children I believe, correct?
That is correct, yeah.
And a dog even.
Yeah, so my wife, Dorothy, who is a miraculous woman, and I adore and admire her. Dorothy and I have six and a half year triplets, and a 16 month old baby. That’s the four kids, we call them the Kidskys. You know, my last name being Lidsky, we call them the Kidskys. The triplets are the Tripskys.
Oh, my God.
And yeah, we’re all enjoying a very busy life.
Yes. You talk about that going blind has actually helped you, but it wasn’t always like that, and you were very candid in your book, “Eyes Wide Open,” talking about your own internal struggles. Can you talk about how other people can deal with these maybe not as dramatic of challenges, but you have some really great tips on how to deal with obstacles in any form?
Sure. When I was first diagnosed with my blinding disease, I was terrified, and I was convinced that blindness was going to ruin my life. It wasn’t really something I thought as much as it was just something that I knew. I knew blindness would end my achievements. It would be an end to independence to me, and then I would never find a woman who would truly love and respect me, ’cause I figured I wasn’t going to love or respect myself, and on and on, and on, and all these awful things.
Psychologists call it awfulizing, which I think is a great term. But it was all these awful images and what was amazing is, it felt real. It felt like truth, right? That’s what’s so pernicious about fear. We all confront fear, we all confront challenges, the unknown types of crisis, and in those moments our fear really fills the void of the unknown with awful, with the worst case scenario. If we’re not careful, if we’re not aware, we believe it, we experience it as truth, and then it becomes true, right? It’s self-realizing.
So, for me, going blind in a lot of ways, the disease was really kind of the cure. As I lost my sight progressively and slowly, produced all these bizarre visual effects. Objects would appear and morph and disappear, and if someone told me about the picture I was holding in my hand then I could suddenly see it, but otherwise it couldn’t, and on and on, and on.
The upshot was, the impact was that this illusion of sight, this human experience of sight which is an illusion, was kind of shattered for me. I realized that far from being some kind of passive perception of some truth or some objective reality out there, sight is this incredible personal, virtual experience that is crafted in the mind. Literally seeing that firsthand was empowering and liberating for me, because the same is true of our fears, the way we experience our fears. The same is true of countless other aspects of life, and once we see our role in shaping our lives, we can take control.
I love it. Well, I neglected to say in your intro that you went to Harvard, have your law degree, and were on this fast track and have clerked for two Supreme Court justices. While you were blind, you were still able to have this amazing career, and yet, you realized that for you, there was something else to do, and that’s the entrepreneurial itch sometimes. You have all this time and money invested in this amazing education, and yet you find yourself going, “This isn’t quite right for me.” Can you tell us about that big decision that you made to leave New York and start something else?
Sure. So, a big part of living life eyes wide open for me is really holding yourself accountable for your own definition of success, your own understanding of what value looks like. Really, being rigorous in assessing how you want to spend your time and who you want to be as a person. So, that has put my money where my mouth is and endeavoring to live that way has played a major role in my repeated invention or career switches along the way. The one you speak of, I was blessed to do a lot of really call things in law in the public sector. I worked for the Justice Department, litigated appeals all over the country, clerked for the Supreme Court, all these great things which I enjoyed.
Source: Warren Wong on Unsplash
[Tweet “I lost my sight, but I gained a vision in the process”]
Then I found myself taking the easy route and big signing bonus and fancy office and paycheck and all of that, and working for a big international law firm, which to be clear, there are people who enjoy that work, who find it rewarding, who find value in their lives in that work. I have no problem with it. That’s great for them. The problem was that it wasn’t so for me. I was pretty dissatisfied and pretty miserable in my career.
So, this was around the end of 2010, the beginning of 2011. I decided with my college roommate that it might be a good time to buy a small company and use it to build an excellent business of our own. My roommate, Zac, helped me find the business and he put up a lot of the money to buy it, but he kept his fancy day job in the world of finance.
I put every single penny that Dorothy and I had into the business, and moved from Manhattan and my fancy law firm office to Orlando, Florida, to serve as the first Chief Executive Officer of our new residential construction company, contractor, and that was in June of 2011.
Yes, that alone is a big decision and I know from listening to you read your book out loud to us on Audible, which is my favorite way to consume content, it is that you, because you’re a lawyer, know due diligence probably better than most, and yet, once again, another challenge appeared that you had to use your eyes wide open skills to figure out how to sort through that.
Well, you know, in retrospect, Zac and I really had little idea what we were doing. We learn in life, often by doing. Experience is the best teacher and all that kind of stuff, so the unfortunate corollary to that is your first time out, you don’t tend to have a lot of way by experience or insight. We thought we knew what we were doing, we meticulously analyzed the financials of the business. We met with the owner, we met with the team, and having bought the business, three months in we realized this data we had been so obsessively focused on really was nonsense. It was garbage in, garbage out.
The truth of the matter was nobody really knew what was going on with the business. The sole proprietor, owner, was relatively unsophisticated and anyway, far from treading water or getting by, this business we had bought was actually sinking like a stone. That led to a pretty miserable time in my life. It looked like Dorothy and I might lose it all, and declare bankruptcy. We even had conversations with her parents about maybe moving in with them and our then year old triplets, and our dog.
But along the way here, my mother revealed, it was a surprise to me and a surprise to really my whole family, but she revealed that over 30-40 years, she had been squirling away some cash to save for that rainy day. It was a lesson her father taught her well, and her father being an immigrant who had to start from scratch a couple of times in his life.
For him, the only way to truly save was by saving cash, right? Banks come and go, governments come and go. Anyway, it turned out my mom had $350,000 in cash tucked away, and she was convinced that I should take it and use it to try to save my dying business.
She said something to you about taking care of yourself, and loving yourself. Can you tell us what that was? It just touched me so much when I heard you say that.
Yeah, so after two or three days of really wrestling with this decision, whether I could actually bring myself to take this money and do something productive with it, we met, actually Dorothy and I drove down Florida’s turnpike, and met my mom. She drove up from Miami, we were driving down from Orlando, we met about halfway in the parking lot of a gas station, at a turnpike rest stop.
I got out of a suburban and stepped into a pretty tight hug from my mom and she said, “Please be good to yourself.” Then, she said, “I know you will fix this” which was pretty remarkable because she didn’t say she thought I could, right? She said she knew I could.
Then, she didn’t say, “Could,” she said, “Will.” “I know you will fix this.” Man, there’s a lot of wisdom in mothers, and I’m glad that she turned out to be right.
Well, you have people like that believing in you, and your wife was equally supportive saying, “Just fix it,” right? Your mom saying, “I know you will fix it,” I love that you differentiated that. Not “I think” and that “You might,” the distinction leads right into one of my many favorite things in “Eyes Wide Open” which is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Can you tell us the example there? You said the wisdom of mothers and that leads right into this.
Yes. Yeah, that’s fun. So, it’s a saying. I wish I could claim credit for it, but it’s not my own, but they say that “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad.” For me, that very nicely encapsulates this idea that we get a lot of cues around us in the world from other people, from our circumstances, colleagues, friends, family, whatnot, that I would put in the knowledge bucket. But sometimes we do ourselves a disservice. We have a hard time trusting ourselves when it comes to wisdom.
Of course, on matters of who we want to be and how we want to live our lives, and what we’re trying to achieve, our own wisdom is vastly more important and vastly more relevant than any knowledge we might gain from without. So, that’s the way I look at that, I guess.
Well, I think one of the things that you really made me think, and I think’s going to be so interesting for everyone listening, is just because you lose your sight doesn’t make your hearing automatically better. Like, suddenly you have super hearing or something, right? And you’re a superhero with your hearing. But you do talk about we all know about speed reading, but you have this great insight that we can train ourselves even if we are still seeing with our eyes, to be better listeners or even faster listeners. Can you talk about that?
Sure, that’s exactly right. So, there’s a Hollywood shorthand that when you lose sense, your other sense “get better.” That’s not true at all. The truth of the matter is that you learn to use your other senses more effectively. You rely on them more, you pay more attention to them, and you learn ways to use them more effectively. That distinction is critical because it means that all the awesome and amazing ways that I have learned make my ears a lot more productive for me, a lot more useful to me.
You don’t have to be blind to do the same. So, sighted people can do it, too, and one big part of that is listening to people more effectively, truly listening, and trying to communicate at a deeper level, which I talk a lot about in the book. But another example, a fun fact I should say. The average person reads somewhere around 300 words a minute, using their eyes.
I listen to information, I don’t use my eyes obviously, because they don’t work at all. So, the average American English speaker will speak 150 words a minute. Now, getting information primarily through my ears and listening to documents and books and things over time, and slowly nudging up the playback speed a little bit and a little bit, and a little bit, over time, I can now listen to somewhere in the 700 to 725 words per minute.
I literally, I listen to documents far faster than I could ever read them, even with “normal sight.” Again, you don’t have to go blind to do that. Some of my friends are fascinated by the idea, trying to do it as well, and they get through audiobooks in half the time and that kind of thing.
Well, the other really great example that you have used, being the CEO of your company, is when people would go around the room and you present an idea and you’d ask for feedback, and people would just nod. You really came into a big “Ah-huh” moment there when you helped people say, “Look, don’t nod.” Can you tell us that story?
Sure. Yeah, that’s a great one. We get all sorts of visual feedback from people. Facial expressions, gestures, that it’s our tendency to try to imbue them with all sorts of meaning. I think the nod is a great example. It’s a really pernicious example.
When I first took over at OEC and built up my leadership team and we would have these meetings. To your point, I would ask a question and, “Do we all agree?” Someone poses an idea, “Do we all agree or disagree?” Then there would just be silence. It would hit me. I’d say, “Folks, are you guys all nodding again?” They would chuckle. “Oh yeah, sorry, we’ll still nodding.” I’d chuckle back and say, “Yeah, I’m still blind so that doesn’t work. Let’s just go around the table and everybody says, just say, ‘Yes, I agree’ so that I can actually hear it.”
You’d think everyone would say, “Yes, I agree” because everyone just nodded, but it never once happened that way. It was instead, “I guess I sort of agree.” Which leads to the question, “Well, I guess I want to know the ways in which you might not agree.” Then, it leads to more and more discussion, so at first, I was wrong. I mistakenly confused this as some awkwardness, some sort of burden brought about by my blindness.
In fact, the awkwardness and the tension was a necessary component of meaningful communication, right? Of being vulnerable, of telling each other what we really thought, of inviting and perpetuating conflict, right? Disagreement.
Yeah.
And all these things that really were necessary requisites to our communicating effectively, and in the end, because my being blind forced us to get there, it wound up being one of the best things that happened to me as a leader, and I think it’s one of the best things that happened to my business.
That’s such a great takeaway for anyone who is in any way, shape, or form, working for a big or small company, in any kind of leadership capacity, is to really not just take the nonverbal cues, right? And really get people to open up and make that a new practice. I thought that was amazing.
Yeah, and for me, what I argue is, obviously you get a lot of information from your eyes, but to the extent you’re getting facial expressions or mannerisms, or gestures that are maybe inconsistent with what your understanding is, it’s great to pay attention to those if, and that’s a big if, you use them to seek more verbal communication, more words, more clarity. When you take them in lieu of words, or a substitute for words is when you get into trouble.
Oh, that’s a great distinction. Well, not only did you come up with a great title, “Eyes Wide Open,” but then you talk about how we can learn to live with our heart wide open. We’ve already talked a little bit about how we can live with our ears wide open. Can you talk about how we can live with our heart wide open?
Yeah. So, at the core of “Eyes Wide Open” is this idea, this awesome power we have, this inescapable responsibility we have, really in every moment of our lives, to choose how we want to live our lives, and who we want to be.
Circumstances, there are obviously circumstances beyond our control that we confront, but how those circumstances manifest themselves in our lives is entirely within our control. It’s our choice. For me, I would argue that to truly make that choice, with awareness and to hold yourself accountable for that choice, to know yourself and to commit to manifesting the version of yourself that you want.
You’ve got to be willing to really open up your heart, open up your heart to be seen, first and foremost, by yourself. You can’t hide from it, and also by others. I grew up a very I say committed uber rationalist. I did not like to talk about things like hearts and love and emotions, and I just was convinced that all of life was rational and logical.
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[Tweet “Learn to live with your heart wide open”]
Man, I was completely wrong. This notion that we can be purely rational is a total myth, and it’s a harmful one. It breeds polarization and bias, and it prevents connection and understanding. We’re creatures of the heart, whether we like it or not.
It’s so true. I really like that, ’cause when you bring your heart into the workplace, not only does your team feel more connected, but then even your clients and your customers do as well. From what I can see, that’s been one of your keys to success, whether you’re an actor, a lawyer, or running your own business. That’s really what I saw is a consistent throughline through your life.
That’s very insightful. I think that that’s true. I think that that’s true.
One of the other things about you, Isaac, is that you have a great metaphor about life being like poker. Can you talk to us about that?
Yeah. So, it extends to all forms of poker but Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em which is a game that I enjoy immensely. There’s this debate in the legal world as to whether it’s a game of skill or a game of luck. Literally whether skill predominates, where the outcome is more than 50% skill or more than 50% luck, and it’s been litigated to major consequences.
To me, it’s astounding, because to me it is so obvious that poker is a game of skill. Properly viewed. Like, if you look at it one particular hand, yeah, maybe it’s a game of luck, and it depends on how the cards are dealt that one hand. If you look at playing poker over thousands of hands, over different sessions against different players, there’s just no questions it’s a game of skill.
So, for me, I love that as a metaphor for luck in our lives. I think that generally, we tend to misperceive luck in a couple of really important ways. First, we think that luck can be categorized as good or bad. Circumstances good or bad, and the truth of the matter is really they’re neither. They are what they are, and it’s up to us to make them good or bad in our lives.
I’ll give you an example. For me, going blind, I am certain of the fact that ultimately I was very lucky to go blind. The experience that I had losing my sight, the insights that I gained were one of the biggest blessings of my life. Who’s to say whether luck is good or bad? The second way is that we tend to think that there’s neat and tidy line that divides circumstances beyond our control from the circumstances that are within our control.
Of course, the truth is a lot more complicated and nuanced, and far more often than we realize, we do exert control over the circumstances we confront.
Well, you also talk about the house always wins in the majority of gambling, and you encouraged all of us to look at our life as if we’re the house, right?
Oh, sure. So, yeah, that’s our cosmic edge. Before you even get into the proper way to look at different events in your life, or how to leverage your luck, how to see yourself empowered to influence and take advantage of your luck and all that kind of stuff. First and foremost what I always think about is this cosmic edge. So me, for example, born to a middle class family in America, parents who loved me and nurtured me, never known hunger, always had shelter, always had access to healthcare, and on and on, and on.
You’re looking in the grand scheme of things, there’s just to me, as clear as day, it’s an objective fact that I am just immensely lucky. You look at the cosmic hand that I’ve been dealt. I think going blind in many ways, one of the biggest impacts it had was just that, to help me realize how immensely lucky I am overall in my life.
For me, to then curse my luck with respect to one particular term of the deal, going blind, or deal that doesn’t go my way, or a tough break or whatever, is to lose sight of that immense cosmic edge. Yeah, the metaphor I like to use is picture the owner, the majority owner and chairman and CEO of some huge casino in Vegas, standing on the casino floor and cursing his luck when a roulette player wins a big take on the spin of the wheel. It’s a ridiculous thing even to imagine, because of course, the house doesn’t gamble on any spin or roll or hand, right?
In aggregate, it has the structure in place that guarantees it’s going to win. The rule is rigged in its favor, and I think for so many of us, who live privileged lives, again, the rules of the world have been rigged in our favor, and to then curse your luck to me is a real shame.
I just think that’s a phenomenal perspective to look at life and reframe everything through that lens. It’s really been helpful. It’s been such an honor to have you on the show and get to hear you firsthand describe your vision and your life, and how you’re making a difference in the world. Now, you also are available if companies want to hire you for keynote speeches. Is that right?
Yep. So, since the TED Talk and writing the book and stuff, I have been doing a lot of corporate speaking and keynotes and whatnot as well. My passion these days really is sharing my “Eyes Wide Open” vision with others, because it’s not about blindness or even disability. It’s about taking control of your reality, mastering the life you want to live.
We’re going to put obviously the link to buy “Eyes Wide Open” in the show notes. If someone wants to follow you on social media, can you give us your Twitter handle or all that good stuff?
Sure. So I mean, if you go to my website, lidsky.com. Everything’s there. My TED Talk’s there, the book’s there, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, et cetera.
We’ll put all of that in the show notes for everybody to go. Isaac, do you have any last thoughts or comments you want to leave us with?
You know, I would just tell folks that whether you realize it or not, whether you like it or not, whether you believe it or not, your life is not happening to you. You are creating it, and you might as well do so with intention and purpose, because you can live the life you want for yourself if you choose to do so.
Great, great. Fantastic. Thanks again, Isaac.
Thank you for having me.
Links Mentioned
- Book: “Eyes Wide Open”
- Website: lidsky.com
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