Supersurvivors

by David B Feldman

  This sureness in people’s ability to control their own destinies can come across as a lack of humility. Goldsmith cautions that it’s not narcissism, however, even though it may look like it from a distance. “It’s actually self-confidence. The single strongest thread of commonality between mega-successful business executives is self-confidence. In my experience, zero CEOs have low self-confidence, and no top executives from multibillion-dollar corporations have low self-confidence, either.”

  In supersurvivors, too, we see that illusions of control may be a key to extraordinary accomplishments. The perception of control permits people to take all kinds of risks. It even informs what types of risks they take. Dropping everything to riskily pursue rock stardom, Asha Mevlana needed such illusions. So did Alan Lock, as he strove to become the first blind person to row across the Atlantic Ocean. From this perspective, most supersurvivors we interviewed strongly believed that they had both the right and the personal capability to do what they’d done. Just as Goldsmith observed of mega-rich CEOs, positive illusions seem to increase supersurvivors’ chances of success. Without the basic belief that they have control over their destinies despite ample evidence to the contrary, these people might not have become supersurvivors at all.

  According to Goldsmith, successful people believe that they have the internal capacity to make desirable things happen. “People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats,” he explains. “To put it simply—they try more different things.”

  It’s reasonable to question what seems to be a contradiction here. In chapter 2 we told you that positive thinking can be dangerous, and now it seems we’re saying just the opposite. For this reason, it’s important to contrast these productive positive illusions of control with the denial-based positive thinking we previously argued could be damaging. In her Journal of Personality article, Shelly Taylor directly addresses this issue. “On the surface, positive illusions may look like mind-numbing bromides that get people through trying situations by permitting them to ignore the objective evidence and to maintain a fictional belief akin to denial that all will be well if one takes no action and waits things out,” she writes. But whereas denial-based positive thinking is a distortion of the situation, positive illusions are slightly inflated views of oneself and one’s ability to control one’s future. Denying or distorting a bad situation may be comforting in the short term, but it’s potentially harmful in the long run because it will be almost impossible to solve a problem unless you first admit you have one. In contrast, having an especially strong belief in one’s personal capabilities, even if that belief is somewhat illusory, probably helps you to solve problems. Casey didn’t expect a car to hit him that night, but it did. Yet he still believed he was in control of his own destiny—even if he couldn’t control the things that happened to him, he could certainly control what he did with those events through his own actions.

  What we’re talking about here is the same kind of grounded hope we advocate in chapter 2, but now we’re getting more specific. A useful, if somewhat simplistic, mathematical formula might be: a realistic view of the situation + a strong view of one’s ability to control one’s destiny through one’s efforts = grounded hope. Dozens of studies have shown that hope predicts all kinds of positive outcomes, including success in athletics, better college grades, better mental and physical health, a greater sense of meaning in life, and even better psychotherapy outcomes.

  In one study, David Feldman (one of the authors of this book), along with his colleagues Kevin Rand and Kristin Kahle-Wrobleski, asked more than a hundred and fifty college students at the beginning of the spring semester to name seven goals they wanted to achieve by the end of the academic year. Not surprisingly, students’ aspirations varied widely, encompassing everything from “get a 3.0 GPA” and “get rid of my love handles” to “raise an additional $10,000 for our United Nations Association chapter” and “dedicate more time in my life to God to understand my path on earth.” The study set out to determine if it was possible to predict who would make the most progress toward accomplishing their goals by the end of the semester, a challenging task without a crystal ball. Three months later, as the end of the semester neared, students were invited back to report on their progress. On average, students with higher hope at the beginning of the semester were further along on all seven goals than those with lower hope.

  This may be because the high-hope students put more effort into pursuing their goals and tried more things, particularly when faced with setbacks. Hopeful thinkers tend to use more problem-focused coping, such as gathering information about a problem, seeking practical assistance from others, and taking action. Arizona State University researchers Natalie Eggum, Julie Sallquist, and Nancy Eisenberg provided evidence for this. With the help of translators, they interviewed fifty-two adolescents who lived in rural areas near Tororo, Uganda, to investigate the connection between hopeful thinking and coping with adversity. It’s not hard to find adversity in Uganda, where things such as poverty, violence, and the loss of parents to AIDS are parts of kids’ daily lives. In fact, at an average age of thirteen, 21 percent of the kids had already lost a parent, 63 percent didn’t have enough food to eat, and 56 percent had witnessed violence. For many of the children, problems came in groups. “It was very difficult when my father died. I thought I was going to even leave school,” one boy explained. “No way we can get even food. Even our mummy did not have work or a way to get a job.” According to the results, the kids who tested higher in hope tended to practice higher levels of a variety of coping strategies, but most relevant, they reported engaging in proactive, problem-oriented coping. In contrast to dwelling on their admittedly dire situations, they reported doing things to comfort themselves and improve their lives. As some of the children explained, “Instead of being annoyed, I can go to my books and be happy”; “I study and if I get good marks, then I feel better”; and “If I have planted crops, I check on them.”

  It is in this tendency toward doing that grounded hope may help create a better existence for those who practice it. If other people were faced with the daily traumas and tragedies of these Ugandan youth, they might consider it more rational to give up. The situation seems reminiscent of the myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to push a boulder again and again up a mountain, only to see it roll back down to the bottom. What’s the use?

  Perhaps these Ugandan adolescents know something we don’t. Maybe they’re teaching us a lesson about the utility of believing that, in the face of all contrary evidence, something better is possible. In fact, such hope seems to mitigate the negative effects of trauma. When University of South Carolina psychologist Kerrie Glass and her colleagues interviewed 228 adult survivors of Hurricane Katrina, they found that people with higher levels of hope had lower levels of distress and fewer symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Similarly, when David Berendes, Francis Keefe, and their colleagues at Duke University Medical Center surveyed 51 patients with lung cancer, they found that people with greater levels of hope tended to have less depression and fewer physical symptoms such as pain, fatigue, and cough, regardless of the severity of their cancers.

  The stories of supersurvivors vary dramatically from person to person, and yet we see time and again their sense of grounded hope. They seem to come to a place where they are willing to try more things, and to try different things, than they ever have before. The catalyst was a trauma, but an important part of the method for supersurviving is an unusual assessment of risk driven by an abiding belief that, through their own personal efforts, they control their own destinies. Even though their belief in their personal control may seem unwarranted to casual observers, in an interesting sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, it seems to create the conditions for a better future.

  Four years after the accident that robbed Casey of his limb and nearly his life, he stood once again on the side of a highway. Gray clouds and rain added peril to Interstate 101’s car-choked morni
ng commute. Dressed in reflective gear, Casey tightened the buckles of his skates and secured the suspension system that latched his artificial leg to his body. He stomped the wheels of his right in-line skate on the pavement to be sure it was securely attached to his prosthesis. The rain brought oils to the surface of the concrete, slicking the ground. He’d need to factor this into the journey. After the first mile, he was able to tune out the click-clack click-clack of his strides. The stunt was supposed to be skating three thousand miles from San Diego to Washington DC, but the real stunt was not getting squashed by cars, staying hydrated, treating sun exposure, and making it across the country in one piece.

  Modern prosthetic limbs are near-miraculous devices that often afford people a life without significant impediment or compromise. Made of carbon-fiber pylon with a suspension systems of straps, belts, sleeves, and airtight seals to keep them attached, they’ve gotten lighter, more advanced, and more controllable over the years.

  Casey was fitted with his first artificial leg almost immediately after the accident. Just months earlier, he had been an ambitious athlete with a full ride to Nevada’s Wassuck College to play basketball. Now he’d lost that scholarship and had transferred to the University of California–Santa Barbara. To help pay for school, he took a job as a coat checker at a nightclub. The regular bouncer didn’t show up one night, so Casey offered to step in.

  Most people in his position might not have volunteered for the job, believing that a one-legged bouncer would not exactly strike fear into the hearts of would-be troublemakers. But Casey is not most people. Unfortunately, the owner of the club refused to give him the job. “[He] questioned my ability to do it. From the moment I lost my leg, I was told what I couldn’t do,” Casey says with indignation in his voice. “On the one hand, sure, to try and pick up where I left off before the accident was idealistic but impossible. But I was still the same core person, and this was discrimination plain and simple.”

  But what could Casey do about it? Driven by the same over-the-top belief in his ability to control his life through his own efforts, Casey was certain that there were things he could do that people with two legs couldn’t or simply wouldn’t. “I’m going to do one thing that will show everyone in the world what I am capable of, and no one will ever tell me again what I can or can’t do,” he decided. It would have to be something outrageous and very different from anything he’d ever done before. Exactly what that big and bold thing would be remained elusive until happenstance stepped in, a chance encounter that Casey would masterfully parlay into opportunity.

  In 1987 he was on a flight to Miami when he found himself seated next to another amputee. “I couldn’t believe it. He was the exact same size as me, only he was missing his left leg, not his right,” Casey says. The guy was part of the U.S. ski team, and Rollerblade was sponsoring him. Of course, with one leg, he used only one skate, and now he offered the unused one to Casey. The in-line skate would later come in handy for getting across UC Santa Barbara’s sprawling thousand-acre campus, a beautiful yet time-consuming terrain for Casey.

  The peculiar sight of a one-legged student in-line skating across university grounds quickly caught the attention of a girl on the school’s stunt skating demo team. “Why aren’t you on two skates?” she asked.

  “The problem was my prosthetic leg wouldn’t stay in a skate very well,” Casey remembers. “This very nice girl made a call and got me a matching skate. I took it and cut it up, pulled out the weights, and made it lighter. My foot didn’t exactly fit, so I customized the prosthesis.” At age twenty-four, he joined that charitable girl on Team Rollerblade, an aggressive in-line skating stunt troupe.

  It was here, as Casey’s confidence grew, that he found the idea that would once and for all convince people what he was capable of. “I met a guy named Joel Bott at a charity skating event. He had the crazy idea to skate across the country,” Casey says. “Along the way, we’d raise awareness and funds for a limb bank for amputee kids, who could use reconditioned prostheses other kids had outgrown.” The idea took flight, and in the spring of 1993, Joel and Casey launched the Blade Across America tour. “I was confident at this point that I’d wind up back on top,” he says, and his belief in his own ability to affect the situation only grew as he secured sponsors and private donors for his cross-country trip.

  The Blade Across America tour started with great fanfare and media attention from Mission Beach, San Diego. From here, the duo skated the dusky desert highway from California into the low, reddish mountains of the Southwest in fifty-mile stretches. A lot can happen in fifty miles. Deserts turn into cities, cities into subdivisions. Every new place has its own vibrant character. Casey skated past seemingly endless stretches of mini-malls and billboards, gas stations, housing projects, tract homes, steel buildings, factories, schools, graveyards, and churches. Pavement turned to gravel, to sand, to mud and tar. Ruddy skies transitioned to gray, deep blues, rich purples, tungsten, and obsidian.

  Beginning in New Mexico, the two set up ramps and presented three stunt shows a night at Veterans Affairs hospitals, school parking lots, and skate shops, performing tricks, jumping barriers, and hurling themselves over reporters, cars, and spectators to the pleasure of the grandstands. The crowds responded with cheers as Casey contorted his body in the air, turned, and gained speed, displaying complete control and mastery of his skill.

  Of course, he wasn’t always masterful.

  At a skate show in Texas, an exhausted Casey was ad-libbing a stunt, missed the ramp with one skate, and hit the audience member he was jumping over. Later, in Richmond, Virginia, as he was jumping over a Cadillac, his prosthetic leg came off in midflight, causing him to crash to the ground, separate his shoulder, and tear up the right side of his body. His injuries were serious enough that his doctor told him to stop skating.

  Undeterred, in the morning, Casey squeezed into his skates and harnesses, ate a power bar, and returned to the road. With one arm now in a sling, he skated on to Mount Vernon in ninety-five-degree heat, just a bit wobblier than the day before.

  Applying the formula for grounded hope, it’s easy to see what kept Casey going. Although he had a brutally realistic understanding of the trials and tribulations of his journey and of the difficulties of making it on a prosthetic leg, his belief in his ability, through his own efforts, to make the best of that journey never wavered. With this combination of a realistic understanding of the situation and confidence in your ability to face it, there’s always a reasons to keep trying to solve whatever difficulties life throws at you.

  The Blade Across America tour left Casey with a nickname among peers and fans. “People called me a ‘super-cripple.’ It’s a funny name, but it’s sort of true,” he concedes. The problem, as critics have pointed out, is that focusing on the exceptional triumphs of a few capable disabled people, or “super-cripples,” obscures the day-to-day needs of the disabled majority. “But I liked to think I was doing some good with this stunt,” Casey says. “It started out as a way to prove I could do anything on one leg as well, if not better, than someone with two legs, but it became something else in the end.” In June of 1993, Casey addressed Congress and met with Senator Ted Kennedy to draw media attention to the needs of amputee children whose families couldn’t afford to replace their prostheses as their kids grew. Perhaps his greatest stunt yet, Casey’s three-thousand-mile journey in eighty-nine days led to the development of the National Limb Bank. Casey was also responsible for raising tens of thousands of dollars for education, research, and rehabilitation.

  Back home in Santa Barbara, he continued to skate professionally for a couple of years. He took acting classes on the side, got his Screen Actors Guild card, and auditioned for some small roles in film and commercials. In 1991 agents started calling. There was even some buzz about turning Casey’s story into a movie. Though such a film never materialized, he liked Hollywood. From stunt skater to stuntman was a natural leap. He trained to do high falls, stair tumbles, and fight scen
es; to throw a punch, sell a shot, handle weapons, and master a sword. “I know I take life in my own hands every time I do a stunt,” he says. “But you have the knack or you don’t. Most people would never say, ‘I could be a stuntman,’ so they don’t try. But I just knew I could do it and be the best at it. I was relentless at pursuing it.”

  We’ve heard these types of survivor stories before. Unexpected tragedy greets an unassuming guy, destroys his life, and he struggles to regain a normal, reasonably well-adjusted existence, ultimately becoming more than he ever dreamed possible. Casey has now appeared in more than fifty films and television series. He’s currently working with the biggest action film directors, including Paul Verhoeven, Sam Raimi, and Steven Spielberg.

  But looking at Casey Pieretti through the prism of positive illusions and the hope they afford, we know that there’s much more to his narrative than his casual metamorphosis might lead people to believe. Casey is, after all, only human. He would be a successful stuntman only if he were capable of reaching his goals based on realistic limitations. But the science shows that this goal pursuit process is at least partly dependent on a sense of control and self-confidence. Unfortunately, the nature of trauma is that it so easily rips these away. It strips the soul of its strength and overtakes our perception of safety, replacing it with fear. Casey’s overly positive faith in his ability to control his environment seems to have protected him from this eventuality, leading him through two traumas to supersurvivorship.