One of the themes of these calls was expressed by Mahatma Gandhi when he said, The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Scott Hamilton has served millions by showing us what is possible when we are truly committed. Today, he continues his service through his books and his work on behalf of those suffering from cancer.
The most recognized male figure-skating star in the world, Scott Hamilton has won 70 titles, awards and honors, including an Emmy Award nomination, induction into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame, and a privileged member of the World’s Figure Skating Hall of Fame. He captured the attention of the world 25 years ago with his Olympic gold-medal performances in Sarajevo, and has since shared his love and enthusiasm for the sport as a commentator, performer, and bestselling author.
Most recently, Scott released his inspirational book, The Great Eight, and signed up to be part of The Celebrity Apprentice, which premieres March 1, 2009.
Conducting the interview is Vishen Lakhiani, co-founder of MindValley Labs, one of the world’s leading online publishers and marketers in the field of personal development with a following of over 250,000 people. A former Silicon Valley executive, Vishen is one of the world’s top authorities on social media marketing and is a sought-after expert on taking an author’s work online. You can learn more about Vishen and MindValley at www.finerminds.com.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: Hi, Scott. It is wonderful to be talking to you.
SCOTT HAMILTON: Thank you. Thank you very much.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: I’ve gone through your bio on Wikipedia, which is open and out there for anyone to see. The stuff you’ve gone through in life is pretty remarkable and inspiring, what you’ve been able to achieve despite what you’ve had to go through. Let’s get started, Scott. This series is called Passions of Real Life Legends. Will you tell us the role your passions, the things that matter to you, have played in your life?
SCOTT HAMILTON: I think that it’s been instrumental in every decision, every level of public acceptance, everything I’ve been through. It all comes out of a true passion to regain my physical health, which has happened on many occasions, but also to dive into something and follow it through as best I possibly can. Skating gave me that vehicle. Without skating, even without some of the illnesses I’ve had through my life, I don’t know where I would be.
It’s funny, when you’re fighting for acceptance when you’re young, you can get into whatever activities you get into. It’s amazing how it becomes not only what you are but who you are. Fighting back from illness when your physical health is challenged, it’s amazing what awakens in you. Passions, desires, focus, determination and strength help you navigate all that.
Without those instances in my life of having to fight back for my physical health and having found skating the way I did-it became everything in my life-I don’t know who I’d be right now or where I’d be.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: I know it’s amazing what you’re able to achieve. You really took what would have been a terrible situation for most people, spun it around and turned it into something good. You’re saying it pushed you to become even more successful. You became a championship skater and an Olympic gold-medal winner, but not by the route most people would expect. Would you tell us your story and how you got your start?
SCOTT HAMILTON: I was adopted by two amazing people, both school teachers living in northwestern Ohio. At around age four, I stopped growing. Because I was adopted, there was no access to family medical history, and they didn’t know if this was something normal or something really abnormal. I think they figured it was pretty abnormal when the growth did not happen over several months.
It became very apparent that they needed to intervene with some sort of medical help. I was in and out of hospitals all over the place trying to find out what was wrong with me. It was dead end after dead end. We were at the Children’s Hospital at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the doctor there said, If things don’t change in the next several months, I don’t see this continuing this much longer, meaning I probably wouldn’t survive. Getting that kind of diagnosis, your parents say, Okay. Good luck with your medical career. We’ll be going somewhere else now.
We ended up at the Children’s Hospital in Boston with Doctor Harry Schwachman, who had been pretty amazing finding different things. Schwachman-Diamond syndrome was one of the illnesses he was able to find and name, and we felt that might have been what I was suffering from. When he couldn’t find what was causing my lack of growth, he recommended that all the medications, restrictive diets, and everything I was on just be stopped and to let me live a normal life to see what would happen. He said, At this point, we have nothing to lose.
Once we got back to Bowling Green, Ohio, where I was growing up, our family doctor recommended that due to my parents’ exhaustion, they send me to a local skating rink with his children to give my parents some time to recuperate and get away from the high levels of stress and maintenance I was bringing to the family every day. It was to the skating rink I found I really liked going; I really liked interacting with other kids, and I really liked the fact that I’d found something I could do as well or as poorly as other kids in my class.
Being the smallest one in my class, I was always the last one picked for a lot of the team sports. I was underdeveloped, undersized, and I really wasn’t physically strong enough to compete with other kids in team sports. Finding skating, for me, was gigantic. For the first time in my life I had self-esteem. They noticed I started having some muscle development and started to absorb my food properly.
My distended stomach started to rescind. I had a lung condition that started to improve due to the cool, moist air in the rink. My health started turning around. It was an extraordinary kind of miracle. I’d found the right level of physical activity that helped me get through my childhood illness, and I started to become healthy again. That’s how I found skating, and that’s kind of the reason I stuck with it.
I think my parents, due to the years I was in and out of hospitals, realized that if something was giving me health, they were going to keep it pretty close; they weren’t going to let it get out of their sight, so skating became my life.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: That’s amazing how that one decision to take up skating completely transformed your life.
SCOTT HAMILTON: It was an amazing set of circumstances. If Dr. Sam Cooper hadn’t pushed through this funding proposal at Bowling Green State University to have a hockey team and skating classes, they never would have built the skating rink. Then what? Then where would I be? One decision, one man, one person, one here, one there; it’s amazing the effect that people have on other people.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: Now that you’ve reached the pinnacle of success in skating, what are you up to? What does one do after they’ve achieved the heights you’ve achieved?
SCOTT HAMILTON: I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up! I’ve decided because I have two small children now that I don’t want to grow up. I want to hang out with them and watch their cartoons and read their books and play. I’ve found with a lot of my life experiences, with the variety and diversity of my failings and successes, with my shortcomings and overcoming those, that I can share these experiences with people.
I can try to help them and motivate them through their challenges and struggles. This book, The Great Eight, is a big part of what’s next in my life. I’ve had the skating career that was beyond my wildest dreams and expectations. I never would have asked to have a career like I had in skating. Now it’s time to branch out, experience, and to investigate new things. It seems like everything I’ve been through has been meant to be shared.
If I can help people, if I can minister to people in some way, shape or form to let them know that it’s okay to go through this, that it’s okay, and that you’re going to have struggles, stresses, anxieties and unhappiness in your life-but it’s all investment in the greater good, which is deciding to turn that around and be engaged, happy, active, positive, and a force in your community-then that’s what I’m meant to do. This book is a first step in that direction.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: Right. I’m looking at the book on Amazon right now, at this lovely quote, which a customer wrote. He said, This is not a book about ice skating. It’s a book about skating through life; and even though you might not come out unscratched, you can have hope.
SCOTT HAMILTON: Well said. You’re definitely going to come out scratched. We all do. I used skating a lot as a backdrop, a foundation, a metaphor at times; but it was all about letting people know that a lot of things I’ve experienced-through anecdotes and perspectives-are meant to be applicable on a broad scale. It’s beyond falling and getting up. It’s beyond repairing relationships.
It’s beyond getting through the most difficult times in your life. It touches on everything. I’ve lost jobs. I’ve had to deal with very little to try to accomplish a lot, and I feel that a lot of the lessons I’ve learned, people can look at as an example. They can say, Okay, my issues are manageable. My problems are not insurmountable. I’m just trying to get that out there. I like what the person wrote on Amazon.
I think they got the entire gist of the book, that I use skating and a lot of my skating experiences as the launching pad, but generally everything that’s in there is easily adaptable to everyone’s lives.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: What inspired you to write the book? What made you decide to share these ideas with the rest of the world?
SCOTT HAMILTON: In what I call my odd hobby of collecting life-threatening illnesses, I was speaking to a Pituitary Network Association conference in the desert, where they have a yearly meeting. They wanted me to come and speak to other brain-tumor survivors. I was diagnosed with a pituitary brain tumor in 2004. After giving the speech, another brain-tumor survivor-a guy named Ken Baker-came up to me.
He said, I just can’t believe, with everything you’ve been through and with all the stuff you’ve endured, that you claim to be happier than you’ve ever been in your life. I said, Yes, I am. Without those experiences, I don’t know if I could have attained this level of happiness. I’m really thrilled with my life and where it is right now. He said, This is something I think we need to share. We need to work together to get this out to people. I think it’s a message people need to hear now more than ever.
I said, Ken, books are hard. I’ve got a young family. He said, No, we’ll take our time, and we’ll do this right. Over the next year-and-a-half, we talked and we honed our message. We packaged it. We had a lot of people chime in and give their two cents, and sometimes more than two cents. We came up with The Great Eight. It was taking a lot of those experiences and putting them into a form that people could really adapt to their lives, perspectives and points of view that they could really utilize to better live their lives effectively.
I was inspired to do it by a friend who heard me speak at a conference. I’m so happy I did. I don’t know how many people will get their hands on this book, and I’m not sure how broadly or widely it will be accepted or if it will make a bestseller list of whatever. I’m just thinking if I’m meant to do this, if it gets in the right set of hands, the right pair of hands, then it was worth all the effort and all the planning.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: You are an enigma. You’ve gone through so much difficulty, yet you’re joyously happy. You’re an Olympian. That simply seems to defy belief. I wanted to ask you this. How did you get through the challenges of being diagnosed with testicular cancer and a brain tumor?
SCOTT HAMILTON: They were at completely different points in my life, and it’s hard to say which one was more difficult. One was physically more difficult; the other one was emotionally and mentally more difficult. I was on the road with Stars on Ice in 1997, 50 cities into a 60-city tour, and I was really struggling physically to stand up straight. People would come to the shows and say, You’re skating all right, but you look exhausted. What’s going on?
I said, I guess I’ve been living this life too hard for too long, being on the road and working 11 months a year, traveling and trying to build this career. I just felt like maybe my life choices had taken me to a place where I was really starting to affect my health. Not being able to stand up straight all the way was another symptom. I had a lot of abdominal pain, and I thought maybe I had worked myself into an ulcer.
After the 50 cities, with 10 left, I decided to go into an emergency room just to have a doctor give me a prescription for whatever they give people with ulcers. Then I could press on and get through my tour. After two sets of scans and a lot of questions, the doctor came to me and said, We seem to have found a mass. I’m five-foot-nothing; mass has never been used to describe anything about me! He said, It’s either benign, malignant, or something else.
Having lost my mother to cancer in 1977, I realized I was just diagnosed with cancer. It’s devastating. The fear that washes over you is profound. It’s almost suffocating. I’m doing the math of pain, suffering, being debilitated, and losing everything I’d built. I had an instant sense of self-pity; but beyond self-pity, I think the rug has been pulled out from under you, and you’re just trying to gasp for air at that point.
I’ll tell people-and I’ve shared this with a lot of other cancer patients and survivors who totally agree-that you don’t know if it’s five minutes, five seconds or a nanosecond, but that fear is completely replaced with a sense of power and determination. You become this instant warrior; you take ownership of it and think, Okay, yes. Let’s move forward. Let’s fight this thing with everything I’ve got. It’s an amazing sense of power you get out of this devastating diagnosis.
That was my cancer, and then there was the going through it. I heard a quote recently that’s in the book, Courage is fear that has said its prayers, and I totally believe that. No one is instantly, blindly courageous. Courage comes out of fear, and it’s a natural emotion. The courage part of it comes out, I think in many respects, of a lack of choice. You either fight this thing or nothing; you fight this thing. Going through the chemotherapy was difficult, but it was fascinating at the same time.
I got to round three and I wanted to quit. I just didn’t like the way life had turned so quickly for me, but I realized it was the cancer losing and trying to make me give up, to let it gain its foothold again. With that mentality, point of view and knowledge, I fought back. I said, I’m going through the fourth round of chemotherapy. I can do this. I will do this. Comparing chemotherapy to a marathon, I hit the tape with my chest out right on schedule.
I was able to navigate and endure all the different aspects of chemotherapy. I was really proud of myself for being able to do that. Then I had two wait six weeks before they were able to go in and do the big surgery, which ended up being 38 staples down my abdomen to make sure the cancer was completely gone. After that surgery and its recovery, it was time to get back to life and my career. That was my focus at that time.
With the brain tumor, it was completely different. I figured I’d paid my life-illness dues by having cancer and going through chemotherapy. I was vigilant in keeping track of my health and practicing what I preach when I tell men, Women are better at this than men. Men, get out there and stay in touch with what’s going on with your bodies. If you don’t, something can really take hold. If you get to it soon, you might be able to nip it in the bud.
If you let it really get in there and do its mischief, you’ve got a big struggle ahead of you. Keep in touch and be vigilant with your health. While I was practicing what I preached, I knew I was feeling different. I went to my Cleveland Clinic doctor. I made an appointment. I said, I’ve got my scans. Everything’s fine. We’re going to go through this. The testicular thing is behind us now. It’s secure, but I’m feeling odd.
They tested my blood and found a lack of testosterone, which they felt was because I’d had testicular cancer. My remaining testicle would probably… it was over, basically. They figured they could just treat me topically for testosterone since my body wasn’t producing it on its own anymore, and then I could get back to life in a matter of weeks. It would be fine, and I’d feel 100% again. I really wasn’t satisfied with that diagnosis.
I felt it was too easy, too simple. I kept pressing and I kept pressing. Finally, when I said, My peripheral vision has changed, they said, Let’s get a head scan, and they found I had a pituitary brain tumor. The issues there were different because I was just married a year-and-a-half, almost two years, before, and we had a young son. I didn’t really want to be leaving my family; and if I was able to survive this, I certainly didn’t want to be a burden to my young family.
I was scared to death. How do I tell my wife that I’m going through yet another medical nightmare? My son was playing on the floor with the phone when they arrived in Cleveland. I was doing my cancer benefit that weekend. I said, This afternoon I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Tracie took my hands in hers, bowed her head, and started to pray. It was powerful.
It was the most amazing thing I think I’d felt, from that sense of hopelessness about how to tell my young family to her taking charge and just going straight to the Being that could help us the most. It was a life-changing moment for me. It really gave me the strength and that foundation of determination. I knew I had the right support to be able to face that illness and to evolve out of that like I did my cancer.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: What a story! Your book is called The Great Eight: How to Be Happy (Even When You Have Every Reason to Be Miserable). If anyone can make a statement like that, you’re probably right up there, but is it really possible for someone to be happy when everything in their life seems to be going so wrong?
SCOTT HAMILTON: It’s odd. Again, I tried to write this from my experiences. I’ve lived through a lot of it. I was the shortest kid in my class. I took all the bullying; I took all the beatings; I took all the lack of social acceptance. It was hard to get a date. I was the littlest one in my class and a male figure skater. Come on! Who’s going to go out with a male figure skater besides another skater?
It was all these things-the illnesses, the setbacks, the failures, and the injuries. There are so many temptations to roll over and just let it run its course. However, we all have that ability to look at our lives-and I feel very strongly about this-as a gift. It is a gift and it is a test. We need to pass this test, and a big part of it is: What’s in my way? What is my obstacle? What is holding me back?
What do I need to do to navigate this? What do I need to do to do it, to get around it, and accept it for what it is and press on? I’ve met so many people through my life who have had what most people would consider beyond an obstacle to overcome. There was one boy I met through this college scholarship program I used to judge for who was burned over 85% of his body. He went through more surgeries than you can count.
He was completely disfigured. He’d burned off his ears, his nose, his hands, his fingers. He didn’t have fingers, but he had hands. He was president of his junior class in high school. How are you the most popular kid in school when most people would think, Oh, no! I’m so disfigured I don’t want to be in front of people? This was one of the most beautiful and engaging people I’d ever met in my life, and I was completely impacted by that.
That, for most people, is their absolute worst nightmare, and he turned it into a dream come true. I thought, If he can do that, so can I. There was a girl I met through this same scholarship program who was hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed from the waist down. She’d been a student athlete, and when she came out of the hospital, the first thing she did was to start a ThinkFirst program in her high school, to take ownership and say, No one else has to go through what I’ve gone through, and I’m going to impact people’s lives.
When I see these people, I’m inspired by them. I felt that, maybe, through my life experiences of failures to successes, of trying to rise above physical limitations and social limitations, illness and everything else, if I can put that out there for people, maybe I can inspire them like these people inspired me. I felt, I can handle anything. If they can handle that, I can handle what I’m going through. I own it; it’s my problem. It’s my situation, and I need to find a way to get through this.
I have found a way to get through pretty much everything in my life. It’s a multifaceted point of view. It’s not just ‘this’; it’s that this is part of it, this is part of it, and this is part of it. For this publication, it counted to eight.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: Your book draws on your experience as a championship figure skater. Do these principles of skating really have any relevance to people living lives in the non-skating world, in the real world?
SCOTT HAMILTON: I think so. We all learned to walk. My first steps were wobbly like everyone else’s. My one-year-old is learning to walk now. He falls down and gets up, falls down and gets up, falls down and gets up. That’s a lot of it; in life we’re going to fall down a lot. We just have to keep getting up. So much of it is about commitment and repetition. It’s not about hard work, sacrifice, and all these words that kind of scare people away.
It’s about if you want to take a new direction in your life, if you want to take on new perspectives, not just something like a switch that you turn on or off. It takes time. Using the skating comparisons of repetition, commitment, and getting up, those, I think, have a broad application to anyone. It’s an easy visual. It’s something I think a lot of people can relate to. We all slip. We all do things, whether it’s a decision we make that we regret later on, or it’s just a failure that we have to live with.
We all go through that, all of us. Part of living our best lives is to find a way to accept our faults and accept our shortcomings, in a way, but also to do everything we can do rise above them. I think the skating was a nice foundation, a nice platform, to use a lot of those examples from because I was able to describe them in a way that was user-friendly.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: Right. You talk about falling, getting up, and landing that first jump.
SCOTT HAMILTON: Yes, that’s a big part of it. When I started skating, leaving the ice at all was something that just didn’t interest me. Actually, it did; I wanted to do it, but it was kind of a frightening proposition. All of a sudden, I thought, I can do that. Then you realize, Maybe I can rotate a little bit, so then you’re going from little bunny hops to waltz jumps, which are half-revolution jumps, to getting into salchows and toe loops.
Wow! I was learning all these new words, I was starting to get a whole turn around in the air, and I was landing backwards on one foot. Wow! This is pretty cool. Maybe I can learn the next jump, and then the next jump. It’s kind of a feeding process where you learn the basics and then you press on. A big comparison to life in the figure eight is that a lot of what we need to do in our lives to take the next step forward or to change is to do things that may seem tedious.
You don’t really want to go through these initial steps to get to the prize, the bigger reward. It’s like scales on the piano, like learning to walk, or learning a different trade or skill. You start at the beginning and you go from there. For me, compulsory figures were that. I want to jump, I want to spin, I want to entertain, I want to get out in front of people and do all those athletic things.
However, without the compulsory figures I wouldn’t have had the control or the fundamental understanding of edges, balance and everything else in order to be able to do the really fun stuff. A lot of that concept is that some things may not seem like they’re too much fun, or they might seem a little boring or tedious in the beginning, but once you start to apply these principles on a consistent level and just get your footing, it takes on its own attraction.
It’s like, Wow! I got this far. Maybe I can go a little bit further and a little bit further. The backdrop of compulsory figures as being the scales on the piano, the rudiments on the drums, or a lot of these basic skills just comes into play in the bigger picture of commitment, repetition, starting off slowly, and building your strength and your balance.
VISHEN LAKHIANI: You draw on the story of Kristi Yamaguchi in your book. Could you share that story with us?
SCOTT HAMILTON: Yes. Kristy and I toured together with Stars on Ice for 10 years. I was always blown away by …
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For more information about Scott Hamilton and his work, please go to http://www.clevelandclinic.org/cancer/scottcares/
