026: Kyle Maynard: 2004 SP Best Athlete Award for Disability, On Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and Living Life With No Excuses

 

Being born with no arms and legs never stopped Kyle Maynard from becoming a competitive football player, a champion wrestler and a summiteer of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Join Kyle’s journey as he almost gave up half way, but thanks to his family, coaches and mentors, kept living his life with no excuses. Never stop thinking forward on what can be possible and what you can achieve through hard work and positivity.

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It’s Mark Pattison back again with another phenomenal episode of Finding Your Summit, and I don’t throw that word around a lot but this individual is special. His name is Kyle Maynard. I was on Aconcagua down in Argentina climbing this crazy mountain, about 21,000 feet, and all of the sudden I see this guy crawling up the mountain and I didn’t know what was going at me. I’m sitting on a rock, taking a breather like, “Can I keep going?” He literally crawls next to me. This guy, Kyle, was born with no arms or legs, congenital amputee it’s called. Essentially at the elbow and at the kneecap, that’s where it ends. He is taking on these amazing challenges. He has been Oprah. He’s got two ESPYs for Athlete of the Year. He climbed Kilimanjaro. Talk about absolute inspiration.

We walked through this journey and he has got this whole mantra on life about no excuses; no excuses to go do things. If we all took that to heart, we’d just be better people. We wouldn’t sit around complaining. Look at the guy next to you, just an inspiration. I told him this as I was looking up his resume and I was doing some research on him, I was like, “I haven’t done anything compared to what this guy has done.”

He is just constantly forward thinking about possibilities and that’s the thing that inspires me and why this episode was so much fun to do. Phenomenal it is, phenomenal describes him. As always, please go in and rate and review on iTunes, Finding Your Summit. Just continued to pile up the downloads. People are so driven to hear about adversity because we all have it. There’s nothing special I’m doing, it’s just the people are coming on and sharing their stories and we can all identify with these different things. On that note, let’s get after this episode and have a chat with Kyle.

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Kyle Maynard: 2004 SP Best Athlete Award for Disability, On Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and Living Life With No Excuses

This is an epic episode of Finding Your Summit. If there are some asterisks I was going to put on this one, it would be something like super or amazing or awesomeness. There are a whole lot of words. The reason why I say that is because this particular gentleman, Kyle Maynard, is a guy who as I was literally sitting at about 21,000 feet on this rock, I was tired. Half our group had bailed out; we started with twelve and we were down to six at that point in time. All of the sudden, there is this dude literally crawling up the mountain. This is one of the world’s highest mountains, almost 23,000 feet. This guy comes crawling past me and I’m looking at him and he is like, “What’s up dude?” I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing. For people who don’t know, you are born without any arm and legs. You’ve just had this amazing journey of accomplishment.

I was doing my research on you and I haven’t done jack compared to what you’ve done seriously. I’m just so inspired and so grateful that you came on the show. It’s such a gift for me that you decided to come and talk to us. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I was definitely having some flashbacks of sitting on that rock when you were describing it. It’s pretty wild.

Why don’t we just quickly paint the picture visually of the way you were born and then we’ll get into this literally a laundry list of accomplishment that you’ve been able to do.

Just so people can have a visual idea, basically my arms end right at elbow and my legs end at the knee. It’s been that way since I was born. I never really know it any other way. I think in many regards it makes it significantly easier having only known that way. Mom and dad didn’t really know I was going to be born with a disability, the ultrasound technology was a lot different. I think they just made that critical decision early on that they were going to focus on trying to treat me as normal as possible. Not focused on just the disability, everything that went wrong with it.

In my research, I was looking at a lot of videos because you’ve had a lot of content. You’ve got a special story and this whole mindset about no excuses. It seemed like your father was more the driver of like, “My kid has got this situation but I’m not going to give him the way out. He is going to be like everybody else,” and you were always treated in that way in your family and your friends, right?

Yes. I think there is a good balance between both my mom and dad. My dad’s instincts were definitely to be more of the force for independence. Forcing me to try to figure out how to go and do things on my own and not really have to be reliant on massive adaptations or prosthetics, things like that. My mom, she wanted it to be an easier path. I think it was a good balance between the two worlds there.

No matter who you are, it takes a village. Certainly, it sounds like your dad was a little bit more on the tough love part of it but love was anchored. That relationship and your mom, she is like any mother, just very nurturing and wanting the best for her kids. I saw these videos of you when you were a little kid running around and you’re doing everything else everybody else was doing with crayons. I saw you on, I don’t know how young you were, it looked like seven or eight, you had a football uniform on and you’re out there literally playing nose tackle for some Little League team.

Athletically, that’s where it all started was just bringing a flyer home from school and telling my mom that I wanted to play and convincing her. I knew my dad would be the easier one to convince. He is more like the dreamer too and my mom was a little bit pragmatic. It was interesting to think about their different personality types and how that played a factor. Basically just convincing mom to call the football coach and just see what he said and came out to the tryouts and ran the bear crawl sprint as fast as I could. When I was at home, I just ran around down on all fours, so it’s exactly what I did at the football field and just jumped out on my chair and ran with the other kids. I chose number eight to wear in my jersey because I figured it was a good quarterback number and I figured after my performance at the tryouts, they’re definitely going to make me the quarterback. Those were some amazing times.

Really the cool thing there too, I think the coaching staff that I had, in particular the head coach for the Youth League, Tom Schie, he had to do something that the more I think about it is pretty remarkable. The fact that he had to basically lobby votes for me to be able to play and be able to participate. It was against a seven-member Board and he convinced four people that I should have the chance to be able to do it. When at that time, short of a couple of practices, there was very little physical evidence as to whether or not I could do it, whether or not it would be safe for me to do it, all that.

[Tweet “There are coaches and mentors that were the spark plug that propelled us to do great things. “]

For all of this, there are coaches and mentors in life that were that spark plug that propelled us to do great things or possibilities or were leading with the torch. In your case, it sounds like it was your dad and your mother that were certainly leaders in that category, also you had some coaches along the way that helped you pave the way. It must have been an amazing mindset. I saw some videos where you played nose guard so you go in and you tackle, people at their knees, they go down, it’s starting to build that confidence that this is possible, right?

Yes. I think upon the first play that I took, it’s funny, practice scrimmage game, we weren’t even wearing pads yet. I was playing nose guard, the center, he went to go and stop it in between his legs and just stood straight up. He didn’t know how to block me so I used that chance to just dive under his legs and mess the quarterback up so bad. We were not even wearing pads yet but I took my helmet and rammed it in the quarterback’s legs and knocked him over and first play got that sacked. It was such a big confidence boost and changer. It was an absolute game changer for me.

That’s why I think a lot about the education that comes with sports outside of just the camaraderie aspects of things, there’s a deeper learning of ourselves that goes on with sports or goes on inside of a mountain. I think that’s a lot more of that physical utility of it that we don’t really talk about enough. It’s hard to quantify.

It’s finding your summit, it’s not literally about the summit. It’s metaphorical. So many of us have different things that we’re trying to achieve but along that path, it’s not so much of the destination but it’s the journey. In that journey, I looked back and I was fortunate to be on the winning side many times and catch the last second touchdown. All the time that I spent with my teammates and in the locker room and being taught life lessons by my coaches, those are the nuggets that have propelled me forward to try to accomplish these things. I agree with what you’re saying.

The thing that’s cool about this too is that as this relates for football, that’s so much of who I became because that was the path that I led. Since you were able to do that and now you’re watching NFL games or college games or high school games or whatever games you’re watching, you can literally understand and feel what that was like because you put on the helmet, you had the shoulder pads on and you played that position and you’re part of the team. It’s really cool that you were able to live through that.

I look back on that period of time in my life too. That was really one of the harder periods that I’ve ever had to deal with. It was becoming more self-aware about the disability. Nine to ten years old really was when I was beginning to ask a lot of those bigger questions and what the rest of my life is going to look like. It’s perfect timing to be able to go in and play and develop that first dose of finding the summit, finding a purpose, finding that challenge that’s going to go and be in another spot. Some of the lessons I talk about now if I’m giving a speech or telling my story on this, I think it comes back to that first year playing football, just making that tackle and how differently life showed up after that.

The kids were getting bigger and stronger and taller and everything else so you had to rechannel, and by the way, that happens to all of us. No matter if you have arms or legs, we all grow a certain height and we all have to rechannel. Some are better in other sports or maybe some artistic endeavor that they are after, playing an instrument or something. It happens to all of us, but for you it sounded like you went in and rechanneled that towards wrestling. Now you’re moving on from football, you’re still a young kid but now you’re moving into more middle or high school. When did you pick up the whole wrestling thing?

It was sixth through eighth grade I played football and then it was also sixth grade that I started wrestling and then continued that on through high school. The rechanneling, refocusing, we became a little bit more towards high school when I was in senior year especially really zeroed in on that goal of wrestling in the nationals and what you’ve got to do. That was a pretty amazing experience.

It just started from my dad basically tricking me into telling me it’s going to be just like the pro-wrestlers. I was a big fan of the Hulk Hogans in the world and people like that. I had a completely different idea of what wrestling was inside of my head than what I was actually getting into. I showed up to practice at first day and realized it’s totally different than I was expecting but it was fun. It was awesome even though that first year I stopped a lot. I lost every single match for a year and a half and did not want to come back and continue doing it.

Who pushed you to keep coming back?

It was a lot of back and forth both my parents. That first year, they see me quit in the middle of the season and did not want to come back and do it again that seventh grade season but they convinced me to.

I started playing football when I was in fourth grade. The first year, we were in the city championship, we lost it. It went from there and it went for three years in a row. I was the guy, I was running around and a lot of touchdowns and I was running back. Then I moved up, as you’re getting older, into a different league and a different coach. The first new coach I’d been exposed to in three years and I was in my fourth year going into this and he benched me. He just didn’t think I could play football. I was just blown away. It was the hardest thing but the best thing that ever happened to me.

One of the things, just like you, that my dad had told me back then is, “If you want to quit, you’re going to quit but you’re not going to quit during the season,” which is when I wanted to quit. I made it through that season. I’ve got to play a little bit at the end, then the summer came through, then I forgot about it all, then there was a new coach and I was like, “All right, I’ll go.” I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if I would have quit. The same thing with you. 

It is wild to think about. I have no idea how definitely things would have turned out but I know that we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.

Were you working out with weights in terms of you getting stronger? Now we’re talking about your senior year where you’re really starting to excel in wrestling. How does that all work? Did you do that and how does it work?

I think a lot of sports are like this but I think wrestling especially is a sport where you benefit greatly from just time on the mat and everybody gets better as long as you put in the work and you’re on the mat day in and day out. That was a lot of it, just putting in the extra work. My coach in wrestling, Coach Ramos, one those amazing mentors, he would go and get down on his side knees and tuck his arms into his sleeves trying to figure out moves I could go and do from my perspective.

My senior year, I had established enough of the game plan of this is how I do it, where to take down, what I do on top, what I do on the bottom. I had built that strategy out enough. At that point I was just getting stronger and I was definitely doing okay in that department. I would strap chains and a cuff and chain around my arm and do a modified butterfly press. In my peak, I did 120 pounds on each arm, 240, did that 23 times in one set. I was wrestling at 103 pounds, 105 pounds but then going up against guys that has definitely had that strength advantage and then became that understanding to be beyond that of whether or not I was unfairly advantaged in the sport.

To put that in perspective, I was very fortunate to be invited to the NFL Combines back in the days. Essentially, they take the top 330 and players, invite them to some place. In my day, it was Arizona State and now they do it at Indianapolis. Everybody convenes: the agents, the owners, the coaches, all these players. One of the things you have to do is the bench press and it’s 225 pounds and how many times can you rep that out. We’re talking about with you, 240, 23 times. I think I did 225 maybe 26 times or something. It’s a great feat that you pulled off just to put that on NFL caliber. I was one of the stronger ones at that Combine in those days. Another huge compliment to you.

How did it play out that senior year for you at the end of the day in terms of your wrestling? You mentioned maybe it was a year before or a couple of years when you first started out, you lost every single match. Mentally, you’ve got to get over that hump and now you’re starting to get some momentum.

[Tweet “Work as hard as you can, let the advantages cultivate themselves. “]

A lot of that was just doing that debate of whether I was unfairly advantaged or not. To me, it was work as hard as you can, let the advantages cultivate themselves. I have no problem with cultivating advantages that happen through work and being disciplined. Cruising into that senior year then I had beaten a lot of other surrounding state champions, state placers and that made a pretty huge difference within that year confidence-wise. It ended up on my senior year I’d beat most people on but messed up my state tournament. It ended up due to the performance I had that year, I got invited to the nationals and was one match away from being in All American in high school. It’s a big juxtaposition from where it started.

Is it in 2004 then that you got the ESPY Best Athlete Award for Disability? Is that right?

Yes.

Did you actually go to the ceremony?

Yes. That was amazing. At eighteen years old, I get to hang out with Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, all these guys. It was wild.

On my bucket list, I want to go to the ESPYs. I love that show and you’ve done it twice, right?

Yes. I was going to say we did for climbing Kilimanjaro in 2012. ESPN did an awesome job putting together a story for that one.

Let’s talk about that. You finished your senior year, good things are happening to you. You are getting more and more confident about this is a life of really no limits for you. You talked about no excuses. You decided to attend the University of Georgia. How long were you there? You’ve got to a point where you saw your purpose better served by helping others. Is that right?

Yes. It’s wild to look back on now but there’s a ton of opportunity that was coming my way in terms of getting to have the story come out more publicly after the wrestling. I had HBO Real Sports do a story, a number of other media outlets and a front page story in USA Today, all of that stuff and an interview with Larry King. The opportunity to start speaking, to start traveling, to write a book, launch that book, all those things started to happen at once. I went from being a full-time college student studying journalism at UGA to then a full-time business traveler at nineteen years old. It was a pretty wild shift.

At what point did you set your sights on shifting? You’re not wrestling anymore, and now you’re looking at new athletic endeavors that you can take on. Of all the things that you could possibly do on the planet, you say, “I’m going to take on Kilimanjaro.”

It’s funny now. It used to be a huge portion of what I’d speak about, a big part of my life. There’s even a two year build up to do an MMA Fight, all the stuff leading up to that. There’s always been that connection to a physical thing or challenge for me because it’s the easiest to access to how to make a really deeper experience.

The Kilimanjaro thing came about after doing a CrossFit competition. I opened a CrossFit gym in Atlanta. One of the early competitions that we had, you had to do a 1000-meter row on a rowing machine and then sprint up Stone Mountain, this 900-foot granite rock in Atlanta. I tore up all the skin on my arms doing it, rolling sleeves to protect my arms and my feet and I tore my pants up. When I got at the top, I was like, “This is beautiful.” I told my friend that night that I want to do Kilimanjaro and she said, “You’re freaking crazy,” with a different f-word. That’s true. It’s how it happened. It was like, “Yes, I know this is nuts but we can figure this out.”

Let’s go back to where we started. I’m at 21,000 feet and here you come crawling past me and I’m sitting there on a rock and I’m like, “If he is going, there’s no way I’m not going.” That inspired me to get up my ass and start climbing again. What I saw is you had, it almost looked like tire treads or something that you had strapped to your arms and legs that enabled you to motor up this crazy mountain. There’s a better explanation for that but that’s what I saw. They looked like tire treads.

It’s funny, the prototype that we created was like literally tire treads but the gear that I was using there when you saw me was we’ve taken carbon fiber. They did a carbon fiber cast around my arms and my feet and there was a Vibram hiking shoe sole attached to that. It’s actually like a shoe sole that’s attached to the gear. When we started, I was taking bath towels and duct tape and duct taping the bath towels under my arms and taking the bike tires and cutting those into squares to create some traction. That’s exactly how it started.

I’ve done Kilimanjaro twice now. I was down there last February with Chris Long of the Eagles now, he was with the Patriots last year, and there were six ex-NFL guys who are doing a fundraiser for Waterboys which is building water wells for the people of the Maasai Tribe. We also had four marines, some of them were Green Berets but two of them were amputees.

Kirstie Ennis is somebody who is on that. She became the first above the knee amputee, and she basically hopped up to the top. It was crazy. It was insane. The amount of grit that she put together to do that was insane. We did this even though it’s slower on actual summit day because we’re going straight up, from your standpoint, as you know it’s incredibly rocky. It’s almost like you’re on the moon or something through a lot of that trek to get yourself in position to make that. How many days did it take you to do the whole thing?

Kilimanjaro is ten to the summit. Aconcagua, I think it was our 17th day.

Just to put that in perspective, the rest of us did Kilimanjaro this last year, I think we did it in six days and we are hiking and walking, and you’re crawling. It’s a whole different thing. It’s crazy. ESPN, they did a piece on you when you went down there?

Yes. I did a deal with them beforehand, which is reassuring that somebody is going to get behind sharing the story and we wanted to have a bigger message, being in particular to the veteran community. We’re struck by, at the time I think it was eighteen or so veterans a day that were committing suicide. Now those numbers have crept all the way up to 22, 23 in recent years. I wanted to be able to go and show that I don’t know what it’s like to lose an arm or a leg or both but I do know what it’s like to live without. I know that we are all fully capable of living extraordinary lives regardless of the circumstances or passing conditions that happen to us.

The ESPN thing, they’re going to give us some portion of the budget for the climb ahead of time and that was enough to be able to go and put us over edge to be able to have enough to go and take the chance to do it. We know too that if we didn’t come back with a compelling story, if we didn’t come back with something that they’re going to use, then we wouldn’t see anything beyond that. It really was enough seed money to go and take this group. When I’m hiking, when I’m going, it’s a different pace. It’s a whole different kind of expedition. Sometimes it ends up being pricier and all those things. We’ve got to figure out those details. Just like wrestling, I think a huge part of mountaineering, the fight is leading up to get to the climb, to get to the event. In wrestling, you cut weight, you’re miserable, you’re training and you’re hurt. But then you just to get to that event, that’s the buy-in that everybody has to make.

Did you struggle with altitude sickness on Kilimanjaro or Aconcagua?

I definitely struggled, yes, for sure. I don’t know of anybody that does it just completely effortlessly. The hardest parts I would say was Kilimanjaro is just really long.

So was Aconcagua. That’s a long way.

Aconcagua is as well but it’s different. We also took our time and spaced out a lot better. I took a much smaller group so we could go and take our time. If we needed potentially 25 days instead of seventeen, we would have been prepared for that. That was a big factor. Aconcagua too, the terrain, the loose rock and the scree, that was the most maddening part. Most people can use their trekking poles to stab into the rock and take in a big step. For me, it’s not going to happen. Sometimes if you’re sliding back, you move up four or five feet and then just fight to get to the top of that and then slide six feet down. That was non-stop in Aconcagua.

Has there been any consideration for you to put prosthetics on your legs or your arms? How do you feel about that?

I used to use it when I was a kid. They can almost slow me down a lot more than they help. The technology has gotten way better. Oddly enough, the way my hips are shaped, it’s almost better and conducive to bear crawling.

I’m going to ask a really ignorant question because I don’t know the answer. How do you drive?

I just grab the steering wheel with my arms and I have lifted pedals like an extension that comes up from the brake that I hit with my left foot. Then an extension comes up on the right side for the gas that I hit with the other foot.

It’s like a custom car?

Yes, you can pop in the car and drive it. You just put your legs underneath the pedals and you’ll be good to go.

What was it like to be on Oprah?

It was pretty wild. The coolest part of that whole thing I think was watching my sisters. They are with me and they are huge Oprah fans and having Oprah sit next to my baby sister, McKenzie, and compliment her on her shoes, seeing my sister light up that Oprah complimented her shoes. That was the biggest deal ever. That was really cool.

She seems like she is the exact same person you see on TV; very warm, engaging, present person.

I think over the years too, even in the event that you go and hear stories about people and how they act at certain times or whatever, I try to not take in any one thing in particular, look at more of the aggregate whole of how somebody’s reputation is. Someone like Oprah, for instance, what I didn’t realize is that when she was taping, she would tape three shows in a day. There does have to be a strict calculated precision of marching orders from one guest to the next and all that and having that system down. If you’re going to do three shows in a day in front of a completely different live studio audience each time, that’s a lot.

I started this podcast three or four months ago and it just taken off. I’m so grateful for that and I’ve tried to do two back-to-back in one day and they’re just too draining for me. By the time I do all these research and I get really into the moment of talking to people like you and what you’ve been able to accomplish, it’s just a lot. That’s why she is Oprah and I’m where I’m at. It’s all good. It’s certainly a talent that she has and had and that’s why she is popular and everybody loves her.

Let’s talk about your book. The True Story Of A Congenital Amputee Who Became A Champion Of Wrestling And In Life, No Excuses. Is that your tagline?

Yeah. It’s pretty cored in my central philosophies I think. The book was an amazing reflection of where I was at at nineteen years old but it’s also something that came out when I was nineteen. I’m 31 now. As human beings, a snapshot of who we are in time there is not always where we’re going to be and that would boring. It’s definitely time for another book. I’ve got to not make excuses myself to get out there and write it.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a book. I’ve talked to many other people who have done books. I’m going down this certain path and I’d love to do that. I just need to take that same attitude, no excuses and go make it happen. One thing that you said, which is interesting and I do agree with you, is when we’re talking about finding your summit, there isn’t just one summit and you are right in that. When I was in my 20’s, I was trying to play in the NFL in college and that was my summit at that time. That’s what I was trying to accomplish.

In my 30’s, I started my businesses and I got married and had kids. Every one of those decades, it had seemed like there’s been a different period where I’m trying to get to a certain point. Now, I’m this whole other where the metaphorical point of finding your summit actually is me climbing mountains and trying to accomplish that in which you have to go through in all the preparations you have to make to make those things happen. I love that. When do you think this next book will be coming? Have you started that or is this just in your head and you know you should do it?

My main focus right now is video and film, photography. It’s my next big mountain to focus on. It’s been a creative outlet that I’ve had a freaking blast doing. Hopefully, I’m going to be doing more and more of that and just quintupling down on video and trying to go and connect and build a deeper audience with people through that.

When you talk about video, tell me exactly what you’re talking about? Like one-minute to three-minute how-tos? What are you thinking?

More of a full-blown vlog style video. Something a little bit more personal, intimate, not just caught up in making it overly produced or motivational. More authentic to give people a glimpse in different things. Just running around, learning how to go and shoot. I’ve got a Sony camera system setup right now, just all that stuff, editing stuff together, color grading. It’s a different world.

What is on the horizon for you athletically? You have another mountain in the future or what are you thinking?

I’ve got a few for sure. Obviously, as you know with the Seven Summits and all that, those big trips are few and far between. There’s a bunch of other smaller different experiences that I want to take on. For instance, I’m not really sure whether we will do it here in the US or somewhere else but one of my buddies is finishing up around ten, eleven years with the SEAL team on the East Coast. He wants to see if he can bear crawl a mountain with me.

Let me give you one that you 100% should do and it would be your third mountain of the seven and that’s Mount Kosciuszko down in Australia. That would be a day or two for you, maybe three. It’s very attainable and the terrain compared to those other two mountains is 100% better and beautiful. The people in Australia are so warm and friendly. If you’ve done those other two, it’s 100% slam dunk you could do this one.

That would be awesome, that’s for sure.

Where can people find you?

I’d say the easiest bet would be Facebook, Instagram. I’ve gone dark on social media the last little bit just because I have been so focused on the video stuff. Hopefully, they can find me there as well in the not too distant future.

I do want to end by saying that we had our little chat at 21,000 feet somewhere, I was on the rock, you were actually climbing. Then we had another great chat there with your crew at the lower camp. We had summited and now you had summited and now we’re at 16,000 feet or something. We had gone down and remember you guys were hanging out your tent and I came over and we had a great chat for an hour or so. I was just blown away by you, your optimism. I mentioned it takes a village and in this case it takes a team and the other guys that were climbing with you, there were three other guys that helped you with this, those guys were rock stars too.

We had three Americans other than me, four total and then two Argentineans, Guillermo and Manny.

They were just great. I have been on five of the mountains and I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’ve done without the proper guides and other teammates. It just seemed like the guys that you had there, everybody was super cool. Everybody was super committed to your cause and just seemed like the type of guys you want to hang out with and have a beer.

[Tweet “If you’re going to do business with someone, make sure it’s someone you’d want to get a beer with.”]

It’s usually a litmus test for I would say any endeavor. I heard it as an advice given by our friend, Tim Ferriss. He said, “If you’re going to do business with anybody, make sure they’re the type of person that you’d want to get a beer with.” If you’re going to climb a mountain with somebody, I think of that statement times a thousand. It’s life and you’re going to be spending a lot of time with those people so you better enjoy it.

It has been an absolute joy to have you on my pod, Finding Your Summit. Certainly, you’ve just had a long list of amazing accomplishments and it just seems like we share a kindred spirit a little bit. I literally feel like I haven’t done anything and my stuff is all out in the front. I’ve got so many things that I want to do and accomplish and you’re just so forward thinking and you’re not thinking about, “Poor me because I don’t have this or that.” You’re just like, “Look at all the opportunity that I have,” and you’re imparting that knowledge of no excuses to the planet. I think that I know I’m a better person because I know you and I know other people have benefited from your spirit and your inspiration about the things that you want to get accomplished, so thank you.

I love it and I love the vibe that you’re spreading out to the world too. You do that in our own unique way.

Have great day. I can’t wait to continue to follow your journey.

Likewise. Talk to you soon.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Kyle Maynard
• No Excuses
• Kyle’s Facebook
• Kyle’s Instagram