Blind Ambition, with Chad E. Foster – Episode 430 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author, professional speaker, and executive coach Chad E. Foster talks about living most of his life outside of his comfort zone after totally losing his sight in college, becoming comfortable with discomfort, how lacking sight made him a better skier and martial artist, taking advantage of your disadvantages, learning to code just to INVENT the software needed for the rest of his job, becoming the first blind graduate of the Harvard Business School Leadership Program, and finding your “true north”.

About Chad:

Although Chad E. Foster lost his eyesight in his early 20’s, that didn’t stop him from becoming an executive for Red Hat, the world’s largest open source software company and securing over $45 Billion in contracts throughout his career.

He is the first blind graduate of the Harvard Business School leadership program and did what Oracle said could not be done; he built a software solution that created job opportunities for hundreds of millions of people. His direct and confident style, combined with a go-for-it inspiring belief system (he is an avid downhill skier… and that’s not a joke), has made him a high-impact speaker for leaders at companies such as Google, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, GE and Microsoft.

An inherited retinal disease robbed Chad E. Foster of his eyesight as a young adult, but it could not take his ambition. He refused to live life on anyone else’s terms. While enrolled at the University of Tennessee, Chad was forced to relearn how to learn without the benefit of eyesight and his grades actually improved.

He made the Dean’s List with straight-A’s and was hired by a Global Fortune 500 consulting firm out of college. In his spare time, with determination, ambition, and drive, he taught himself how to write code in order to program his screen reading software. As a result he did what Oracle said could not be done – building a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solution that created job opportunities for hundreds of millions of people.

Chad’s success soon transcended the technical world and into the business world. He was promoted to direct the financials of multibillion dollar commercial deals in record time, serving as a renowned financial thought leader who also secured over $45 billion in government contracts with industry-leading growth and best-in-class margins despite tightening market conditions. In 2014 the University of Tennessee recognized Chad with the Accomplished Alumni Award.

Chad was the first blind graduate of the Harvard Business School leadership program (PLD), and his classmates were so impacted by his presence, attitude, and contributions that they elected him as their graduating speaker. Chad gave a graduation talk that directly and meaningfully changed lives – the lives of the audience as well as his own. His talk had such an impact on one audience member that he is commissioning an opera inspired by Chad’s life story. Chad is currently the Senior Director of worldwide deal management at Red Hat, the world’s only multibillion dollar open source software company, and continues to shatter traditional notions of what people think is possible.

Learn more at ChadEFoster.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

LISTEN:

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

__________________________________________________________________________

(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Dan Moore:
Hello, everybody, welcome to the Action Catalyst. This is Dan Moore. I’m so excited to be with Chad Foster today. Chad is wonderful to have you on the Action Catalyst. Welcome to the show.

Chad E Foster:
Thank you, Dan, it’s my pleasure to be here.

Dan Moore:
You know, we always enjoy hearing about people’s backstory, because we can look at what you’re doing now you’re an author of a book, you’re the first graduate who has sightless from the Leadership Management Program at Harvard University. You’re a great software developer, you’re a leader of many, many companies, you help the countless people, but the backstory?

Chad E Foster:
Yeah, I think we all talk about how life throws us curveballs and you know, it’s going to throw us all curveballs. And we have all experienced our share of disruption. I started experiencing my disruption at roughly three years old. And it was there, my parents that Tom they had noticed that I was having difficulty seeing and really dark rooms. And so they took me to Duke University Medical Center, where it was there that they learned that that I had with the doctors thought was retinitis pigmentosa, which is an inherited genetic eye condition that gradually causes blindness, it’s really hard to imagine what they were feeling as they were going through that and hearing that, of course, was oblivious to it at three years old. But this particular eye disease is evidently something that’s in my family. But it’s because it’s an autosomal recessive trait, nobody had it. So it was sort of the hidden family eye disease, and only because both my parents are carriers, could I have the potential to be symptomatic, and eventually go blind. And so when I was growing up, I was pretty active. You know, I played sports, I played football and basketball and baseball, but I was constantly learning the limitations of my eyesight. And I would learn those limitations by bouncing off of something bouncing off of a wall or a pole or something that my eyes just didn’t pick up. And as I was losing that that eyesight and it became worse and worse over time, you know, all of the objects around me essentially became my walking cane. And I spent so much time in the hospital there for a period, they questioned both my parents and me in separate rooms, wondering if I had been abused. And the truth of it is I hadn’t been abused. I was just I was an active kid. And I didn’t really let my lack of eyesight keep me from doing what I wanted to do. But the whole process obviously was a psychological journey and emotional journey, learning the limitations of what you can and can’t see. And then finally, when I was roughly 21 years old, at the University of Tennessee, doing my undergraduate work is where all of my eyesight left, that’s when I realized that I was I was losing everything that I had known and seen for my entire life. And we asked kids all the time, what do you want to be when you grow up? And none of them said they want to be a blind first? Well, there you go. That’s exactly what was happening to me. And so I had to sort of rethink what I wanted to be when I grew up and reimagined my hopes and dreams for myself and my future. And so that that was a difficult time. But I think looking back, I think what makes it unique is the fact that I’ve lived a lot of my life outside of my comfort zone. You know, that whole process that I just talked about, was really uncomfortable when you’re young and bouncing off of things physically, that’s uncomfortable when you’re in high school and not able to do things at night that you would like to do socially. That’s uncomfortable when you go completely blind in college, and have to give up your self identity. psychologically, emotionally, that’s uncomfortable, but the thing that I’ll say that that has been more of a gift to me than I would have hazard to guess at that time. You know, it’s helped me to develop a thicker, more resilient mindset, which is why I think I’m with you today. It’s because I’ve had so much discomfort in my life that I’ve gotten comfortable with discomfort.

Dan Moore:
Comfortable with the discomfort.

Chad E Foster:
If you’re never getting uncomfortable, then you never have a chance to grow, right? Where we experience discomfort. That’s when growth happens. If you’re comfortable, you’re complacent. Right? And if you’re complacent, you’re not growing. And if you’re growing, you may as well be dying. And so I think it’s helped me to cultivate a mindset that seeks discomfort, which is why now you know, I go skiing on Black Diamond terrain, and even double black diamond terrain without being able to see Yeah, it was way outside of my comfort zone at first and I certainly didn’t start on a black diamond. But the idea of strapping skis to myself and getting on the side of a steep mountain in Colorado that in and of itself was outside of my comfort zone. But you know, one thing I’ve noticed over my journey is that the more you push your comfort zone, the more things you do that are uncomfortable, you can just slowly watch your comfort zone expand, which is why now like I said, I do that also I practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a martial arts. So I enjoy you know, I enjoy pushing myself and I think that’s one of the things that I really like about both of those hobbies or sports is that they they’re as constant room for growth, which I think is a really important part of life.

Dan Moore:
Wow, that is absolutely incredible. Most of us, even sighted, are scared of black diamonds.

Chad E Foster:
I think that’s probably what gives me an advantage. If I could see it, it might be a little too intimidating, right? You got to take advantage of your disadvantages, but we went skiing and six years into me learning how to ski. So I went blind at roughly 21 years old, I started learning how to ski at 38 years old. And about six years into it, we made such good progress that me and my buddy, who had been guiding me, so he’s skis behind me and tells me which way to go. And we learned how to do this with the professionals out there. We’ve gotten so good at it that we decided, You know what, we’re going to try an expert slope. So we go off, and here we are on this double black diamond, which, if your listeners aren’t familiar with the double black diamond, it’s literally the steepest and scariest slope, right? It’s got all these jagged rocks and big cliffs and passageways that are about eight feet wide. Sounds like the perfect place for a blind guy like me, right? I mean, what did the possibly go wrong? So my buddy and I were standing at the top of the mountain, and we take a picture in front of the warning sign at the top, and he turns to be right before we get ready to release, and he says, You know what, Chan, you should be thankful you can’t see what’s around us right now, because it is absolutely terrifying. But I think while a lot of people are like my buddy, they’re looking at the mountain. And they’re looking at it from top to bottom. And they’re seeing all you know, all these things that are really scary, right? There’s this scary vision of of what could go wrong, or this bold vision of greatness, this huge mountain at 13,000 feet with all these incredible obstacles. But I think what gives me an advantage is that I don’t see any of that. And I’m just focused on the next turn, right, I’m just literally focused on I have to make a left turn, and then a right turn, and then another left turn. So I’m not distracted by all of the terrain and how dizzying it can be looking down hill and seeing maybe 5000 feet of elevation like other people are doing, I just zoom in on that next best action.

Dan Moore:
Seems like you’ve really leaned into not just the remaining four senses, but also the medicines, which is your brain, how you implemented and taught yourself code how you develop technologies for people that are spineless, that’s incredible.

Chad E Foster:
When I first went blind, I was in college, and I had to relearn how to learn. That was a really, it was challenging, but it actually turned out that I was a better blind student and sighted students. So I ended up making straight A’s, you know, my mom went in, and she literally at that time, we didn’t have the the internet had just come out. But it wasn’t like you could go to Amazon and get a Kindle book, or you could get an audio book really easily. So all of my books, all of them, she literally read every single one of them to audio for me, and I listen to them on a tape recorder. And so I listened to all of my books twice, I listened to recorded lectures twice, ended up making straight A’s and making the Dean’s list and went on and got a job at one of the top consulting firms out there. So that all seems really encouraging until I get into the workforce. And I realized that the technology that I needed to use this piece of software that you put on a Windows computer, it’s screen reading technology, it didn’t work with everything out of the box. So you couldn’t just log into a company system and expect it to work with everything. There were some obstacles, depending on how the software developers designed the application. And I learned this pretty quickly. I was working at this top consulting firm in the tech space, and my timesheets, something that’s very important to a consultant here, all my job codes, Project codes, where I need to build myself across different clients that didn’t work with my technology. So literally, you know, two weeks after graduating college and thinking, Alright, I’ve cleared a hurdle, I realized that, you know, the journey was just beginning. And so not really being able to do my job. At that point, I knew that there were a couple of options. Option number one was to have them hire somebody to come in and figure out how to write code to build a bridge between these two software programs. Right. And that would kind of set me up as a liability, they would have to pay somebody 150 250 bucks an hour to come in and do that or option two was and I figured out how to do it myself. And because I was 25 years old, hopefully had a long career in front of me, I thought you know what, I’m better off if I just learn how to do this on my own. That way, instead of being a liability, I can be an asset. And I don’t have to rely on anybody else. So I sat down and started figuring out how to write code so that I can engineer my software without even being able to see my computer screen. I put some some code together that was a hack for me to use it timesheet program that I mentioned, but within a few years I was getting so good at it that I had people seeking me out. I started doing it professionally moonlighting a little bit doing that created a consulting company, and even had a friend of mine from this consulting firm called me few years later, so that was Gosh, that was 2001 When I first started learning how to do that by 2007 friend of mine for This consulting company called me and said they needed some work done for one of their customers. And so I figured out how to write some code and make this CRM system work for one of their clients will come to find out Oracle, only that CRS CRM system and didn’t think it could be done. And I ended up having to get on a call with Oracle, and with the screen reading manufacturer and explained to them, actually, it can be done, I’ve done and here’s my client, he’s up and up and running and successful with it. And, and so yeah, I think a lot of times just hearing somebody say that something can’t be done is enough to kind of prevent you from even trying. But you know, I found that if you just apply yourself relentlessly and dig enough, eventually you can find this solution.

Dan Moore:
That is incredible story as well. Chad, somebody once said, people that say things cannot be done, often find themselves interrupted by someone doing it.

Chad E Foster:
I love that. I’m gonna borrow that.

Dan Moore:
Clearly you’ve done that so well. But talking about the Leadership Program at Harvard, and what that was like you were the first sightless person to graduate from there.

Chad E Foster:
Yeah, so I was working at the time I was leading pricing strategy and solutions, I was a senior director for a technology services company that provided services to the United States federal government, mainly. So we provided services to military to intelligence to civilian and other state agencies as well. Yeah, I was our senior director of pricing strategy and solutions. So my job was to go in on these very large programs, multibillion dollar programs and figure out what is the price point that we need to bid for this basket of services based on all the data that’s there? And so you know, what’s the market look like? What services are they asking for? What’s the going rate for those services? How much are customers willing to pay? What is the competition going to do? And and how does that get influenced by the procurement process? Well, that was my thing. I’ve been doing that for a while it was very good at it. In fact, I’d gotten so good at it that I helped the company, which just with my decisions bring in over $45 billion in contracts. Wow. They were so blown away by it. My boss comes to me says, Chad, what can we do for you, you’ve done so much for the company? What can we do? And for some crazy reason, I said, Send me to Harvard. And for some crazy reason, they said, okay, so they agreed to write a check and send me to HBS. And so yeah, it was there that I became the first blind executive to graduate that leadership program there at HBS. But that was a really important part of my career for a lot of reasons. You know, first of which you’re learning and growing with not only the professors, but so many fantastic minds who, who go there, you know, young minds, great leaders, great human beings, the people you’re learning from, are not just the professors. Sure, you learn a lot from the Harvard professors, but you’d learn just as much from the students there. And learning how to navigate and manage through so many complex situations where it’s not, you know, it’s not a math problem. You know, it there’s so many shades of grey when it comes to the real world of management, and really exploring that with those those fellow classmates was was fantastic. But the other real fantastic thing that I learned was how to find my true north. And I was learning there with Bill George. And for those of you not familiar with Bill George, he’s the former president and chairman of Medtronic, which is one of the world’s largest medical supply companies. He took them from a market capitalization of $1 billion to $60 billion. So he’s fantastic transformational leader. He retired after 10 years at the CEO position at Medtronic decided to go and work for Harvard became a senior fellow there. And I’m sitting in his class, and he’s teaching this class on authentic leadership, but it’s all about how to discover your True North. And it really boils down to how can you find meaning in your life by examining things trials and tribulations in your life, and really threading that with things that you have a talent for? And so that you can combine purpose and passion and talent into a profession. And a lot of my classmates were grappling with this when mine just sort of reached up and smacked me in the face. And it occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything with my story. I just always kind of taken it for granted, if you will, a lot of people would come up to me from time to time and say, hey, you know, you’re inspiring. I appreciate what you do. And I didn’t really know how to react to that, because I didn’t really take myself. I didn’t see myself that way. You know, I didn’t see what I what I was doing as anything other than inspirational. I was just doing what I had to do, you know, my everyday reality was just that it was every day it was regular. For me. I was doing what I had to do to get by and, and sure I had some obstacles that were maybe a little bit different than what other people face but I just never really saw myself that way and, and so that moment I started to really reconsider that. And then there I was, I was elected to speak at our graduation. And that really was a crucial moment for me an Ignite moment actually, where I saw firsthand how much I could help people if I just tried to actually do that. So I gave a short little 12 minute talk. And people were really blown away by it. And I’ll never forget one gentleman in particular, one of my classmates comes up to me afterwards. And I’m not a real soft and fuzzy person, but this particular gentleman come to find out he had lost his daughter the year before to cancer. Wow, something I had said. And, you know, I don’t know exactly what it was that I said that resonated. But something I’d said resonated and it gave him hope. And it changed me and it moved me and it inspired me to kind of move beyond myself and, and to look more deeply at how I can have impact. And the really interesting thing that I learned from that is it showed me how experiences like that helping people like that can make going blind worth it, you know, because all of a sudden, now I’m taking this, this beautiful gift of blindness that was disguised in some really ugly wrapping paper. And I’m unwrapping it and I’m sharing those gifts and those lessons with the world. And I never really looked at it like that, before that.

Dan Moore:
I’m blown away, Chad, you know, plenty of people in your situation are facing different obstacles would have just let it control them, they would have felt sorry for themselves and said, I just can’t do stuff. What kind of advice could you give to somebody that may be He’s, um, they’ve had a legitimate issue, but they’re caught up and feeling sorry for themselves instead of moving forward moving off of it?

Chad E Foster:
Well, you know, I feel sorry for myself too, for a little while. But then I realized, you know, what, I’m 20 something years old, if I’m gonna feel sorry for myself, for the rest of my life. Well, that’s a whole lot of sorry, I just can’t do it. I couldn’t stomach the thought of feeling sorry for myself that much. It was just it was too overwhelming. And so one of the things I thought about is I did what I like to call and I didn’t think of it in these clear terms back then. But now I call it the future you exercise. years from now, when you look back on your life? How are you going to feel if you don’t get what you want out of your life? Is it okay? To make an excuse? And to feel sorry for yourself? In the moment when years from now, if you look back? If you know you didn’t get what you wanted out of your life? Or is it better to hold yourself accountable so that you can make the decisions and live your best life and really move towards your dreams and your goals? And so I decided at that moment, I looked forward in my life. You know, when I’m if I’m so fortunate to live to 70 something years old, and I look back on my life, which decision can future Chad live with? Is it sitting around and feeling sorry for myself and not even trying? Or is it failing in pursuit of my wildest dreams? You know, I don’t think I’m going to accomplish everything I want. But I want to know whether or not I can, who knows, right? We could have lived our wildest dreams, we could have achieved our most daring goals. But if we don’t even try, then the regret really is not even knowing what could have been possible. That to me, was the fear that I allowed to drive me. You know, anytime in life when there’s a fear, there’s a counter fear. I’ve accepted that first job out of college, I was initially really scared when I was moving to Atlanta. I thought, Here I am, I’ve got to figure out, how am I going to get to the office, I’ve got to learn the bus and the train system, I can’t see. I don’t have family or friends in the area. It’s just me and my guide dog, I just went blind a year and a half earlier, I’ve got to learn how to get to the airport, I’ve got to learn how to travel across the country. I’ve got to learn to get to different hotels and client sites and learn how to write code and do billable work. And all of these challenges. Like they were even something as simple as just getting my groceries, you know, we didn’t have a delivery service back then. And we didn’t have smartphones. So all of these things were incredibly intimidating. And I was looking at it my family and friends would ask me like, hey, Chad, are you excited? And I lied to them? I told them Yeah, I was excited. But the truth is, I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. But the thing I was more scared of than anything else was living my life with regrets.

Dan Moore:
We all have a future self in the future self still look back and say well done, or why did you one of the sayings in our company is that the person we’re going to someday be we’re now becoming.

Chad E Foster:
You’re absolutely right. And that the net of it all, every single person listening to this podcast, without exception will become the stories that they tell themselves about themselves. You will become your story I will become mine story. One of the most important lessons if any of us can learn is how to tell themselves the right stories. Now, look, the fact of the matter is I went blonde and when I was In college, okay, that’s a fact. Now there are a couple of different stories that I could tell myself about that. One story is Chad look you wouldn’t blonde because you’ve got terrible look poor you are an alternative story to that would be Chad, you actually went blind, because you’re one of the very few people on planet Earth, who has the strength and the toughness to overcome that, and use it to help other people. Now, technically, both of these stories can be true. But one of these stories, the first one paints me as a victim. But the second story actually takes my disability, my misfortune and reframes it into my strength. It’s a Jedi mind trick that we can use to it’s called cognitive reframing. But it really is about taking a set of circumstances that we can’t control and learning how to make those circumstances work for us. Instead of against us, all of a sudden, my blindness that happened to me because I’m mentally strong enough which that prepares me to deal with all of the other curveballs that life is going to throw at me. So if you can figure out how to tell yourself the right stories, then you can get better outcomes in your life. Because at the end of our lives, all of us will become the stories that we tell ourselves.

Dan Moore:
Woohoo. Now, just a question. Have you just given us a summary of your book Blind Ambition?

Chad E Foster:
That’s a core message of it. That is a core message of it. Certainly, there’s, there’s a lot more in there. You know, when I get on stage, I’ve got 55 minutes when I in the book, I’ve got 55,000 words, there’s a lot more detail to it. But that is one of my most core messages and themes from blind ambition, the book and blind ambition, my talk, it really does get down to, you know, how do you see yourself? What narrative Do you have playing in your mind? And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s the meaning we attach to circumstances, what’s the meaning we’re attaching to those circumstances, the facts are way less significant than the stories that we choose to tell ourselves about those facts, because our stories are either going to keep us trapped, or they’re going to help us bounce back. It’s one of the two.

Dan Moore:
But we’re really grateful for you. The message that you’ve just shared with me in particular, and all of our listeners is that it’s more than inspiring, gets a kick in the head. It’s a wake up that says we’ve got gifts, we’ve got abilities, what we can look at what we don’t have a look at what we do have, and we can move forward and look for chances to help the world. That’s exactly what you’ve done and continue to do.

Chad E Foster:
You know, when you can assign meaning to the circumstances that that give you purpose and give you a brighter future that really is where you can move towards acceptance. You know, I talk about visualizing greatness and sometimes unpalatable circumstances, right. If you can visualize greatness, in circumstances that you didn’t really want. Like for me, how can I make blind look good. And I know that sounds a little paradoxical, making blind look good. But the reality of it is, if I could never visualize how I could make blind look good, the odds of me moving towards acceptance, and deep down in my heart, and bracing and even thriving in those circumstances, we’re next to zero. But if I could at least paint a big bold vision of how I can make blind look good, no matter how hard it is to get there, at least that can give me something to work towards. And then all of a sudden, I can start looking at things inside my sphere of influence things I can control, whether it’s writing a book, or learning how to give a talk, or creating a message or leading a company, all of those things are possible. But if you have that vision of greatness, that doesn’t ignore things that you don’t want in your life, you can’t ignore things that you can’t change it, you’ve got to, you’ve got to factor those into your vision. But having that bold vision can motivate you to do the hard work to get there to to learn how to write a book or learn how to you know, meet a publisher or give a talk to a big audience or any of those things. None of that it’s easy, but if you have the right motivation, it’s possible.

Dan Moore:
And with that, we’re going to have to let you go Chad, this is fantastic. And speaking about makeup blonde look good. You really rockin the Morpheus look today. So thank you so much for sharing and for being who you are.

Chad E Foster:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.