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How to unleash high performance by paying attention
Give your people an identity to live up to.
Even at just 39, Brad Snyder has already lived quite a full life. I’ll spare you the remarkable details (they’re just a Wikipedia click away anyway), except for two.
- On September 11, 2011, Brad was permanently blinded when he stepped on a buried IED in Afghanistan while trying to help victims of a first IED that had exploded minutes before.
- On September 11, 2012, Brad stood on top of the podium at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London, having just won the gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle. One year later. To the day.
There’s much more. If Hollywood made a movie about Brad Snyder’s life, you wouldn’t believe it. The serendipities are just way too Forrest Gump to be true. And yet they are.
A few years prior to his first Paralympic Games, Brad was in his Junior year at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Life was coming at him fast. He was taking an over-full course load in naval architecture, was on the academy’s swim team, and was trying to maintain some semblance of sanity.
Something had to give, and Brad decided that swimming was that thing. “I was very emotional about giving up swimming,” he explains, “because it was my whole identity at that…
