Your Past Doesn't Matter

Greetings from half way through the cricket World Cup between Australia and India. Not in person, but from my couch and TV. Australia has kept India fairly quiet with some late reverse swing at the end of the innings. The Australian wicket keeper has set a record for catches. Now we need to score at 4.82 per over on a sticky wicket in front of a hostile crowd and a fierce bowling attack.

Okay, the Americans will have left after that opening. Hope the rest of you are well.

A shootout on a Houston freeway caught my attention this week. Also not in person, thankfully. Stunning footage showed a civilian running into the firefight in order to drag a shot officer to safety. This link contains a written report and the video.

The attention-grabbing element of the story is that the rescuer is an ex-prisoner. John Lally has spent time in prison. Twice.

As the title of this newsletter says, your past doesn’t matter when it comes down to whether you can take heroic action today. Houston’s police chief, Troy Finner, said, “People make mistakes”.

Lally’s previous crimes and jail time didn’t restrict him from rushing in to help someone else. In fact, some of his experiences helped him. Lally – who’d once been shot in his leg – knew exactly what Gibson was enduring in that moment. It gave him a chance to make a connection.

“I don’t have to like you”. We don’t help people we like. We help people who need help. A connection helps. A shared experience helps. But we don’t need to like them.

Finally, a quote that struck me relates to another of our training tenets. “In my mind,” Lally said, “I just was on a mission to go grab him.” As Anthony Sadler described to Ari Kohen at a Hero Round Table, when we see ourselves as being on a mission or doing something that is our “job”, we can overcome a lot of obstacles, mental or physical.

And, actually finally, here is another example of someone whose past crimes didn’t stop him acting heroically when the time came. Jabbar Gibson drove a stolen school bus full of flood refugees after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

That’s what I have this week. It’s 11:30pm on a Sunday night and I’ve got at least another two and a half hours of cricket before sleep and work. Wish me luck. Actually, wish Glenn Maxwell luck. With a bit of it, he could win us a sixth World Cup.