Dean Furness Wheelchair Athlete Real-Life Story

Dean Furness is a data and analytics professional. He is a husband, a father of three and a basketball coach.

We have been measured almost all of our lives, when we are infants, with our height and our weight, and as we grew it became our speed and our strength. And even in school, there are test scores and today with our salaries and job performance. It seems as if those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers. And I think we should look at that a little differently. That personal average is just that, it’s something very personal and it’s for you, and I think if you focus on that and work to build that, you can really start to accomplish some really amazing things.

Wheelchair athlete Dean Furness says, when you stop comparing yourself to others, you can accomplish great things. After losing the use of his legs in an accident, he discovered a powerful new mindset focused on redefining his personal average that helped him get better little by little.

What I found out is that good and bad really didn’t have a lot of meaning unless I had the context of knowing what my average was. It was really up to me to decide if something was bad or good based on where I was at that point in time, and it was in my control to determine if it really was a bad day.

What I found in those scenarios is the quicker you move on to what’s next, the quicker you can start attacking things. And by moving on to next as fast as possible, you shrink the time you spend in those bad scenarios and it gives more time for the good. And, as a result, the good outweighs the bad, your average increases and that’s just how the math works.

He concludes his talk with these motivational words Take some time and focus on you instead of others, and I bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.

He concludes his talk with these motivational words Take some time and focus on you instead of others, and I bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.

The best advice he offers to others is no matter what kind of challenges they might be facing, never compare yourself with others..

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