The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [107]
Hal was the only person who suffered any major injuries in the accident; the drunk driver, Hal’s girlfriend, and all other drivers involved in the accident were safe.
When emergency services used a Jaws of Life tool to pull the roof back, Hal started spewing blood. It turned out that the car had been keeping him alive—he had such a large hole where his femur had pierced through that the pressure from the door was keeping his blood inside his body, preventing him from bleeding out.
When emergency services pulled Hal out of the car, the blood came out with such fury that he flatlined—his heart stopped beating—making him, by some definitions, clinically dead for the next six minutes; with chest decompressions, they were eventually able to resuscitate him.
Six days later, Hal came out of his coma in the hospital; he had flatlined two more times during that period.
He was twenty at the time of the accident. A C student throughout high school, he had been a student for a year at the College of the Sequoias, a community college in Visalia, in Central California. He left after his first year to go into sales, found he had a knack for it, and within a year was earning six figures at an annualized rate.
At some point in his sales career, he had learned about a concept called “the five-minute rule” from one of his sales mentors. This mentor, a high school dropout and now a successful sales manager, had told Hal: “You’re going to have customers who aren’t going to buy from you. Some might be rude to you or cut your appointment short. You’re going to have days when you don’t reach your goals. And it’s OK to be negative sometimes. But not for more than five minutes. You’ve got to live by the five-minute rule. Bitch, moan, complain, vent, get it out of your system, whatever you’ve got to do. But just for five minutes. Beyond that, there’s no benefit to dwelling on it. Instead, focus 100 percent of your energy on what’s in your control. What can you do now? How can you learn and benefit from the experience? How can you move forward?”
Once he regained consciousness and memory in the hospital, two weeks after the accident, the disfigured Hal remembers calling upon this advice and experience, gained during his sales training, to help him cope with his accident.
“I very quickly came to the realization that I had to accept what had happened to me. And while I felt plenty of negative emotion about the accident before that realization, after I had that thought, my negative feelings around it disappeared almost overnight.
“At one point, unbeknownst to me, my doctors called in my parents—both my physician and my psychologist, who was helping me deal with the trauma. They said to my parents, ‘We’re very concerned with Hal. We believe he’s in denial. This is very common with accident victims that have been through such a horrific accident, and sustained so much damage. They go into a state of denial, in which they can’t face what happened. Every time we see Hal, he’s always laughing and smiling, he’s telling jokes and making us laugh. That’s not normal, not for someone who’s been through what he’s been through. We need you to talk to him and sit down and find out how he’s really feeling. Because until he accepts what’s happened to him, and faces it, the emotional healing can’t begin.’” Hal continued:My dad came in one night, sat next to me, and got real serious. He said, “Hal, I want to talk to you. Turn the TV off, I want your attention. How are you feeling?”
“Uh . . . great, Dad, why?”
“Well, I know you have friends here, you’re laughing, you’re joking, you’re reminiscing,