Life is hard for you these days?  

Try these two situations on for size. Then, rethink the adjective “hard.” 

Bram Cohen has Asperger’s Disease. (Some may have read the wonderful book, The Curious Incident of the Dog That Died in the Night, about a boy with Asperger’s who solves a mystery, using his skill at making lists). Some psychologists view Asperger’s as a mild form of autism. According to Susan Berfield, writing in her blog in Business Week, Asperger’s is:

a condition that keeps him rooted in the world of objects and patterns, puzzles and computers, but leaves him floating, disoriented, in the everyday swirl of human interactions.

According to Berfield,  Cohen had an unhappy childhood. “I was picked on a lot,” he says. “There was something obviously wrong with me. But it wasn’t acknowledged until I was much older that something had always been off-kilter. Were I to have to redo high school, I would just drop out immediately.” He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo for one miserable year and then left. 

After miserable experiences working with startup companies, Bram headed for Silicon Valley. There he started BitTorrent. Here is the main idea:

Cohen sought an efficient way to share huge amounts of digital data. Napster and other peer-to-peer programs already allowed people to pass smaller music files from one computer to another. But big files would clog the system. The elegance of Cohen’s solution is that as more people join a network, data move faster rather than slower. His software breaks files into pieces and scatters them on users’ hard drives. When someone requests a movie, the software gathers the pieces from the nearest computers on the network and assembles them only once they reach their destination. This allows a file to download much more quickly. 

BitTorrent has run into difficulties. Bram is no longer CEO. But the mere fact it exists and survives, and the fact a person with Asperger’s launched it successfully, are inspirational. It is hard enough to start a company. But starting one with Asperger’s? And, you say your life is hard?  

One of the most popular recent YouTube downloads is one without any spoken words at all. I often show it to my students. It is about a young man with cerebral palsy, confined to a wheelchair, and his loving father, who had heart disease. 

“Dad,” he said (few except his father can understand his speech), “I want to run a marathon with you.”   

Marathon? But – how?

The father began to train, running and pushing his son in his wheelchair.  His fitness grew.  Eventually, they ran a 42-km. marathon.   

His son was ecstatic; his face lit up at the finish line. And soon they did another one.

Then… “Dad!” he said. “I want to do an Iron Man triathlon!”

Triathlon? Wait. That includes a 120 km. bike ride and a 4 km. swim, then a full marathon. Intense activity for 8-10 full hours. But how?

His father swam, towing him in a rubber dinghy. His father biked, with his son in a seat in front of the handlebars. And his father ran the marathon, pushing his son in the wheel chair. They crossed the finish line to the amazed cheers of the crowd.    

If you search “Iron Man” on YouTube, you’ll see them in this 6 minute video.  

We learn again that there is nothing the human spirit cannot overcome, there is nothing too ‘hard’ to overcome, if the will is strong enough.