The way in which we frame experiences and people throughout our lives is possibly the most important factor in determining not only our success, but also our happiness and peace of mind on this earth. If I had to pick just one lesson from this book that I'd like you to walk away with, it is probably this. Because all of us, whether we're a Navy SEAL, an Academy Award–winning actor, or atop the Forbes Fortune 500 List, will experience loss, tragedy, defeat, and emotional emptiness at some point in our lives. That is a given because all of us are human. What will differentiate us, however, and the quality of our lives, is how we choose to interpret those experiences and thus, how we respond to them.

It's Not the Canvas, It's What You See in the Canvas

I remember a time in elementary school when a black-and-white photocopy of a sketch was being passed around. When it was handed to someone for the first time, it was accompanied by the question, “What do you see?” Half the people would say it was a picture of an old lady. They'd point to her protruding chin and her bumped nose, her sad eyes looking downward, and the white kerchief that served almost like a hood. The other half of the people who looked at the photocopy came back with a drastically different description. They described a beautiful young woman, with a strong jawline and gorgeous cheekbones, exposing her exquisitely slender neck as she demurely turned away from the viewer. The only part of her face that was exposed was a long, curly eyelash and the tip of her petite and perfect nose. One picture, two drastically different descriptions. While this mental exercise fascinated me at the time, I had no idea just how much its principles would later become a part of my life.

One of my best friends from college, the same one who introduced me to his sky-diving friend from Chapter 5, is a highly regarded trauma surgeon in Boston. He is also a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty and, prior to that, served as a Navy SEAL. If you're wondering why I allowed such a slacker into my inner circle, I believe it was to keep me humble. Fortunately for me, this friend and I have been having in-depth conversations around the topics covered in this book for the nearly three decades since we met. One of the things I love, which he shared with me shortly after he made the transition from SEAL to doctor, is something he would do when invited to speak to various organizations and schools. He would project two huge lists on a screen behind where he stood. These lists were resumes, displaying contrasting accomplishments and failures of two drastically different potential candidates for some fictitious position. Going through the two different individuals' lists with the audience, he would ask them to help him figure out why one had failed so much while the other thrived.

One of the applicants, tragically, could never seem to grasp his goals. He wanted to be a fighter pilot, but eventually changed his mind. He wanted to play lacrosse in college, but despite being very athletic, he was cut before making the team. He had trouble focusing, which led him to quit many sports as a youngster, including gymnastics, because he wanted to “have a normal life.” He was told by his college counselor, when asking for guidance in reaching medical school, that his extracurricular activities would not be enough to compensate for his mediocre grades, so he should give that dream up. In short, this candidate could be described as a loser.

On the other hand, the list of the second individual was astonishing. He had breakdanced for the Washington Redskins when he was only in sixth grade. He was a Delaware-Maryland-Virginia gymnastics champion before middle school. He got his varsity letter in football and lacrosse before choosing not to play Division I lacrosse in college so he could earn his tuition through the Navy ROTC program. He later chose to become a Navy SEAL and not only made it through their legendary training to receive his Trident, but eventually earned prestigious awards. Upon leaving the Navy, he coached his high school's lacrosse team and taught English literature while studying for his medical school entrance exams. He aced the exams, flew through med school, and was honored by the White House for his exemplary service during seven deployments in Afghanistan and elsewhere as the first doctor to also be called upon for his combat expertise. He later opened his own practice and became a member of Harvard Medical's faculty.

By this point, maybe you've guessed that the second individual is, in fact, my friend. But what makes him so different from that first candidate? Why has he succeeded where this other individual has failed? The answer is quite simple: he hasn't. That other individual is also my same friend. From a certain vantage point, even an American hero with a life story that reads like the screenplay from Forrest Gump can appear to be an abysmal failure.

This is true for all of us. How we frame and interpret the events of our life determines our destiny. The good news is that this skill can be taught. Just as the kids in my elementary class who saw the old woman in that sketch were able to discover the young lady once she was described to them, you can discover the heroism and victory in your own story if someone points out to you where it lies. Friend and past guest Toni Torres made her way out of extreme poverty in the ghettos surrounding Cleveland all the way to being a working actor in Hollywood. She reframed her entire life to prevent herself from ending up dead or selling drugs like so many of the kids with whom she grew up.

“I went through this stage where I started saying my parents were in sales … because they sold drugs.”

—Toni Torres, Actor

A few years back, I uttered a phrase to my wife that describes the action I partake in pretty much every day: willful denial. Let's break it down. According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, the definitions of these terms are as follows:

I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day with me on this and point out the errors of my ways. But I'm not denying that what I do is a little insane. (In fact, if I set my sights on writing a second book, I'm going to call it Crazy Enough.) I believe that anyone who has ever achieved anything beyond a modicum of success could, from at least one perspective, be perceived as a little off their rocker. The very vision that creates art where there was once a blank canvas, or massive commerce where there once existed either inefficiency or a large gap between buyers and sellers, is full of willful denial. When a poet, novelist, or entrepreneur creates something that eventually wins them awards or massive amounts of money, they are being rewarded for refusing to look at what's in front of them as the only real option and, instead, creating something that no one else realized could exist. This is the same thing we must all do on a daily basis when faced with challenges that might otherwise stall us or, worse, derail us altogether.

Living with someone who engages in this behavior incessantly, as my wife has been forced—er, chosen—to do with me, might be enough to drive a person insane as well. This is why so many documentaries about individuals who changed the world in some way also turn their focus on the spouses and families of those individuals: the people in close proximity sometimes suffer from the shrapnel that disperses every time one of these grand visions implodes or comes crashing down to earth—or even succeeds beyond wildest expectations. What's possibly more infuriating for these supporters is that the person responsible for the thing that is crashing will rarely admit that the crash was a bad thing. I'm not suggesting that we don't examine the errors of our ways or analyze our past missteps in order to improve upon them. It should be obvious that post-execution assessments need to be made on a regular basis for us to get better. But it is also necessary to frame things with the sentiment that life happens for us, not to us, in order for us to maintain positive emotional engagement.

There's No Business Like Show Business

Let me give you some classic examples of this from my own life.

When the ABC series Mistresses, starring Alyssa Milano, told me after one episode that they wanted to bump me up from a guest star to a series regular, where I'd make exponentially more money, I was excited. Then I learned that they wanted to lock me into the show exclusively for the remainder of that season with no pay raise, and merely the promise of a series-regular position if the show got picked up for another season, which is never a sure thing. This sounded like a bait-and-switch so I said no, remained at my low price, and finished out the season without being tied to the show exclusively. All throughout that season, the creators told me that I was the soulmate to the woman across from whom I was playing and that they needed me for the duration of the show.

When Mistresses got picked up for a second season, I was invited to attend a party in Hollywood to celebrate. Even though it was a long drive and our young kids were home, I wanted to go. I wanted to celebrate with my castmates, and it was also smart business as I'd be getting the call about my new deal as a series regular probably within days after the party. We had some drinks and hugged each other, proud of the accomplishment. I wanted to ask about my deal, but of course that wasn't the right time or place. When a week went by, and then another, with no call, I pressed my agents and manager to call them and find out why there was a delay. It wasn't until we reached out that we heard the news: the network was being tight with money so they couldn't add a new series regular to the roster. I had to make a choice: tell them to go screw themselves unless they made me a series regular or do the show as a guest star again, for the reduced rate, because having a job was better than unemployment. Given our financial situation and young kids, I chose to continue as a guest star and worked hard to assuage my ego. The bold truth was that I felt burned and was pissed off. But what I told myself, and the world, was that I was happy to have a job and actually grateful that I wasn't locked in so I could go do other projects.

That last line sounds good, but as the second season continued and most of my time was spent on set or auditioning for other projects that ultimately didn't want me, its logic felt thin. Until, out of nowhere, I was asked to do a favor for a casting director (you'll hear that whole story in Chapter 15, Just Be a Good Person), and before I knew it I was telling Mistresses they had to shoot my scenes out before I left for New Orleans to be one of the main villains in Hot Pursuit, the first studio movie I'd ever booked. Don't get me wrong, I truly liked all of the producers on Mistresses, and I can look back now and know that their decision to not make me a series regular was not only not personal, but likely out of their hands and mandated by the network and studio. I'd be lying, though, if I didn't admit the sweet revenge I felt as they had to bend their schedule around mine to get my episodes in the can. My willful denial from the summer before had turned into truth.

“I would write, ‘I'm gonna be in a commercial with LeBron and Serena.’ And I'd write it over and over and … ends up, I was in a Nike commercial with LeBron and Serena. It was the big Colin Kaepernick ad.”

—Charlie “Rocket” Jabaley, Entrepreneur, Speaker, Nike Athlete

I have followed this pattern so many times because the nature of an acting career is that, even when things work out, there is a shelf-life for most projects that is laughably short. For this reason, rather than viewing the end of a job as downer, the attempt is to view it as a new opportunity to reinvent oneself with whatever project comes next. Sometimes that is easier said than done, like when Huge in France was canceled by Netflix less than a month after we became available for streaming, despite rave reviews online and a bit of a cult fervor among comedy folks in my industry. Shocked by their decision, and with no choice but to move on, I quickly released it from my mind and focused on the potential of City on a Hill becoming my new home. Perhaps the situation that I'm most proud of reframing is something that I did as a result of a major hiccup during my run on ABC's Scandal.

Out of Work? Start a Podcast!

My run as Michael Ambruso on Scandal came literally out of nowhere. But, as my brother used to jokingly say when we were kids playing football in our basement and he'd stop me from a touchdown, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” This was definitely true for Scandal because, as easily as this one came to me, the bottom dropped out on it at the most surprising time. I was in Utah in 2016 close to wrapping filming on Wind River, a feature film that eventually made a splash at Sundance and in theaters, when I got a call from my manager. She told me that Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Scandal) wanted to “use me big time in the upcoming season.” I was not under contract with the show so my work was subject to the whims of the scripts that came in, but a call like this was as close to a guarantee as one could get. Not only that, they were giving me specific dates. There would be 16 episodes that season, and they would halt production in the fall for Kerry Washington to have her baby and then resume and work through April of the following spring. It felt like a lock.

Later that year, I got an opportunity to move my family into a house close to where our kids go to school, but it meant doubling our monthly overhead. Knowing I had work coming, my wife and I were inclined to take the leap. I never did find out what changed the storyline of Scandal that season—perhaps it was the election that put Trump in office (because it's a show that takes place in and around the White House)—but somehow my “big-time” stint dropped to only three episodes. I was without work and that particular pilot season did not bode well for an actor of my type. In the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite movement, which protested the snubbing of several African American–led films that perhaps should have been in contention that year, many of the roles I may have been considered for in the past were now being cast with minorities. As an American interested in giving everyone an opportunity, I was happy to see this. But as the breadwinner in my household, I was out of work. I couldn't seem to get any potential employers' attention during that pilot season despite feeling good about my work in the audition rooms.

What I did with that disappointment, despair, and fear is probably my biggest source of pride to date. Naturally, it involved a classic “Del Negro Reframe.” Instead of continuing to let the weight of all my rejections and lengthy periods of unemployment bog me down, as they had in the past, I decided to flip them on their head. Having discovered podcasts a year or two before, I fell in love with the raw and authentic style of this audio-only medium where a listener could be a fly on the wall, hearing conversations between people to whom they otherwise might never gain access. I decided to take all of my “no”s, all of my rejections and failures that I tended to hide away from others and minimize in the hopes of appearing to be “fine,” and turn them into my platform. The result, 10,000 NOs, has been the most inspirational three years of my life, as of this writing. It has helped me to reconnect to the dreams that were in jeopardy of being snuffed out. It has also connected me to people around the world who have become as addicted as I am to these stories of resilience that I have been lucky enough to find and present.

In its first few years, the 10,000 NOs podcast did not bring me financial reward, other than what I've received to write this book from a publisher I was introduced to through one of my guests. It has always, however, brought me something that may be more valuable than money—passion, purpose, and service. I firmly believe that these three assets will end up bringing me even more financial success someday, but it will truly be the side effect of the real gold. Service, passion, and purpose are the lifeblood that keeps me engaged and constantly striving, and are integral parts of any success I may achieve. When I become too caught up in my own drama, I am pulled out of it by notes from around the globe of people with tougher challenges than me. These notes express how listeners have been inspired by the stories of guests overcoming obstacles. In this way, my decision to reframe the aspect of my career that I hated the most ended up saving not only my career, but my soul. Had I continued down the worn path I'd been traveling, I might have burned out by now.

The adverse effects of any experience can be reversed by choosing to reframe the way those effects are perceived. I do not say this as though I have had to experience tragedies anywhere close to those of my guests or others I have read or heard about. I say this because each inspiring comeback story I encounter, whether personally or from afar, has an element of reframing in it that allowed the comeback to happen. Try it for yourself, in situations as small as waiting on a long line for coffee or as big as the tragic loss of a loved one. It may not ease your pain immediately, but eventually it will open the door to potential recovery.