About Stephen Bolt

It would certainly be a much more pleasant world if there were no setbacks in life. No divorce, no business failure, no bankruptcies, no unexpected life trauma. But that is not the real world. The question before each of us is not whether we will face setbacks, but rather what we will do with them.

In my own life I can count more than a dozen unpleasant, unplanned life events that set me back – sometimes severely.

• After a 20 year marriage, I found myself divorced. Neither of us could have expected that to happen.
• I’ve held my first born in my arms like so many proud fathers; except that my son was stillborn.
• In sports, after achieving world class status as a distance runner and enjoying an unending running career, I found myself suddenly with no cartilage in my left knee and unable to ever run pain free again.
• In business, after a highly successful career in the financial industry spanning more than two decades, my world was rocked when the company I headed quite unexpectedly lost all of its revenue literally overnight and I was left as a personal guarantor on loans that neither the company, nor I could pay. It left me bankrupt.

Each of my life tragedies were unexpected, unplanned and devastating and each one set me back; emotionally, physically, and even spiritually.

And each one could have been the end of the story. But by the grace of God, what tragedy meant for an end, God used for a beginning.

I am blessed today with a wonderful family; a loving, supportive wife and four beautiful children.

And though I can no longer compete, I am blessed with the ability to run several times a week, and be a coach to aspiring young athletes. In business, I have been able to use my economic loss as a way to relate to the millions of others who strike out as entrepreneurs with great ideas and high hopes and yet fail. They, like me, will be more acutely aware of their vulnerabilities the next time and be stronger and more fruitful as they pick up the pieces and move forward.

So, what does recalibrate really mean? It means not giving up – despite the detractors, the pain, the loss and the hurt. It means not taking the easy way out and giving in to despair.

History is filled with examples of those who understood what it meant to recalibrate and because of that, and we know their names. They are in politics such as Abraham Lincoln, and Ullysses S. Grant; music such as Willie Nelson, Tom Petty and Lorrie Morgan; entertainment such as Larry King, Burt Reynolds, and Don Johnson; and the financial industry such as Donald Trump and Dave Ramsey.

And what about those who fell victim to despair, who did not recalibrate and move on? Well, we’ll never know their names. They let their candle go out.

Teddy Roosevelt forever captured the meaning of recalibrate in his famous Paris speech in 1910:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."