The Unfair Advantage: Turning Your Deepest Wounds into Your Greatest Strengths

Fourteen years old. Lying on the cold Chicago pavement on a February night. My first thought wasn’t about dying. It was about the tingling sensation spreading through my body, starting at the tip of my nose and washing all the way down to my toes. It was the feeling you get when your foot falls asleep, but it was my entire world going numb. A bullet had just shattered my T12 vertebra. I tried to push myself up, to crawl, to keep moving, but only the top half of my body worked. The bottom half was just… gone.

As I lay there, helpless, the shooter ran over and knelt beside me. Pressed his .38 revolver to the back of my head, and pulled the trigger.

"Click"

The miraculous, deafening sound of an empty chamber. In that single, silent moment, my old life ended. But this speech isn't a story about survival. It's a story about a new beginning. It's a blueprint for how our most profound struggles, our deepest wounds, become the source of our most significant strengths. That click was not an ending. It was the violent birth of my greatest asset; an "unfair advantage" that has defined every success I have had since.

But to understand that advantage, you first have to understand what brings a fourteen-year-old kid to that moment on the pavement.

The Forge

To understand the fall, you have to understand the city and the forces that shaped me. I was the product of a powerful, loving Puerto Rican family, but I was also a student of the streets.

My dad was the "fixer," a man whose hands spoke a language of love and dependability. When anyone in the family needs a helping hand, my dad is who they call. He's been my personal handyman for my homes, my cars. He's always been there for me.

And my mom... my mom is a warrior. I learned this long before I had to fight for my life, because I watched her fight for her own.

For nearly a year, she was in constant pain, a fire in her stomach that wouldn't go out. She couldn't sleep. I was just a kid, tagging along to her appointments, watching her tell a doctor named Wong that something was deeply wrong. He’d poke her stomach, and she’d wince, and he’d tell her she was fine. He dismissed her pain. This woman, who is so tough that when she showed up at the ER to give birth to me the nurses left her in the waiting room because she didn't look like she was in pain, this woman was being told her suffering was all in her head.

Finally, he gave her an ultimatum: "If you come back here complaining of this stomach pain," he told her, "I'm going to send you for a psych eval." He told my mother she was crazy.

That threat was the breaking point. She defied him and went to a different doctor. She wasn't crazy. She had Stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

My world broke. We found ourselves in "I Can Cope" therapy groups. I was just a kid, but I noticed when the faces in the circle started to disappear. But my mom, she outlasted them all. But the therapy had an unintended side effect. While my mom was fighting to live, those sessions were teaching my dad how to let her go. So when she survived, they found themselves on two different paths. One night, I overheard my parents arguing. I couldn't make out what either was saying, until I heard my Mom clear as day say, “I just don't love you anymore.” My world broke again.

The loss of control at home pushed me to seek it elsewhere: The streets.

At school, I became the “Gifted Rebel.” I learned early on that I didn't need to do the busy work; I just needed to pass the tests. A teacher, frustrated, told my mom, "He knows the material, so I have to pass him." That sentence was the key to the kingdom. It was my first lesson in hacking the system.

This culminated in one final act of validation. I was excluded from the ACT prep group (the one for the kids who "had a future"). I rolled into the ACT test high as a kite, both days. I got bored during the math section (the final part of a six-hour test) it started to feel like busy work, and they told us that once we turned it in, we could leave. So I was done. I left about fifteen math questions blank.

A few weeks later, the school gathered the entire ACT prep squad to announce the results. I wasn't in the room. I was never invited. But the story got back to me. The shock on their faces when they learned that the top score in the school, the highest in a decade, didn't belong to any of them. It belonged to the wheelchair boy they had already written off.

On the streets, the rules were simpler but far more deadly. The first time I got shot, it was almost casual. A ricochet from an asshole standing about a block and a half away slammed into my shin. It took me to the ground. I felt the bullet stuck in my skin, burning. I lifted my pants up and flicked it off with my finger. I ripped the bottom of my sweatpants off, tied a little tourniquet around my leg, and I walked home. It wasn't a traumatic event. It was just a Tuesday.

After getting chased and outnumbered walking home from school one too many times... well, getting chased eventually means getting caught. It means finding yourself balled up on the ground, at the mercy of a group of boys who are just having 'fun' kicking and beating you. You just lay there, balled up, hoping they get bored or one of them has enough mercy to stop them before they go too far. Hoping they just leave you alone so you can go home.

One too many of those beatings makes you make life choices you wouldn't normally make.

So, I made a strategic decision: I joined a gang. It was a trade. My freedom for their protection. It gave me the power to walk home safely, but it came with a new set of rules that could get you killed daily. I was living a double life, balancing the intellectual thrill of outsmarting the system with the primal need to survive.

That double life collapsed on February 9th. As I lay on that cold concrete, a woman came running from a nearby house. I don’t know her name, but I know she was a nurse. She was on the phone with 911, and she knelt beside me, telling me to stay calm, that help was coming. For a few brief seconds, a stranger showed me profound kindness.

And then the first cop arrived. He wasn't there to offer comfort. He leaned in and whispered in my ear, a special message just for me:

"I fucking told you to go home and now look at you. You're going to die here in the street all alone."

He was wrong. That moment wasn't designed to be my end. It was designed to break me. But instead, it became the first piece of fuel for my difficult road ahead.

The Rebuilding

My new life began with humiliation. I was sent to a special school, transported on a special bus with the loudest, most groaning wheelchair lift you can imagine. Every morning, it hoisted me into the air like a spectacle for the neighborhood to watch. On the bus, it didn’t get any better, I was surrounded by severely developmentally disabled children, and a new terror took hold: my body was gone, but what if my mind was next? I believed my mind was the only thing I had left, and I was terrified of losing it.

Then, a ray of light. A guy named Ramon Medina, another student, came flying down the hall in a sports wheelchair, his wheels slanted, stopping on a dime right in front of me. He didn't see a victim. He didn’t see a tragedy. He looked at me and said, "Hey, you look like you can play ball. Do you play basketball?" He saw an athlete.

I was still angry and bitter, but the strategist in me saw an opportunity. He wasn't offering pity; he was offering a new arena, a new game with a new set of rules to master. It sounded interesting. I took the offer. That offer gave me a new tribe, a new identity, and a new purpose.

I ended up at the University of Illinois, playing for a legendary coach, Mike Frogley. He was the architect of my mental toughness, and what he taught me can all be captured in one brutal drill. He tied me to my teammate, Steve Serio (now a Paralympic gold medalist) with a thick rope for a tug-of-war.

Round One: For four minutes, I dominated him. I pulled him all over that gym. I was stronger, bigger, and I let him know it. It felt great.

Round Two: I had gassed myself out, and he was pissed. For the next four minutes, he returned the favor. He was relentless, and he pulled me around just like I pulled him around, no matter how hard I grabbed those wheels, he was winning that battle.

Round Three: This was the decider. Both of our bodies were completely spent. Our arms were dead. But we were both pissed now. This wasn't about strength anymore. This was about something else. We were both giving it 150%; every ounce of will we had. For four excruciating, brutal minutes, we were deadlocked. Our wheels barely moved. We were just two immovable forces, straining against a rope that felt like it was going to snap. All the while, Frogley was screaming in our ears:

"This is mental toughness! This is how you win!"

When the final buzzer sounded, I tried to let go of my wheels. I couldn't. My hands were frozen into claws from gripping my wheels so hard. I couldn't open my hands for a few minutes. My body had gone further than I thought it ever could, to a place where only my mind could drag it. The knots in the rope were so tight from the strain that the trainers had to cut us apart.

That was the lesson. In that moment, when our bodies had given up, our minds refused to quit. That was the most powerful lesson I could have ever learned: willpower is more powerful than physical circumstance.

The Advantage in Action

That lesson (that my mind is my greatest asset) is the core of the unfair advantage. It has saved my life, and it has built my career.

Years after I was shot, I was coming home late. As I pulled into my driveway a car blocked me in. A man got out, a long kitchen knife in his hand. He grabbed me by my shirt and put the blade to my neck. "Motherfucker, you're one of those D's, aren't you?" he growled. "My little brother got killed here this week, so I'm here to kill one of you motherfuckers."

He was drunk, grieving, and looking for revenge. All the while, his stupid girlfriend was sitting in the car, whining with the most annoying voice I've ever heard, "Babe, come on, let's go!"

My heart was pounding. But some part of me, the part forged in Frogley's gym, stayed calm. My survival instinct wasn't to fight. It was to connect. "I'm in a wheelchair, bro," I told him. "I got shot when I was a teenager."

He shot back, "Yeah, you must have been a gangbanger to get shot." There goes that story. Fuck. What next? I thought back to my own trauma, the pain I put my parents through. So, that was my last-ditch effort. "Your mom just lost one son," I told him. "She's about to lose you, too. Go home. You need to go be with your mom right now."

He broke down. He started to cry. The man who was about to kill me was now mourning with me, hugging me with a knife still in his hand. We ended up by my back door. I rolled a blunt. We smoked. We laughed. We connected. He even asked if his girlfriend could come hit the blunt. I told him, "Man, leave her ass in the car. She didn't get out to save my life, she doesn't need to get out for this blunt." And he laughed. A belly laugh.

The trauma that nearly ended my life gave me the perspective to save it. That is the unfair advantage.

It's the perspective that allows you to see opportunity where others see chaos. A colleague at work once asked me, "How do you stay so calm under pressure?" My response was simple: "I've never had a knife to my neck at work. No one's ever tried to kill me here. Why would I ever be flustered?" When you face true life-or-death situations, a tough project is just a puzzle, not a threat.

That perspective allowed me to see the six months I was laid off not as a failure, but as a mission. It allowed me to see an organization in turmoil not as a sinking ship, but as an opportunity to advance. I stepped into that void and earned two promotions in three years.

That fight continues every day. Just last week, after a ten-year wait, my insurance company finally approved a new wheelchair. The cost is about $4,000. Their approved coverage, after deductibles and fees? Fifty-five dollars. You could get angry. But with some perspective, you could also laugh at the absurdity of it. It's just another puzzle, another fight I have to win.

The Victory

This is my "why." This is what all the fighting was for.

It was a fight to have a family, a journey through the clinical, heartbreaking world of IVF. The doctors told me my sperm was "low quality." The guilt I felt watching my wife, Mo, endure painful daily injections was immense. The first round failed. The clinic, worried about their success rates, pushed us to use a sperm donor.

For the next round, they did a 50/50 split. The daily updates from the lab were brutal. The donor's embryos thrived. Mine struggled. By day five, he had four healthy embryos. I had one. One lone survivor. I had to fight the clinic to even include my embryo in the transfer. They didn't want to do it.

For nine months, I lived with a silent, haunting question: Whose is it?

The day our daughter was born, I had already accepted our fate. But then I saw her (those bushy eyebrows, those little crooked pinkies just like mine) and a flicker of hope ignited. A DNA test confirmed it. She was mine. The little embryo that could had survived.

That miracle paved the way for our second pregnancy. This time, there was no donor. At the first ultrasound, the tech found a heartbeat. "Baby A," she called it. A moment later, she said, "And here's the heartbeat for Baby B." We were stunned. We were having twins.

The image that defines that time for me is leaving the hospital. Mo, just two days after giving birth to twins, got out of her own wheelchair, lifted the car seats into the car, then walked around, grabbed my wheelchair, and put it in the back of the car before getting into the passenger seat herself. The transporter just stood there shocked, and I just watched her in awe. In that quiet, powerful moment, Mo showed the world she is, and has always been, the strongest of us all. I knew then, we were going to be just fine.

Your Advantage

My story is unique, but the principle is universal. Every single person has a story. You have a story of hardship, of setback, of pain. Maybe it was a layoff, a failed business, a personal loss, or a private struggle no one else knows about.

Society teaches us to see these moments as liabilities; scars to be hidden, weaknesses to be overcome. I am here to today to tell you that is a lie.

I challenge you to re-examine your own stories. Look at your deepest wounds not as sources of weakness, but as the very forge that created your unique strengths. That failure taught you resilience. That loss gave you empathy. That struggle built your grit. That moment of terror gave you a perspective that no one else has.

The unfair advantage isn't just about survival; it's an act of emotional alchemy. You learn to take the hot, chaotic energy of anger and pain and consciously transform it into the cold, patient, strategic fuel of a long-term plan.

Find your wounds. Reframe them. That is where you will find your own unfair advantage. Own it. And use that gift to leave your mark on the world.