Link to the episode can be found here.
>> CHEN: Welcome to the ExcelAbility podcast. This is a brand-new series of conversations on success with people who happen to have a disability. Together we’ll uncover the attitudes, habits, techniques, and practices that enable these individuals to achieve astounding success.
>> BERLIN: I have cone-rod dystrophy. I can detect some shapes and motion in my peripheral vision but really nothing in front of me. Hard work beats talent, especially when talent doesn’t work hard. Having trained myself enough to overcome not being able to see everything I wanted to see, it’s gonna train me to be more of a risk taker in a constructive way. What’s one of the top three skills that you would look for in a valued employee? Almost always ability to problem solve. Skills like that, that’s all what we’re trained inherently to do by lacking one of our senses.
>> CHEN: Welcome to this episode of the ExcelAbility podcast. I’m your host, Jack Chen. Today we speak with Dan Berlin. Dan cofounded and owns the Rodelle Food Company. Rodelle is most well-known for producing vanilla beans and vanilla extracts available in about 75% of the grocery stores in the U.S. Dan is also an epic adventurist, having hiked from rim to rim to rim in the Grand Canyon, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in the dark, and hiking the Inca Trail in one day. I’m excited to share the lessons that Dan has learned in his journey on disability with you today. Please feel free to contact team ExcelAbility to share your comments, questions, or feedback or to share your own story with us. We’d love to hear from you. You can find information about this podcast and previous and future episodes at www.teamexcelability.com. That’s www-dot-team-E-X-C-E-L-ability-dot-com. You can follow us on Facebook at team ExcelAbility or on Twitter, @teamXLability. Hey, Dan, thanks for being available to chat with us to talk about disability and success. I’m really excited to be able to hear from you, from all your life experiences, your journey on disability. Thanks for taking the time out to be with us.
>> BERLIN: Yeah, no, thank you. Great to be with you.
>> CHEN: Awesome. Well, let’s get started. Dan, can you describe your disability to someone who might not already be familiar with what it’s like to have your disability, kind of your daily impact, your life impact?
>> BERLIN: Maybe to start from the physical aspect, I have cone-rod dystrophy, which in my case manifested to loss–complete loss of my central vision. It built up almost being like running my life for the past several years looking through thick waxed paper and has continued to progress to a point where I can detect some shapes and motion in my peripheral vision but really nothing in front of me anymore, no more central vision left.
>> CHEN: So it’s degrading over time, is that right?
>> BERLIN: It is. It’s a slow progression. I was first diagnosed when I was seven years old. I was a second grader who was having trouble seeing the board, evidently, and after visiting several eye doctors and then ophthalmologists, you know, with my parents–you know, being a seven-year-old kid, you don’t really know what’s going on, before I finally hit upon on ophthalmologist who said, “Yeah, you have something that looks a lot like Stargardt’s. It’s progressive, and you’re probably gonna be blind by the time you’re in your 20s.” I pretty much dealt with it in a way where I kind of shoved it in my back pocket and didn’t think much about it and just, you know, went on living and never really thought of it or thought of myself through my early years as really going to go blind. I just figured this is the way the world is and just–I wouldn’t call it denial, necessarily, as adaptation to it.
>> CHEN: And so for your daily activities, explain the way that you adapt. How do you manage some of your daily tasks?
>> BERLIN: First off, one of the basic ones is just getting around. I use a cane for the most part now. I find I rely on memory for a lot of things, which I don’t really believe that I have a better memory than average. I just rely on it more and therefore use it more, so I count steps. I remember where I put the toothpaste in the morning. I remember what I have where in my closet, which is funny because that inevitably doesn’t fit very well with having two young children at home who–who don’t see the need for remembering where to put the toothpaste in the morning, so.
>> CHEN: You founded a very successful company a couple of years ago. Can you just briefly describe what your company does, what it produces?
>> BERLIN: We produce baking ingredients, mostly for home bakers through retail stores, predominantly vanilla extract. We’re one of the world-leading producers in vanilla extracts and vanilla flavors.
>> CHEN: How might our listeners already be familiar with your company or your products? Are there any particular brand names that they would be aware of?
>> BERLIN: Yeah, of course. Our company and our main brand name is under Rodelle. The Rodelle brand’s found in about 70% of the retail stores across the U.S, also throughout Canada, Asia, Australia, and a bit into Europe as well. If you look in the–the baking aisle of your grocery store, more likely than not you’ll see a bottle of Rodelle vanilla or even a–a bag or a canister of Rodelle baking cocoa.
>> CHEN: Fantastic. Well, I’m sure my wife, who’s an avid baker, has used those products.
>> BERLIN: Perfect. She’s our target customer then. [pause]
>> CHEN: So since losing your eyesight you’ve also taken part in a number of epic adventures. Can you briefly describe what those are and what motivated you to get started with doing those crazy things?
>> BERLIN: Yeah, it’s funny. I really never set out to do crazy things. It’s one of those phenomena where they say you become the average of your peers, and I picked a couple longtime friends that are pretty crazy and ambitious. When they were attempting some of these challenges, really, for fun, it came up once that they said, “Hey, you know, Dan, do you want to do this together? I’d be happy to guide you, or we’d be happy to guide you, but I don’t think anybody blind has really done this before,” so I have a hard time saying no to just about anything, so I agreed. Yeah, our first one was we ran rim to rim to rim across the Grand Canyon and back, and that was three years ago, and then, yeah, that was quite a–that was a fantastic experience. We did that in about a day. Then last year we went to Machu Picchu in Peru, so we took–the typical four-day hike on the Inca Trail, we ran that in one day. It took us about–a little less than 13 hours. Just two months ago, or a couple months ago we climbed Kilimanjaro, and we wanted to highlight blindness with this, so initially we were going to try to do the entire hike all in one day. It usually takes five to six days. We were kiboshed a little bit due to safety guidelines in the amount of altitude that the guides and the people with us were allowed to ascend, so we swapped this around and actually decided to climb Kilimanjaro in the dark, and this ended up being a really fantastic experience highlighting blindness, really experiencing my three guides, allowing them to be able to hike on these sometimes treacherous, sometimes strenuous trails but without being able to rely on their vision either. Their impression the next day when the sun would come up and they would look out over where we had climbed was a real surprise to them to see this, as they described it, just grand view of what we had traversed, but at the time they didn’t experience it using their eyes. They experienced it using their other senses, and it was a real awakening for them to be able to experience the world a lot the way I experience the world when we do these adventures.
>> CHEN: I’m sure it gave them some new appreciation, new vision, if you will, into their own limitations, so what a great, great story.
>> BERLIN: Yeah, and in addition to just appreciation, it was interesting. I mean, they learned to listen a lot better and feel a lot better when we were actually trekking, so instead of just being able to see what’s around you, they actually became more in tune with their other senses on the mountain because they couldn’t use their eyes, and in that way could really understand what I talk about when I talk about feeling a space even though I’m not actually seeing the space.
>> CHEN: Let’s switch gears a little bit. Before your 30s, which is when the time, I believe, that you had more impact of your vision, can you describe when you first really became aware of the fact that you had a disability and how that impacted you socially, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise?
>> BERLIN: I always knew in the back of my mind that I had some trouble with my eyes. Up through high school and mostly through college I addressed it by listening a lot, but I never thought of myself as disabled, you know? Interesting, looking back, not once all the way up through until my late 20s did I ever actually consider asking anyone for help or going to any sort of, you know, group or agency or even asking a person, “Hey, can you read the board for me?” I just kind of figured that, well, this is just the way it is, and I figured out a way to get it done. [pause] I tell you, the first time that really scared me, I was probably in my early 20s, 21 maybe, still in college, and I was in Pennsylvania driving, and there was a snowstorm outside. I found myself completely on the wrong side of the road and didn’t know it. Two other people in the car with me too that were like, “Whoa, where are we going?” That was the first time I realized that oh, wow, they can see stuff that I can’t see, and it really scared me, so immediately I pulled over and said, “Guys, you’re driving ’cause I’m not, you know, at this point.” I think that was a–that was an awakening for me, probably in my early 20s, that said, “Okay, I really need to look at things a little differently.”
>> CHEN: So what changed in your attitudes or your habits, your techniques to help you to begin to adjust, to overc–to handle this realization?
>> BERLIN: I get a lot of this from my father. He always valued hard work above all else. Hard work pays off, and the fact of having a disability or–you know, I try not to look at it as a disability. I really look at being blind, vision impaired as a significant inconvenience but not something that can’t be overcome. Disability just has this air of permanence to it, of not being able to do something, and I really look at this as an inconvenience. So my thing is I realized, probably in my early 20s to mid 20s, is that I’m just going to have to work harder, and I’m gonna have to work smarter than a lot of my peers around me because, quite frankly, doing the same tasks just takes longer, and it’s not that they can’t be done, but sometimes it takes more thought and just strictly more time to get something done.
>> CHEN: Right. So what were some of the pain points? You mentioned driving and not being able to see what was on the other side of the road. What other pain points and/or examples can you highlight for our listeners of situations where it was difficult for you because of your decreasing vision?
>> BERLIN: When I went to graduate school, I probably picked the worst possible field that somebody who’s becoming vision impaired could possibly pick. I chose microbiology, [pause] and I started out–it was a great thing. This is–you know, again, I don’t know if it’s a combination of impulsiveness, but just always pushing forward, I had some great ideas and ended up having a full research project funded, you know, to do my entire studies this way, and it was a fantastic idea. What I didn’t really think through the whole way at the time was the fact that it required a lot of counting using microscopes and things like that. I ended up having to engineer this in a way that I was doing all the thought and the experimental design, then having to start–that was the first time I started to have to recruit other people and have them do it in duplicate to actually read my slides for me and report the answers, and I would have two people do it and make sure that they got the same counts, which in the end was probably better than one person just doing it and recording the results, but it was done out of necessity because I realized I really couldn’t distinguish some of the things that were on the slide that I really needed to do. Yeah, that was one of the ways where I first–one of the first things where I said, “Okay, I’m not gonna give up on this, but I do need to find a significantly different way to get it done.”
>> CHEN: So interesting that you were able to find another way to get it done in a field that’s traditionally set aside for folks who have perfect vision. Are there any other examples?
>> BERLIN: There’s some basic things, travel definitely. When you can’t physically read a boarding pass or determine where a gate is, you just have to think ahead. A lot of it comes from preplanning, looking at the itinerary ahead of time. I always say now that I was very lucky to be born when and where I was because I’ve evolved with technology, and the ability to put a little extra work in and have that whole itinerary available on my phone in a way that’s read back where I can measure gate changes or be told what’s expected up ahead, and then I just had to give up the expectation of having to do it all myself. One of the hardest things I’ve had to go through is learning how to ask for help when needed and realizing that it’s not a judgment to ask someone, “Hey, can you tell me what gate is this?” or, “Where’s gate 36?” That’s one of the things that some of the athletic endeavors have really taught me too because some of these things would be very difficult to do completely on my own, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t be accomplished. Just need somebody else to do it with me as a team.
>> CHEN: Yeah. What was that journey like for you to begin to learn for–ask for help?
>> BERLIN: It was difficult. I was working as a global manager for a multinational company. Again, I felt like I always prided myself in doing a great job, above and beyond expectations. One of the challenges was, honestly, or the fear was that I’d be judged as incompetent by my–by my peers and bosses. That was a real, real fear that held me back quite a while. I was afraid to use my cane, for instance, and it really dawned on me one day. I was probably around 30, 31 years old at the time, and one of my colleagues said, “Wow, you’re really not that rude,” and I thought, “What are you talking about? I’m, like, one of the nicest people around. At least I think of myself as that way,” and they made this comment. They’re like, “Well, I pass you in the hall every day, and it’s been six months. You’ve never even said hi. You never make eye contact. You just walk right past me.” Then I realized they were giving me visual cues, a wave, a smile, and I was not reacting, and in that case, then I said, “You know what? Well, here’s what’s going on,” and I just decided that I’m gonna start using a cane as much for other people to know that I’m vision impaired, and the whole world changed at that point. Once I kind of came out about it and said, “Hey, this is the way it goes–” I won’t lie. I mean, it wasn’t easy. There were people that I worked with that had the feeling that I couldn’t do certain things or that I wouldn’t be the right one to do a certain job. That’s where the hard work came into play, is, you know, either accepting that or proving them wrong.
>> CHEN: So it sounded like you took the prove them wrong track.
>> BERLIN: More often than not, yes. Again, you have to pick your battles, but I think–they say with talent, but I think hard work beats talent, especially when talent doesn’t work hard, and as long as we work smarter, work harder, we can achieve anything we want to.
>> CHEN: You mentioned that your whole world changed. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that when you started using your cane and when you sort of, as you said, came out with your disability?
>> BERLIN: It was great. I mean, help came from unexpected places, so all of a sudden going to a meeting or, you know, having to take a trip to one of our other offices or out to see a customer, all of a sudden nobody had the expectation that I was gonna rent the car and drive out there, and all of a sudden offers came up like, you know, “Hey, I’ll take you to the airport,” or, “Do you need help with this?” you know, and it became a very constructive, very productive environment where it allowed me to just focus on what I wanted to achieve, my work, my life, and a lot less focus on, “Okay, how am I gonna get this done without anybody knowing what’s going on?” and that was freeing, so a lot of day-to-day tasks just really changed. People just came out of all different areas and were willing to help. That really changed things.
>> CHEN: I love how you said that, that when you let folks know that, you know, you had a challenge, they all came out and offered to help. It’s something that I don’t think that a lot of folks really realize in terms of whether to talk about their disability or not.
>> BERLIN: One thing I’ve learned, too, and especially this came when I started running marathons about six or seven years ago. I really thought I was going to be a burden to other people on the course, and I was being very careful not to disrupt other people’s races. What it turns out I found out is that for almost all the time, people like to help. Allowing somebody to help me very often allows them to feel good as well. That’s something I didn’t realize earlier that I really do now, that it can be mutual.
>> CHEN: Great wisdom there, that it’s not just about you when someone offers to help you, but it’s also about them too.
>> BERLIN: Yeah, very much so. [pause]
>> CHEN: Dan, I believe you played football in your younger years. Did your vision have an impact on your ability to play football? And if so, how did you handle that?
>> BERLIN: Well, yeah, that was funny because at the time, again, I had this whole idea of losing my vision kind of tucked away in the bottom of my bag, and I probably willfully didn’t think about it, so yeah, I played football and several other sports all through high school and really loved it. It was about my junior year and senior year when I was really a starting player on our high school team, and I realized that I couldn’t find the ball.
>> CHEN: Oh.
>> BERLIN: So my job was then just okay, follow the motion and tackle the guy that’s moving. That’s really what it–what it became, so subconsciously I switched my position. I did some other things where I was playing more in the backfield. I moved myself up a little bit more where I wasn’t responsible for identifying just the ball. I ended up kind of playing based on motion and really good guesswork a lot of times. I wasn’t reading eyes so much as I was watching numbers, you know, at that point.
>> CHEN: Did folks know that you were doing all of these things?
>> BERLIN: No idea. Even now if I would talk to, you know, anybody that I was in high school with, coaches, teachers, friends, nobody had any idea. Even in college, a lot of my collegiate friends I have not day-to-day contact with or even month-to-month or year-to-year contact with have no idea that I had a vision impairment. That was one of the things I was always credited with, being able to fake it really, really well.
>> CHEN: Yeah, I can see that, being able to play football and not let anyone know.
>> BERLIN: Yeah, it was probably not the smartest thing in the world too, and that’s what I get back to, is it’s much better to speak up and say what’s going on. I mean, I don’t have major regrets about much of anything, but the one thing I wish I would have done is speak up more at the time. I think I would have been able to, you know, embrace things a little bit more at the time.
>> CHEN: Dan, in your younger years, how did you feel that your blindness would impact your future success, if at all?
>> BERLIN: I never really thought that it would, you know, and I know that sounds silly, but again, I just had confidence in being able to work hard and to, you know, work smarter where I needed to, but I really never–never thought that it would be a significant hindrance to me. I did have the realization that I would have to do things differently. Sometimes a different way of looking at the problem is beneficial, and that’s something that always stuck with me, so I kind of had this in my head, that, well, I’m gonna be that different viewpoint on so many things I come across.
>> CHEN: And did you think you had to be different because of your disability or just because you had to be different?
>> BERLIN: Yeah, I think it was because of my disability that I realized that I would have to be different. I want the end goal to be the same whether I was fully sighted or visually impaired, so in order for the end goal to be the same, the means of getting there just have to change, to be different, so in essence I’m not changing the goal. I’m just changing the way I attain it. That’s the part I think I came to fairly early about being different, is that I knew I wouldn’t be able to do things always the same way a fully sighted person could do it, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be able to do it.
>> CHEN: I love that. You’re keeping the goal in mind, and the method or the mechanism for getting there, that can change whether you have a disability or not, but the end goal is the same. That’s awesome.
>> BERLIN: And I think that’s so true for–for many people. I mean, there’s so many things that we look at as, you know, a disability, but then, you know, everyone, we’re all human. We all have our issues, and there’s always things that prevent us or get in our way of achieving what we want to achieve or living the way we want to live, and sometimes it’s–often and the way I believe, it’s not about changing, then, you know, what the end goal is. It’s about changing how we get there.
>> CHEN: After college you served in a couple of roles. You worked at Hershey Foods, and you also–as you said, you were a global manager for a large, I believe, division of Pfizer. What were some of the challenges that you ran into relative to your disability in those roles, and how did you tackle them?
>> BERLIN: You know, quite a few challenges. As I got a little older, into my 30s, some of the basic grunt work of the assignments became more difficult. Reading an Excel spreadsheet, for instance, was almost impossible. It’s really difficult to work in a competitive, you know, financially-driven environment without being able to, you know, functionally use Excel very well, so that’s when I started learning voiceover technology and, you know, starting to look for adaptive technology that I could use to help–help through this process. It was interesting because–again, this was a little bit of my own hiding the fact from other people, is I never really went to some of the organizations that would have been able to help me at the time. Instead I just, you know, went online, researched myself, figured out kind of screen reading softwares or ways of reading email back to me and things like that, and I stumbled across a couple of them that were pretty good. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I realized that there was a program like Jaws that even existed that was well-designed to do exactly what I was stumbling through trying to figure it out. On the flip side, too, I also–I learned to fake it quite well in the fact that I would have other people read it or explain what was going on without really letting on that I couldn’t see what was on the page, so what it trains–I trained myself to be a very good questioner. I trained myself how to ask questions in a way that people would read back or tell me the information I needed to know without them knowing I couldn’t read what was right in front of me.
>> CHEN: Yeah, I bet that’s become a skill that’s been useful, especially as a cofounder of a company.
>> BERLIN: Yeah, exactly. Exa–I mean, again, that’s a universal skill. I mean, you know, knowing how to ask a question and, you know, the more the better is often what I find is so helpful, and it’s really essential. I mean, that’s what I tell my children, people here at the company, you know, people I mentor along, is ask questions, the more the better and the more often the better.
>> CHEN: Well, do you feel like at this time, in these roles your disability was more of a hindrance, more something that you had to overcome, or was it actually a driver of your work? How would you characterize it at the time? ‘Cause you’ve talked about both.
>> BERLIN: Yeah, it was more something I needed to overcome, is the way I looked at it up until about five years ago. When I started taking on some of these athletic challenges and started doing some other things beyond nose to the grindstone, head down, pushing forward on the career path, then I started to realize that, hey, okay, this really–there’s advantages. As strange as that seems, there’s advantages that I had by being blind. It was essential training in problem solving and in questioning and in not giving up hope when something doesn’t succeed the first time because in order to get ahead, I had to develop that thicker skin, so to speak, towards things not working out as planned.
>> CHEN: Yeah, on-the-job training.
>> BERLIN: Yes, on-the-job training, very much so, on-the-job training for problem solving, and that’s the interesting thing. You ask major corporations today, you know, “What’s one of the top three skills that you would look for in a valued employee?” Almost always ability to problem solve is up there, and to think, you know, really, to analyze and then to act. You know, skills like that, that’s all what we’re trained inherently to do by lacking one of our senses, and that’s it. So it was kind of self–self-taught self training just in daily life that–I try to focus on that now, over the past five years and refocus that and to say okay, this is a skill. What started out as something to overcome has now helped–helped me learn how to effectively address a problem or deal with an issue quickly.
>> CHEN: I love how you turned something that was a challenge into something that was an asset. That is a really huge lesson for, I think, everyone, problem solving, questioning, as you said, developing a thicker skin. So in 2007, I believe, you left to cofound the current company that you help to run now. What made you decide to make that transition?
>> BERLIN: I would like to say it was a difficult choice, but it really wasn’t. I had always, you know, from the time I was young had a very entrepreneurial spin to my way of thinking. Some people would say I don’t like to be told what to do, [pause] but the other way of looking at it is I also like to be in control as much as is possible of my own destiny and of what’s–what’s happening. So with that, I had always known I wanted to really have my own company. It was interesting. When I left this large multinational company in 2007, it was interesting. I had a–I had a fantastic manager at the time when I flew down to Florida to tell him that I was resigning and I was going to go do this, and he just stopped. He said, “Well–well, why? We can never fire you. You know, why take the risk? You know, you’re set here for the rest of your life,” and I was like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Well, you know, you’re disabled, so it’s not like we can let you go,” and that was his honest viewpoint of it, that I didn’t even have to do any more work, and I was set there for as long as I wanted to stay with the company, and I thought about that, and I realized–at the time I was offended by that a little bit, and as–after a little bit of time, I looked back, and it’s like, “Oh, he just–he just really cared about me. I mean, he was concerned that I was taking this risk unnecessarily.” I thought that was–that’s kind of what I get back to about, you know, people really do care once they know, but they express it in different ways. Not everybody expresses it in the same way.
>> CHEN: Can you talk about how, if at all, your disability impacted the decisions and/or the things you had to do around cofounding a company? There’s obviously lots of hats you had to wear. What were some of the impacts for you as an entrepreneur with your own company?
>> BERLIN: In addition to training that kind of hard work and looking at problems from different ways, having a disability really trained myself in being very risk tolerant and always being smart, always doing, you know, the proper due diligence on it, but then again, not being afraid to act, either, is very important. My wife left her job. We were living in–right outside New York City. At the time I had a–a seven-year-old and a three-year-old child. We were moving out here just for me and going into considerable debt. All of that put on some remarkably constructive pressure to do well. At the time I did this I had two partners, and I had this overwhelming drive to not let them down because of my disability. I must say that I’m very lucky, and I think luck has a huge part to play with being successful at just about anything. What we can control, what I could control is just to be prepared to take advantage of an opportunity when it showed up. That’s where the hard work and the preparation came into play. The fact that these opportunities showed up, that was out of my control, and having a disability, I think, allowed me to unlock part of that part of my personality where I’m naturally fairly conservative. Having trained myself enough to overcome not being able to see everything I wanted to see, it’s gonna train me to be more of a risk taker in a constructive way.
>> CHEN: Yeah, it sounds like disability actually really formulated that in you and really made it possible for you to have that perspective ’cause you’re taking a risk every day just by continuing to push hard and expect yourself to be successful. With your suppliers and your partners and investors, has disability come up for you? And if so, how have you addressed it or handled it? Has folks had a negative or positive reaction to it?
>> BERLIN: A lot of my work is done over the phone initially. When we actually have face-to-face meetings, that’s when I’m sure–I always bring my cane, and I don’t often let people know on the phone that I’m vision impaired, but definitely before meeting or when we’re actually going to meet or in a discussion with a supplier or a customer, definitely I bring that up in the forefront, state it right out in the open, and oftentimes will tell them, “Hey, I’m visual impaired. I can’t see something that you put in front of me, and I want you to know that right up front, but that being said, I want to work business as usual. I don’t want you to be making special accommodations for me. If I need something, I’m not gonna be hesitant to ask you for it,” and that way I kind of set the stage up front with them. It takes the pressure off of them trying to understand, “Oh, do–do I need to read this to you, or are you okay if I have a PowerPoint presentation?” Don’t do anything different. Just expect if–if I’m stuck on something, I may ask a lot more questions.
>> CHEN: Many young workers struggle with the question about whether they should talk about their disability at work, whether it’s because they feel they’ll be stigmatized by it or they feel they don’t know how to talk about their disability. How would you counsel someone who’s struggling with these issues? Because I know that it’s been an important aspect of your own career.
>> BERLIN: It has been, very much so, and as I said, it took me years, almost a decade, to admit it to my colleagues and coworkers that I was having–or I had a significant disability. I think it’s better to get it up front right away with coworkers on a business and a personal setting. The downside that I’ve come across of not doing that is oftentimes the reaction and the judgment that we receive from others can be more negative because they don’t realize that we have a disability or a limitation that we’re working with, and then when they do find out, that becomes compounded because now they feel very–they feel bad about it. One of the things–you know, I’ve come to learn that I think honesty’s the best approach when it comes to issues with disability. I’d rather be judged by somebody who said, “I’m not gonna work with you because you’re blind,” than to be judged by somebody who says, “I think this guy is, you know, incompetent. I sent him these, you know, five pictures, and he didn’t even pick one, and he, you know, can’t do some of these things that I sent on the spreadsheet,” and have no idea that I couldn’t see it and I was trying to fake it and work around it.
>> CHEN: Thanks for highlighting–it’s really interesting that you highlighted that there are negative impacts of nondisclosure.
>> BERLIN: I truly believe that the impacts of nondisclosure can often be much more negative and long-lasting than the potential impacts of a full disclosure, and I caveat that, though, too. I’m also not a fan of using my disability very much as a–as a crutch for others, though, either, and that’s one of the things that a lot of people, you know, me included, that have a disability feel like–I feel like I’m doing sometimes.
>> CHEN: Dan, is there someone with a disability who you really have a great amount of respect for? And if so, what have you learned and what can we learn from that person?
>> BERLIN: All people face their own levels of ability and disability. Some of them are obvious, and some of them are diagnosed, but it really depends on every individual person and the goal that they have. If somebody would like to be an Olympic-level runner, more depends on genetics than almost anything else, and we don’t get to choose that. That being said, you know, one of my people who I just find amazing–when we look back in, you know, our world history, some of the most successful people or people that we–have really shaped the way we live and the world we live in today have been disabled. We look at people like FDR. I mean, running the country as president, you know, for four terms through the biggest depression, the largest war, the most tumultuous time we’ve ever had, and the fact that he did this in a wheelchair. He wasn’t questioned on his ability to be able to run the country as a disabled individual. We look at so many other people that have contributed so much in history, scientific breakthroughs, all sorts of achievements, and so often that we learn is that many, many, many of these people had either difficult upbringings or were facing mental or physical disabilities during their formative years. It created that drive to problem solve and sometimes that need–that need is there. I own and run a vanilla company, and vanilla’s grown on an orchid, and in order to get a pod, we need it to flower. In order for an orchid to flower, it needs to be significantly stressed, so oftentimes what brings out the best in each of us isn’t the comfortable times. It’s the stress in life and how we adapt to that, that constructive or productive adversity or stress that allows us to really flower and really identify who we really are.
>> CHEN: That’s a phenomenal analogy. I love that. Dan, we’ve been talking a lot about disability and success. Any other thoughts you want to share with folks out there on that topic?
>> BERLIN: I think success is a hard word to measure, and it’s a hard concept to measure. So often we look at business or finance or, you know, things like that. Really, success is about setting out a goal, an expectation, something that you’d like to achieve, and then finding a way to–to achieve it. Success can be in helping other people. Success can be seen in many, many different ways. I think the biggest drivers for success for me are we live in a society, and being able to be open and honest about disability, be able to ask for help, ask questions, and comfortably go through life.
>> Faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
>> Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird!
>> It’s a plane!
>> BERLIN: I know it sounds a little hokey, and I talk about this, yeah, with my–with my daughter sometimes, but in American culture we kind of have that openness to it. I mean, if you look at–if you look at even a lot, like, the superhero things. Look at X-Men and things like that. You could put them, in reality, into society, and they’d all be labeled as disabled…
>> CHEN: Yeah, interesting.
>> BERLIN: Whether as mental or physical, and yet what do–we turn around and idolize them as the superheroes, and the question is would you see them running a company? No, we’d say these guys are not functional in some way, but could they be the success, you know, here? It’s like, “Oh, yeah, they could,” so again, I, you know, know it sounds a little bit hokey like that in the sense that, you know, sometimes the disability isn’t the superpower, but what it does is it creates that stress or that adversity that allows us to identify what our true strengths are. You know, being blind isn’t–isn’t a–you know, isn’t in itself–it’s a negative. It’s [inaudible], but what it does is it tills the ground in a way that forces me to dig deep and find what are my strengths? Because I need to be that much stronger. I can’t fake it by–’cause I can’t see it, so I got to dig down deep and find what is that stronger sense or stronger power, you know? Do I have–and in a physical sense, yeah, do I have great hearing? Do I have great smell? Can I really perceive things? Do I have awesome balance? You know, what is it? Where if I could see, I probably wouldn’t have to rely on that, but because I can’t, it’s gonna force me to do it. What it does for me is–what I got back is I find that I’m pretty decent at analysis and problem solving, that I probably wouldn’t have had to focus so much on that had I been able to see my whole life. The disability in itself isn’t our strength, but it forces us to cultivate our other strengths even more so than we normally would.
>> CHEN: Sounds like it really has been not only something you’ve worked through but something that has significantly shaped your success, significantly shaped your career and as well as your attitude. I love all the thoughts that you’ve had to share with us. Thanks, Dan, so much for taking so much time out of your schedule and for chatting with us and giving us all the benefit of your lessons. We really appreciate it.
>> BERLIN: Oh, thank you for–for having me. It was great talking with you.
>> CHEN: This concludes our conversation on success with Dan Berlin. Dan has shown us that using the lessons in overcoming his disability to make him a bold risk taker, using the lessons from overcoming his disability to enable him to discover his true strengths to dig deep, and working harder and working smarter have enabled him to achieve astounding success. Join us next time for our conversation with UX designer Pete Denman, who designed the communications device used by Stephen Hawking. Please feel free to contact team ExcelAbility to share your comments, questions, or feedback or to share your own story with us. We’d love to hear from you. You can find out more information about this podcast and other resources by visiting us at www-dot-team-E-X-C-E-L-ability-dot-com, on Facebook at team ExcelAbility, or on Twitter, @teamXLability. Thank you, and have a blessed day.