 In the summer of 2010 I fell from a second story window and landed on a concrete below and added paralysis to the blindness that had happened 12 years earlier. I suppose I've come to acknowledge that sometimes we have the luxury of choosing our challenges and sometimes challenges just choose us. In the aftermath of paralysis as I lay in intensive care, I thought of a book by Jim Collins, Good to Great, and the discussion that he had had with the Colonel Stockdale long-term prisoner of war. Colonel Stockdale suggests that the ones who survived the concentration camp experience were not the optimists but rather the realists because the optimists kept thinking they get out at the end of the year and when they didn't they were disappointed. The realists in fact were the ones who survived because they were able to acknowledge that they may never get out. As I looked at my own situation the only option as a starting point was to be a realist. When you lose something like your eyesight you also lose your identity and the opportunity to rebuild my identity came as a competitor in a rowing boat and ultimately it took ten years to put the demons of blindness behind me as I raced to the South Pole. It wasn't about going along for the ride it was about racing it was about being a competitor and that's where I found my identity again. I have been seeking those people who are attempting to create a cure for paralysis people like Reggie Edgerton and Eureggio Semenco and what we found was that all of these people are trying to work and time and time again we found them working in isolation. We found that the best way of creating a cocktail of cures was to create a project that got them excited and engaged around a collaborative scientific exploration and what we're really interested in is those types of people who are vulnerable enough to say we don't have all the answers we don't have all the solutions and in fact we have the ability to be vulnerable to reach out to work with other people to create the cocktail of cures that may one day provide a cure for paralysis for me and millions of other people around the world. My final point is to decide to be vulnerable enough to be a collaborator rather than a soloist.