Jan 2, 2024
In this week’s episode I am joined by Mark Black!
Mark is the author of “Live Life from the Heart”.
Born with a life-threatening heart defect, Mark underwent two open-heart surgeries before age one. Twenty-two years later, after waiting on the transplant list for nearly a year, Mark was blessed to survive a perilous heart and double-lung transplant.
Three years later, Mark became the only man in history to run a marathon with someone else’s heart and lungs. Then he did it 3 more times.
Mark has travelled the globe as an author, speaker, and coach, sharing strategies and tactics for building resilience. His story has impacted more than 150,000 people at more than 700 organizations including ExxonMobil, AstraZeneca, and Mercedes-Benz.
Mark is married to his superhero wife Marise. They live on the east coast of Canada with their 3 healthy children, Emma, Mateo, and Caleb.
Key Points
• Born with a critical heart condition
• Parents’ unique approach to fostering resilience
• Transitioning from patient to motivator
• Achieving the "impossible": running post-transplant marathons
• Crafting the "Resilience Roadmap" for life’s challenges
Best Quotes
00:59 - 01:14
• "So when I was born, I turned blue. Within a few minutes, doctors go, uhoh, something's wrong. Start running some tests, figure out that there's this blockage in this valve, and tell my then 23-year-old first time parents..."
03:33 - 03:40
• "But, so I would like, despite all of the hard stuff, I was a competitive athlete until I was about 14 years old."
04:54 - 05:11
• " I think if there's the trade off of can we allow them to have small failures and setbacks and discomforts when the stakes are lower So that if and when, well really when, 'cause who escapes life without them, they face some bigger ones."
08:17 - 08:27
• "I got home at the end of that school year. I had been away for two or three months since the last time I had been home. And as soon as my mom saw me, she went, holy smokes. Like, what's going on? Something's wrong."
09:24 - 09:36
• "And I'd been in and out of heart failure a couple of times before, but never this severe. And I ended up, they ended up keeping me for almost a month while they stabilized me ransomware tests."
13:56 - 14:02
• "So the five year survival rate of a heart lung transplant is about 50%. So like, basically half the people make it five years."
29:56 - N/A
• "Nothing changes, nothing changes. So it's great to like write down your new Year's resolutions, but if you're the, you know, going to live January 2nd the same way you lived the last year, then probably nothing's gonna change, right?"
35:25 - 35:34
• "It proves to yourself, oh, I can do these things. And so when the next challenge comes, you can have that armor with you of like, oh, I've done stuff like this before."
For more about Mark: www.markblack.ca