Challenges Are Just Opportunities in Disguise

Dreams don't care about your limitations

Photo: Leandra Rieger

There’s a man up the street who zips around like a daredevil in one of those heavy-duty power wheelchairs.

I often see him blasting up and down the road near our house, arms waving, zigzagging in the lane as if he’s playing chicken with oncoming cars. He always veers off at the last second, grinning wildly, as if he’s stolen a small victory from fate.

Can you blame him?

If life’s lottery dealt you a neurological disorder and splintered your dreams, maybe you would play chicken too. Some people collapse into themselves when adversity strikes. Others lean into the wind and keep going.

Last week I saw another man in a wheelchair. 

He was older, parked in the sunshine at the edge of the park, reading a paperback. After a while, he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, as if soaking in the warmth and dreaming.

I wondered what those dreams looked like.

It’s a great idea but just not that realistic

That night, my wife sat on the couch scrolling through her phone. She smiled, then laughed.

“This is great,” she said.

“What’s great?”

“I’ll send it to you.”

My wife is a hospice nurse. She spends her days among loss and courage and the tender negotiations of dying. When she’s home, she avoids the grim stuff. She looks for what affirms life: a good book, a gentle movie, a story that lifts the heart.

A few seconds later, my phone chimed. The link she sent was about a man named Drew Davis, founder of The Crippling Company.

Drew was born with cerebral palsy. By fourteen, he weighed over three hundred pounds, and his health looked bleak. 

Then came the pandemic of 2020. Something inside him shifted. He met with doctors, started moving, started believing. 

He lost more than one hundred and fifty pounds.

At school, he was assigned to create a business plan. Drew loved hot sauce and had a sharp, self-deprecating humor. He drafted a proposal for Crippling Hot Sauce, complete with names like Crippling Agony, Dill With It, and Ghost Pepper Palsy.

He got an 82% on his business proposal.

When he asked why, the professor said, “It’s a great idea, but just not that realistic.”

It’s a phrase we have all heard, isn’t it? Just not that realistic. Four words that have killed more dreams than failure ever did.

Dreams don’t care about your limitations

Drew went home and decided to prove him wrong. 

He Googled how to make hot sauce, started at the kitchen table, and never stopped. Two years later, he’d sold more than a quarter million bottles. His once-joke idea became a seven-figure business.

“Challenges,” Drew says, “are just opportunities in disguise.”

Watch the news interview below with Drew:

Five percent of every Crippling Hot Sauce bottle sold goes directly to cerebral palsy research

On his website Drew adds:

Sometimes the greeting cards are right

I have known many people with disabilities. 

Some were blind. Others deaf, confined to wheelchairs, or slowed by the mind’s mysteries. Nearly all of them taught me the same lesson: life does not shrink to fit your limitations unless you let it.

Life will throw you curveballs, sometimes fast and sometimes cruel. You will lose someone you love. The job will disappear. The test results will say what you hoped they wouldn’t. There are a thousand ways a life can come apart.

But when it does, you have a choice.

You can shake your fist at the sky and curse the hand you were dealt. Or you can take a breath, gather what is left, and start again.

Maybe it will take time. Maybe it will break your heart a few more times along the way. But as Drew reminds us, challenges are just opportunities in disguise.

Yes, it sounds like something from a greeting card. But sometimes the greeting cards are right.

The bravest thing we can do

If I ever see that man again in the park with his face turned to the sun, maybe I’ll tell him about my joyful neighbor who races through traffic in his wheelchair, daring the world to stop him.

Maybe I’ll mention Drew Davis and his Crippling Hot Sauce.

And maybe the man will smile, because he understands that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is simply keep moving toward the light.