To find happiness, turn losses into wins

In “The Great Eight,” gold medal Olympian Scott Hamilton reveals the secrets to happiness that helped him through his battle with cancer. In this excerpt, he writes about how each of life's challenges can be a gift.

Chapter three: Make your losses your wins
There is no delicate way of describing one of the cruelest facts of life, so I will just come right out and say it: life can really stink. Or, to quote what some wise philosopher once said: stuff happens.

I think we can all agree that sometimes life just comes up all lemons. These sour sodas are fed to the rich, the poor, the good looking, the not-so-good-looking, the famous, and the everyday unfamous. Bad things happen to people in huts in Bangladesh as well as those in Malibu mansions. There is no escaping the rough stuff of life. Many misguided substance abusers have thought they could dispose of their garbage through a drug or a drink or whatever vice gave them a temporary sensation of pure joy — only to find out that whatever they were seeking to escape was still there when they came off their trip. The truth is, we’d all like to live in a perfect paradise, that dreamy fantasy place where no one ruins our day, traffic is never bad, bosses never annoy us, bills never need to be paid, children never cry, spouses never cheat, the stock market never goes down, and you can do no wrong.

But, of course, there is no such place. Neverland simply doesn’t exist. What does exist is another definite fact of life and a key to finding happiness: what you do with the uncontrollable junk in your life is totally under your control.

The 1980 Olympic Speed Skater Eric Heiden once said, “It’s not the events in our life that define our character, but how we deal with them.” Coming from an athlete who achieved the greatest individual Winter Olympic feat in history (an unprecedented five Gold Medals, including four Olympic Records and a World Record) at the Lake Placid games, I think Eric knows what he is talking about. And I couldn’t agree more. It’s how we deal with the things in our lives that creates our character. That is how you define yourself and figure out who you are.

I have learned firsthand how heavy life can be, and I have also experienced how hard but liberating it can be when you lift those burdens.

Video Dec. 9: What are the secrets to happiness? We ask the experts, from authors to doctors to Elmo. Today show

Surviving one loss then another
When I moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s, I was totally in a wilderness phase of my life. I wanted to get away from everyone. I had been given so many wonderful opportunities to perform for an audience — the Olympics, the World Championships, Stars on Ice — and I was grateful to be part of these events. But when I would step away from the spotlight, away from those professional achievements, I struggled personally. I struggled with decisions I’d made and the kind of life I’d been living, and I’d suffered through so many things. When skater Sergei Grinkov died at age twenty-eight of a heart attack, his death hit me hard. We were very close friends, and his sudden passing devastated me. And then the next year, I was diagnosed with cancer.

It seemed like one tragic thing after another. Friendships had gone away, relationships had failed, and I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I wasn’t a better son to my father. I was always a mama’s boy, and my dad basically died alone in the hospital while I was on the air broadcasting the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway. I was working, of course. Why? Because I was always working! And I felt guilty about how my mother sacrificed so much for me but never got to see any of my greatest successes. I carried all this heavy stuff with me every single day.

So although my fans might have thought I appeared happy and successful, the truth is that there was a huge portion of my life I didn’t enjoy at all.

Don’t get me wrong. Throughout my life, I was always trying to turn my losses into wins. But I had come to believe that no matter what level of happiness I found, I would soon be hit with a tragedy again. I was convinced that I would get injured, someone dear to me would die, I would get fired, I would be betrayed, or I would be stricken with yet another illness. I was riding an emotional roller coaster, and the lows were much deeper than the highs. I was just surviving from one doom to the other. I lived in fear of the next calamity that would strike me, which gave me a constant sense of anxiety and stress.

And then came June 2, 2002. The day when I realized I had been looking at the patterns in my life entirely wrong, that, in fact, I had been looking at the events of my life backward. And my life changing insight came to me though the words of a thirteen-year-old cancer survivor.

Inspired by a survivor’s story
Following my cancer battle, I did a lot of speaking engagements across the country, speaking at fund-raisers and various cancer charity benefits. Typically, I would serve as the keynote speaker and tell my story, hopefully inspiring others to keep up the fight and not let cancer win. That’s exactly what I had been invited to do when I was invited to speak at the University of Chicago Hospital’s Thirteenth Annual Cancer Survivors Day celebration.

Several hundred doctors and patients and their family members packed into a downtown hotel ballroom to hear from an afternoon’s worth of speakers, with little old me, who had just gotten cancer into remission, being the last to speak. I normally would get nervous before speaking at these events, so, per the norm, I was pacing in the back, minding my own business and listening to the other speakers. Since it was a celebration, my goal was to keep my talk light and upbeat and deliver a pep talk to all the patients, caregivers, and family members. I couldn’t have predicted what would happen next.

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