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Matt Roloff: Resilient Living
Health.Inspired on UHC TV
Wow, well today’s gotta be one of the happiest days of my life. I mean Joy Bauer, one of the leading health experts, gets up here – you all heard it – and talks about pumpkins being one of the five most – I mean I’m always asking, what’s the next best thing, what’s the next best crop I can grow to be healthy, and she comes up here and I don’t have to look any further because anybody who watches Little People, Big World knows that I’m into pumpkins. I’ve got pumpkins coming out of my ears. We don’t only eat pumpkins, but we actually feed our chickens for our eggs and our hogs for our bacon our cows for our hamburger – we feed them pumpkins. We’re pushing pumpkins all the time. So that’s really good news for me. I’m excited about that. I’m going to take that home. That’s my inspiration for the day.
But I’m actually here to talk to you about something different than related to your healthy food. I’m here to talk about a different muscle that everybody has in their bodies. A lot of people aren’t really conscious of this muscle. They don’t even realize they have it until they need it, and sometimes it’s too late. And that muscle is resilience.
The reason I call resilience a muscle, and an important muscle, it is because it gives you strength, hope and encouragement in times of trial. You can all imagine the childhood I had – the teasing and the difficulties that I had growing up, being different physically and being the size I am. And you know I speak to a lot of grade school kids and college kids and one of the things I like to instill in them is the importance of this muscle – resiliency – and how they can begin to work on it right away. People think you wait until you have some tragedy in your life. For kids, maybe their parents get divorced, or maybe it’s somebody getting divorced themselves, or losing a job, or maybe it’s a death in the family or, god forbid, a cancer or something tragic, and that’s when you decide whether you have the strength to get through that circumstance or you don’t. But people can work on this muscle of resiliency much, much earlier. They can begin it in their joyful or non-joyful response to the little things in life that happen on a daily basis.
You don’t have to be born with something like I have – a very visible disability – to begin to work on your muscle of resiliency. For example, my father was a real good mentor for me all my life (both my father and my mother), and something bad would happen in our family, like for example we’d be on a road trip and get a flat tire. Or one time, we were on a long road trip in the country, and the motor blew up in our car. My dad was always like “oh! This is an opportunity!” Now most of the time we’d be like ‘but dad, what are we going to do? We’re stuck here in the middle of the desert with no cars around, and our car is completely broken down.’ He goes “I don’t know. This is an adventure. This is an opportunity, and we’re going to be joyful about this.”
And that’s a really difficult thing to train yourself to do. I remember when I was young, I spent a lot of time in the hospital. One time, I was probably about five years old, and I’m in the hospital, and this is one of my earliest memories. A lot of my experiences today are shadowed by these early experiences. These are experiences that I wouldn’t want any of my kids to have to go through, but I went through these experiences, and today I feel like I am a stronger person, and my psyche is wrapped around these experiences. So, I’m in the hospital, and I don’t know if many of you remember, but there used to be these little puzzles. They had little plastic squares, and they had a little figure on them, and there was one square missing, and you would slide them around. Kind of like the old Rubik’s Cube. In this case, I had a Superman. And I remember my grandmother came in to visit me in the hospital and she brought me one of these puzzles.
And I worked and worked and worked on that puzzle. I mean I must have worked on that puzzle for a week. And I slid those characters around like mad in my hospital bed to get that Superman image to come to life. Eventually I got the image complete and I remember I set the little puzzle, the little plastic square, on the bed stand by my bed. I leaned it up there and I couldn’t wait for my grandmother to come in and to see my accomplishment. Shortly before she came to visit, the nurse came in, and healthcare by the way has come a long way since 1965, and when the nurse came in she picked up the puzzle and said, “What’s this?” and I told her, “It’s a puzzle that I am getting ready to show my grandmother.” And she scrambled it all up. I tell you, that the emotion of that still impacts me today when I tell that story. But that was the first time, I didn’t have a word for it back then, but that was the first time that I consciously thought about he choices that I had in life, to have strength and to have resiliency.
I took that puzzle and in the minutes before my grandmother came in, I worked and worked. Not only was I able to the put that puzzle back but I was able mess it up and put it back together when she came in to visit. I learned that the power, the freedom, and the joy that could come from being strong and not giving up. Instead of just throwing he puzzle against the wall and going into a crying fit, I remember I took it as a challenge to put that puzzle back. Throughout my life there are stories after story of times when I feel like it’s hopeless and time to give up.
I mean obviously there were times when the kids would tease me in the street. I remember, one time, coming home and telling my dad, “Dad, the kids were teasing me outside. They were calling me Shrimpy and calling me midget and calling me names.” My dad would look at me and go, “Well, you are!” Then he would turn around and walk away. When he describes that today, he says he would walk away and he would have tears running down his face. What was important to me to realize was that hey, that is who I am and these are the circumstances that I have. I mean, in my early grade school days, I can remember looking in the mirror and thinking, “Oh, my gosh. Is this the hand that I have been dealt? I have a choice to succeed and be triumphant through it and to be joyful about my circumstances.” This is probably the most important message I give to healthcare providers and people in your circumstances. Not just sometimes the physical. Obviously they worked on my bones and they were constantly doing orthopedic surgeries and trying to get me to walk and make my legs the straight as they can. Really I was blessed and fortunate to be around people, my parents and other folks that came into my life at various times, that helped me to understand the hope and the joyfulness there can be in one’s life.
All the time the time spent doing puzzles and games and what have you, in the hospital, seemed like such a waste of time and it really affected me. In fact it affected my grades. I remember when I got out of third grade I had to redo the third grade again. So I get to high school and my dad asked me, “What is Matt going to do for a living? What are you going to become because your hospital days affected your grades and your academic accomplishments and what are you going to be in your life?” That is a really good question. Around 1979, close to the time when I was about ready to graduate high school, a friend of mine comes up to me about that time and says, “Matt, there is this new think going on...” In my high school days, I was great if it was wood shop, metal shop, or auto shop I did really well. Those were the grades that carried me through but when it came to some of the basic stuff I kind of missed a lot of my early education. So I was kind of at a disadvantage.
This friend of mine says, “There is this thing called a logic exam.” I said, “A Logic Exam? What is a logic exam? Is that like an IQ thing? I don’t know, I don’t do good on testing. I am a failure. “ All of that. He says, “ No, no. There’s this logic exam and it is puzzles and things. For example they give you this one puzzle and if you can pass this stuff you can get into this thing called computers, into the computer industry.” It was kind of new and just starting up. He said, “ Yeah, there would be like a puzzle where there was a river and a boat and there’s three ducks on one side and three alligators on the other side. You have to get the ducks on this side and they alligators on that side without them eating each other on the boat.” There were different circumstances and scenarios like that. I’m like, “Well, that sounds like something I can do!” I mean I had spent all of this time in the hospital playing with games and puzzles because we were not getting a school education. We were laying on our gurneys with our body casts but we were playing games. We were doing things like puzzles. We were playing Monopoly or playing Risk. Playing chess. So all that skill, that everybody thought would be completely wasted, turns out to be the very skill that needed to be honed to pass this test. So I basically knocked this test out of the park and at that point, once again in my life, I realized that my circumstances were perfectly aligned with where I needed to be and my future.
I pass this test and get fast tracked into a company and I learn computer programming. Again, there are always, you know, successes and triumphs that come along with failures. You have to be strong during the failures.
So I have this really exciting career. It went on for close to twenty years, programming and building programs for big companies and doing database designs and stuff. Then of course, at one point, I always wanted to be in sales. I always wanted to transition from building programs into sales. But I felt like people, like companies, wouldn’t give me a chance in sales because they would take a look at me and they would judge me based on my physical appearances. How would we visualize this guy in front of our customers? Well we don’t. Oh and by the they way Matt, you are really, really good at programming so let’s keep you behind closed doors, in the closet and doing what you do. But I always wanted to get out and to talk to people and to use those skills and to sell the products that I had been working on, for many, many years, to sell them. I felt that there was some resistance, that there were people that weren’t open minded about this. Well eventually, I get a call out of the blue, from a large company that said, “Hey, Matt. We had one of our Vice President of Sales who would like you to join our company in sales.” So I went off and that year I won Sales Rookie of the Year and went on to about a ten year, very distinguished, sales career. Well, right about 10 years after I was in sales, the economy was going well, and I got my own situation that came up that surprised me and that was a chance to, uh, test my sense of resiliency, even after all these years of practice and being strong through adversity. I remember I reported back to this company. So I got this opportunity to join the even bigger, better company after I had been at this one company for about seven years, in a very secure position.
So I’m going to take a big chance because I am feeling good about myself, and I am going to jump out and go work for this, other even bigger named, company. So I jump out, and well about a month after I started with this big company, that was based on the east coast and I was on the west coast, the economy starts to tank. So I get called, “Hey, Matt. Fly out from the west coast –out- we have a big meeting scheduled.” I get out there and my boss called me, “I got bad news. We are cutting out workforce in half and here is your pink slip.” I remember getting on the airplane that day feeling, for a few minutes, devastated. The reason I say, “for a few minutes” because I remember, specifically, that day. Saying to myself in the cab ride from the corporation, with my pink slip, walking out the door and getting on the airplane was probably about an hour. I remember getting on the plane and suddenly having this incredibly joyful feeling come over me. It automatically poured in. Now this is, losing a job, anybody in here that has gone through that knows, especially I’m at the height of my career, I rolled the dice and it all came crashing down. I had a family, by this time I was married, and I remember, “ I should be sad about this. For a least a couple of weeks, right?” Instead I felt this joyous sense, okay this is an opportunity. What kind of opportunity?
I’m on the airplane and they take off and I lower down my tray and I get my notebook out. I start writing down all the things that I always wanted to accomplish in life. I make a list. Well, I have always wanted to start a little business; I did a lot of traveling and still do. I always wanted to start a business that provided stools and accessibility aides, for little people in hotels. So I right there on that piece of paper, I outline what that business would look like. What kind of products it would have in its kit. That business by the way, this is seven years later, is still active today shipping products every day to all the major hotel chains. It was called D.A.S. I make this list of that company I want to found. Within days of landing, I got the corporation set up and started that company and being prototyping the products.
I have to say I have always wanted to serve. I learned from a mentor, in life, that you should never stop learning, building, or serving. A lot of people do in one order. They do it serial in their life. What he said was that it is never too early to begin the process of serving. You can, you know, you are always learning, and then in your career you are building. You are building your career. You are building your family. You are building maybe your home and your wealth but then the serving part, people put later in life, after retirement. It is never too early to start in with the serving. So, I was a member for many years, met my wife, through the organization Little People of America and I said to myself, “I would like to go serve that organization.” I have a lot of skills that I can bring to the table and I was familiar with writing and publishing, and what have you, and I could help them with their newsletter and their big conferences, such as this one. So I wanted to run for the president of Little People of America and serve this organization back. That is a nonpaid position but I had accumulated enough buffer and with our farm going on, what have you, that I felt it was time. I didn’t need to go look for work. I could begin this process with this little stool company and serving the Little People of America. So, I did that.
It was through that, people ask me all the time, let me ask right now, how many of you have seen, at least one episode or a little piece of an episode of Little People, Big World? Okay, so most of you. Okay, that is great. So most people are at least familiar with the show. I always get a common question, “ How did the show come about?” And that’s what I am about ready to tell you. I joined the Little People of America, and this is all happening within weeks and months after this pink slip scenario which instead of being devastating, I was empowered by. I don’t know how but just internally I became excited and exhilarated by this. My energy. I got up early the next day instead of staying in bed and I started working on this company and Little People and stuff.
It was during that at which I started a program called Community outreach for little people. People were not educated about little people. For example, right before we started the show I get on an airplane, in my sales travel, and I remember I get on the airplane. The airplane takes off. The gentleman next to me, clearly was not in the mood to talk. So I am an experienced traveler and if someone is not in the mood to talk then I’m not going to talk. If they want to talk and socialize then that is fine too. He brought out his Wall Street Journal. He had his little glasses on, you know, and he was reading. In my mind, he was hiding behind that Wall Street Journal. When he caught me out of the eye, getting on, sitting in the aisle. He was against the window. He was pretty sure to keep that Wall Street Journal – He turned out the to be the CEO of a very large corporation that you all know. He was working on a major M & A, merger and acquisition thing, and he was a big player. He had the Wall Street Journal up, and his glasses, and it was up between him and I. It was clear that he was intimidated or afraid of me; the fact that I was different. That was an assumption that I made but I didn’t have to assume it long because he, basically, by that time the flight landed, he admitted to me.
So lunch came. He put down his Wall Street Journal and I took it as a challenge to try to strike a conversation with this gentleman. I struck up this conversation and he began to admit to me that he had lots of H.R. people working for him and they were in charge of that. He was not familiar, what were the proper terms and I explained to him that the “midget” has fallen out of favor. It was little person, or person with dwarfism. Maybe even person of short stature. I explained to him the differences about little people, and at the end of the thing, the end of the flight, this gentleman and I were bonded. We were buddies and his FEAR of little people had disappeared.
And this is when I thought to myself, “ We need to get out to the community, as a little people organization, and educate. So started this community outreach program. Started going out into schools and educating about little people. We did the true/false questions. We would ask kids in schools, on the fourth grade level, “All little people have magical powers? True or false?” Uhh, you would be amazed. All little people, you know. Little people can’t have babies. Ahh, you know. People would fall for it. Kids would think that was true. Then we would do a little talk and lo and behold these kids would rethink the true/false question. It was amazing how easy it was to, to change people’s perception of little people. Little people is a profound, in my mind, example of anyone that is different. If you can wrap your head around a little person being different than you but also being intelligently equal or being capable then you can wrap your head around anybody who’s blind or disconfigured or whatever.
So it was at the point that I was doing this community outreach that I have a producer come up to me and say, “Matt, we would like, you are talking to 3 or 4 hundred kids at a time, what about if we take it millions of people and we do a show?” That is what conceived the Little People Big World show and we are thrilled to be able to go out there, on our mission of over 250 episodes, and be able to share our story and to educate, most importantly, people not only about being different and dwarfism but being able to be here today and talk to this group. To talk about an important muscle that is in your body called resiliency and to be able to share that in a very real way. You have seen me from your living rooms. It seems like many of you have and you know we go through thick, we go through thin. We all do but you can be strong and you can gain strength from resiliency. Thank you for listening to me. I appreciate it.
