INSIGHT
“When life forces you to climb multiple mountains at once, the smartest move is not to push harder—it’s to calibrate your effort. G.R.I.T. isn’t about grinding harder; it’s about disciplined timing and purposeful action.”
HOMECOMING
4:30 am, Tuesday, 25 July 2023. My flight has just touched down back home after a trip to the US, where I attended my first National Speakers Association (NSA) Conference—its 50th-anniversary event.
Exhausted but elated, I now have a solid roadmap for my professional speaking—including a major undertaking already kicked off two months earlier on 30 May: a new website.
I turn my phone on and begin retrieving my bag from the overhead locker. A cascade of notification beeps follows—one of them a voicemail.
AMBUSH
No one is moving to disembark yet, so I check it. It’s a message from a nurse at my 95-year-old uncle Stanley’s aged care facility, saying:
“Stanley is having a medical emergency; can you call me back as soon as possible?”
I call back, drop everything, and rush straight to the hospital. Two weeks later, my uncle passes away, leaving me as the sole executor of a deeply complex, messy, and litigious estate.
Thursday, 9 November 2023: Weeks earlier, my 91-year-old father Alan is gardening when he steps into a depression and falls. He gets up, thinking nothing of it, despite some minor, recurring pain in his left hip. After a scan, we return to dad’s GP, who practically shouts, “It’s cancer!” His previously under-control prostate cancer has metastasised to his bones. I’m his only support.
Wednesday, 6 December 2023: Friends are helping support my father, visiting and taking him to radiation treatment appointments while I try to relax on a 13-night beach holiday in the Philippines—a trip booked back in March, well before all the chaos. I’m in a minivan on my way to Subic Bay when I receive a phone call from my apartment manager, “The owner has changed his mind; he’s selling your apartment.” I have a little over two months to make new living arrangements over the festive season, in the middle of a nationwide housing crisis.
“As I learned during my 30-year policing career, it is generally not one event that puts someone into crisis—it’s several events at once.”
ON ICE
I make the call to my website project manager, putting my ambitions on hold—the website is on ice for the foreseeable future.
My energy is now spread brutally thin across my uncle’s estate, my father’s treatment, and organising new living arrangements.
I continue my professional speaking work, highlighted by delivering a bespoke keynote for the Australia & New Zealand Biennial Conference of District and County Court Judges, exploring the complex legal, support, and leadership aspects of my experience.
The long haul. Over two and a half challenging years, I navigated the estate and managed dad’s numerous treatments to help contain his cancer for the time being, while winning the fight to purchase the apartment. Every one of these mountains presented innumerable, massively time-consuming, and mind-boggling obstacles—such as waiting over four weeks just to receive a text message response from the owner in reply to my overtures to buy the apartment.
REKINDLE
Wednesday, 12 November 2025: It’s time to rekindle the website project. I make the call to the project manager. The mission is on.
I draw on a formula from my playbook that I’ve used many times:
Putting my new website on ice was an act of innovating. It wasn’t giving up on the goal; it was adjusting the roadmap and managing my time until I could return to it.
I try to climb only one mountain at a time, but I had three concurrent mountains to scale. So, the fourth mountain—the website—I offloaded until these other challenges were overcome or under control.
At last, the other mountains are climbed. I can finally return to my goal—and give TWICE SHOT the full attention it deserves.
I’ve spent years quietly gathering footage, photographs, and testimonials—there is a tonne of work to do and coordinate.
Plus, I have a deadline—only four months away!
The pressure is on. Time to perform.
I work seven days a week, collaborating with many professionals while managing my other responsibilities, to move the project from ‘on ice’ to ‘online’.
“Performance secret: Willpower and good intentions are bested by plans and action—Every. Single. Time.”
I am determined to have everything ready for the ultimate target:
GLOBAL SPEAKERS SUMMIT (GSS 2026)
Friday, 13 March 2026
Over 400 professional speakers from 25 countries. Four days, five nights—a high-humidity Cairns environment to grow TWICE SHOT and a massive opportunity to return to purpose.
BULLSEYE
Tuesday, 10 March 2026, 4:31 pm: The project manager emails:
“Daryl, I am just reaching out to you on behalf of the team to say CONGRATULATIONS!!!! 🎉Your website is now live.”
Bullseye. Support is organised for my father, my bags are packed, and the air has cleared. I’m stepping on a plane to continue my mission. It’s only a short flight to Cairns, but it is a world apart from where I started with that ominous phone call about uncle Stanley, 2 years, 7 months, and 13 days earlier.
I’m not just flying to a conference. I’m on target—returning to purpose.
And there—reconnecting exactly where it all began, nearly three years earlier.
GSS 2026 Awards Night: Reconnecting with US keynote speaker Joe Curcillo—”The Generalist“. We first met through Cigar PEG Inc. at NSA 2023 in Orlando, Florida, and spending time together in Cairns was another step back on target.
Joe is a High Roller at Cigar PEG Inc., a title reserved for the speaking industry’s most significant philanthropic benefactors. Reconnecting with a speaker of Joe’s calibre—a former trial lawyer and engineer who now champions the “Generalist’s Advantage”—was the perfect way to mark my return to purpose.
GOAL
And the goal? It wasn’t just a new website—it was to showcase my professional speaking more instantaneously through new technology.
GRATITUDE
As Arnold Schwarzenegger so humbly puts it in his book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, he is not a self-made man—and neither am I.
Many friends pitched in—including Gabby Zwaan, Adrian Bensted, Neil Robson, Mark and Deb Makin, Gerri Condon, Chris Gibson, and Kav Singh.
As did many professionals—Wayde Gustavson, Leo Molas (both part of the wonderful team at Five by Five), Iain Anderson, Justine Oxley, Michael Mandicos, Michael Hanson, and John Gribben.
All of them helped me overcome challenges and showcase the TWICE SHOT experience. I’m incredibly grateful—you are exceptionally kind and skilled people.
A special salamat po to the many Five by Five team members based in the Philippines—your work is loved and appreciated.
TRIUMPH
The bigger the goal, the greater the obstacles. With true grit—a goal, a roadmap, innovation, and time, plus a little help from a few friends—this is the formula for you to finish in triumph.
Daryl
Transparency
1) Authorship: All articles are written by Daryl.
2) Review: AI is used for clarity, editing, and accuracy.
3) Mission: TWICE SHOT is about human stories—written by humans, for humans.
