Episode 506 — Why There Truly Are No Excuses with Kyle Maynard
What’s the one excuse you’ve been giving yourself long enough that you’ve started believing it?
As part of the “Road to the Summit,” a special series ramping up to the 2026 Game Changers Summit this November 11-12, we’re revisiting some of the most powerful conversations ever featured at our events. In this encore episode of The Game Changing Attorney Podcast, we’re throwing it back to the 2025 Game Changers Summit, where Kyle Maynard, award-winning extreme athlete and quadruple amputee, took the stage to share the mindset that got him up some of the tallest mountains in the world.
Born without lower arms and legs, Kyle built a career as a wrestler, powerlifter, and mixed martial artist before taking on peaks most able-bodied climbers wouldn’t attempt. In this presentation, he breaks down how a near-failure on Mount Aconcagua became one of the most meaningful days of his life, and why focusing on the next three feet applies just as much to running a law firm as it does to climbing a mountain.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why discipline isn’t about five-year plans, but about the next three feet in front of you
- How to turn panic and self-doubt into fuel instead of an excuse to quit
- What it takes to stop waiting for permission and build your own version of “no excuses”
Whatever mountain you’re staring down this year, remember you only ever have to make it up three feet at a time.
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Show Notes:
A four-word mantra from a Navy SEAL turned a brutal climb into something he could actually survive. “His mantra was not dead, can’t quit. So I forced myself to only focus on the three feet right in front of me. I wasn’t going to look up and see how far I had to go, I wasn’t going to worry about the time. I was just going to deal with that three feet, and then there’d be another three feet, and I’d deal with that.”
Real control starts the second after a bad thought shows up. “You cannot control the first thoughts that often arise inside of your head. You can’t, and everybody has them. But what you can control, who you are as a human being, is your ability to think about those thoughts.”
His parents taught him a mindset long before he needed a mountain to prove it. “Everybody on the planet has some type of disability. 99.9% of the time you can’t look at somebody else and see theirs, it’s non-visible, it’s on the inside, it’s stuff people have to face. But everybody has a disability. Yours is just a little bit more visually apparent.”
Growth doesn’t announce itself until you’re already past the point you thought was your limit. “Everybody in here has their own relative ceiling, and that ceiling allows us to get to those moments in time where we can look around and realize we’re at a place we never really thought we could have gone before. And that only happens by taking on your biggest obstacles.”
Sometimes the story that gets repeated to you matters less than the belief it plants. “My dad told me a story that he didn’t win a match his whole first year in wrestling, and he went on to become a successful collegiate wrestler. I found out years later, interviewing my grandpa for my book, that the whole story was a complete lie. He had no idea what I was talking about. But it worked. It planted that seed of belief that I could do it too.”
The goal was never the peak. It was never having to wonder what could’ve been. “I didn’t want to come away not knowing. I wanted to find out if it was possible. That’s the only thing that matters to me. Even if I fail, even if I fail within a couple hundred feet, I could live with it if I knew I had given everything in my power to make it work.”
Connect with Michael
- Text directly at 404-531-7691
