Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,971.

And today I am going to read an excerpt, a story from the book, same as ever, by one of my favorite authors, Morgan Howsel.

And he talks about the great Houdini. Now, for those of you who don't know Houdini, which I'm not sure how many

of you do not know who Houdini was, one of the great escape artists, the greatest of all times.

And in 1926, he did a performance, and then he invited a group of people backstage to meet him.

As he was greeting the group, a student named Gordon Whitehead comes up out of nowhere and punches

Houdini in the stomach without warning.

Now, the kid meant no harm.

He wasn't trying to cause any problems.

He was just trying to reenact the stunt that he had just seen on stage.

It was a stunt where Houdini gets punched in the stomach by the largest man in the audience and he doesn't flinch.

But unlike that punch on stage, Houdini didn't see this come, this punch coming from Gordon Whitehead.

And it dropped him. The next morning, Houdini felt a horrible pain in the spot where he got hit.

And hours later, Houdini actually died from a ruptured appendix.

And Houdini, I mean, he's been punched in the stomach.

He survived being thrown into the river chained up.

But the thing that he couldn't survive was a punch that he did not see coming.

And a lot of times what Morgan Housel goes on to explain is as devastating, as horrible,

as horrible the story is, a lot of times it happens to us as well. The most devastating things

that happen to us are the things that we don't see coming, the things we don't expect,

the things that we don't plan for.

And my question for you today is, what are these things that you can prevent and that you can prepare for?

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