Hi, it's Elise Hugh, and this is TED Talks Daily.

Today, Dean Furness, an analytic consultant, gives a talk about what he learned after surviving a near-fatal accident.

What do you do when your idea of the future is obliterated by a catastrophe?

How do you face who you are when who you thought you were

changes drastically? Dean gives his talk in what I would call an inspirational deadpan. You'll learn

from what he learned about resilience in the face of life-changing challenges. Here he is from the

stage at TED at Wells Fargo, 2020.

It seems we've been measured almost all of our lives. When we are infants with our height

and our weight, and as we grew, it became our speed and our strength. And even in school with

our test scores and today with our salaries and job performance,

it seems as if those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in

comparison to our peers. And I think we should look at that a little differently.

That personal average is just that. It's something very personal. It's for you. And I think if you

focus on that and work to build that, you can really start to accomplish some really amazing things.

This idea started for me on a December evening in 2011. I just stepped outside to do our evening chores

to feed our horses. I hopped into our tractor. And a few minutes later, a five-foot-tall, 700-pound

bale of hay fell from the loader and crushing me in the seat of the tractor, in the process,

shattering my T-5 and T-6 vertebrae. I didn't lose consciousness, but I felt this buzz

throughout my body, and I knew what had happened right away. My hands were reaching for my

legs, but my legs didn't recognize anything touching them. And in fact, I couldn't feel anything

from the center of my chest down. So there I was, about 100 feet from the house, with my arms

wrapped around the steering wheel trying to hold myself up, waiting for help. And unlike what you see in TV and the

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