What Olympian David Smith Taught Us About Living Whilst Facing Death
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2024, Jake and Damian met the remarkable Olympian David Smith MBE at Fearne Cotton's Happy Place Festival and held an audience of 300 people spellbound. David had a terminal cancer diagnosis — and a message about how to live that neither of them has forgotten since.
This week, they share a voice note David recorded from his hospital bed after becoming a full quadriplegic with recent news he has just months left to live, where he speaks about dancing with life, finding beauty in stillness, and why the journey — not the destination — is everything.
Jake and Damian reflect on David's three guiding values of compassion, curiosity and courage and why so many of us wait for the worst news of our lives before we start truly living.
If you've never heard the full episode with David Smith, it's Episode 215 — and this conversation is the perfect place to start.
Please donate to Ed Jackson’s Go fund me for David Smith here .It is raising money to help fund the treatment, care, equipment, rehabilitation and wider support Dave needs, while also helping to ease some of the pressure on him and his family.
Find David on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsmithmbe/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Damien, how's it going? |
| 0:04.0 | Hey, I'm good, Jake. |
| 0:05.0 | You? |
| 0:06.0 | Great, thank you. |
| 0:07.0 | And obviously, this is a very different conversation to one that we would normally have on |
| 0:11.0 | our performance because we want to talk about someone who had a profound impact on us. |
| 0:16.0 | Someone who, since we spoke to him a couple of years ago has left us thinking about him often, |
| 0:24.6 | keeping in touch with him, and that man is David Smith. |
| 0:29.0 | I think before we hear from David, I think it would be great if you could tell us the story of how we first met one of the most incredible guests we've ever had on the show. |
| 0:33.1 | Yeah, you're right. |
| 0:34.1 | I think no adjective we could use to describe him quite captures just how |
| 0:39.0 | special David is. So back in 2024, me and you were invited to be part of Firm Cotton's |
| 0:46.4 | Happy Place Festival up in Tatton Park just outside of Manchester. And we thought it'd be great to do a live interview in front of an audience. |
| 0:57.4 | And when we were sort of thinking about who would invite to capture the messages, |
| 1:02.7 | we were put onto David through his friend James Burr, who suggested that David's message |
| 1:09.5 | would be one that had been incredibly profound. |
| 1:13.4 | It'd been given a terminal diagnosis for the cancer that he was suffering from. |
| 1:19.5 | And he explained that he wanted to come and share some of the lessons on how to live better |
| 1:25.2 | whilst he was facing his own death sentence. |
| 1:28.9 | And he sat in front of an audience at there, you'll remember Jake. |
| 1:32.4 | And he held over 300 people spellbound. |
| 1:36.6 | We were sat in that tent. |
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