There’s a moment in every hard season where a quiet voice inside tells you to give up. Not loudly, not all at once just a steady whisper that says this is too much, lie down, stop trying. Mike Avila knows that voice better than most. He calls it the demon. And he’s spent decades learning to answer it with two words: Not Today.
Mike isn’t speaking in metaphors he read in a book. In 1991, while racing at Lake Mead a course he’d dominated for a decade his ski hit an object floating just under the surface at 100 miles per hour. He was dragged 150 feet underwater with his hand pinned behind his back before the rope snapped. His heart stopped. He had to be resuscitated. When he woke in the hospital, his neck was broken for the third time, and the right side of his body was paralyzed from his ear to his leg.
At 32, a Hall of Fame–bound athlete found himself unable to lift his arms to feed himself. And for the first time in his life, the guy whose own brother said “Mike doesn’t know how to lose” felt like losing.
The choice hiding inside adversity
Here’s the part of Mike’s story that matters for the rest of us, because almost none of us will break our necks water ski racing but all of us will get knocked down.
Mike’s insight is that adversity is universal, but your response to it is not. Life doesn’t care whether it’s being fair to you or whether you were ready. The curveball is coming; that part isn’t up for negotiation. What is up for you is which side of yourself answers the call.
He describes two versions of every person. There’s the weak side the demon that wants to take the path of least resistance, give in, and quit. And there’s the strong side, the one that still wants a good life and great things. The demon is relentless. In a genuinely tough stretch, it shows up every single day.
So Mike stopped trying to win the whole war at once. Instead, he made it a daily fight he could actually win: “Not Today, buddy. Go ahead and try again tomorrow, but you’re not getting me today.”
Why “today” is the whole trick
The power of the phrase is in its time frame. “I’ll never give up” is a promise so big it collapses under its own weight one bad afternoon and you’ve already broken it. But “I’m not giving up today” is a battle you can win before dinner.
Lying in that hospital bed, Mike could have looked at the whole terrifying road ahead the uncertainty of whether he’d feed himself again, let alone compete and been buried by it. Instead he shrank the problem down to a size he could carry. Not the rest of his life. Just this one day.
That reframe does something measurable. When you stop dwelling on a painful past or an uncertain future and focus on what you can control right now, you get a piece of your life back. You feel less overwhelmed, more resilient, more in charge. And every day you win that battle, the demon gets a little weaker and your belief in yourself gets a little stronger until one day you might even find yourself saying, “Come on, man, I’m never giving in to you.”
It works everywhere, not just on a ski
The reason Mike wrote his book is that “Not Today” isn’t a sports slogan. He’s watched it help people through the things that actually break us:
- “Today, I will not give in to my addiction.”
- “Today, I will work on being better with my kids.”
- “Today, I will sign up for the course that gets me a better job.”
Grief, career setbacks, a hard relationship with a parent, the temptation to numb pain with something that’ll cost you later all of it can come at you again tomorrow. None of it has to win today.
That night in the hospital, Mike looked long and hard in the mirror at the man he had to beat, and at the same time, the man who was going to beat him. He went to sleep feeling good about himself for the first time since the crash. He was still injured. But his mindset had changed and people around him could feel it before he said a word.
You’ve got a version of that mirror moment waiting for you too. The physical circumstances may not budge tonight. Your mindset can.
Mike’s full story the crashes, the comebacks, and the exact mindset tools he used is the heart of his book, The Secret to Never Giving Up. If today is the day you draw a line in the sand, it’s a good place to start.