The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Ryan Otwell grew up a preacher's kid in a middle-class home, raised in the church, moving from house to house as his dad's work demanded, and building the kind of faith that was borrowed from the people around him rather than owned for himself. That distinction would cost him a decade. When infidelity, attempted suicide, and months of family chaos unraveled everything at home just as he was stepping into adulthood, Ryan reached for the only foundation he had. He reached for people. And when people let him down, there was nothing underneath. His older brother left for the military. His younger brother needed him to be steady. He was neither. He fell in with the wrong crowd at his first job washing dishes at Ryan's Steakhouse, started drinking, started smoking weed, and discovered exactly what substances are designed to do: push you away from the pain and make you feel good at the same time. For a brain wired the way Ryan's is, obsessive, all or nothing, that combination was a perfect and total trap.

What followed was years of carrying that baggage into everything. He graduated college with an engineering degree he earned because school came easy and required minimum effort. He married, brought all of his unresolved trauma into the marriage, and watched it fall apart from the inside when his wife's affair came to light. He was already deep in substance abuse and chronic depression by then. By the time the lowest night arrived, it was four in the morning, he had not slept, and he could not go to work. He called his dad. He told him to come get him. He needed help. His dad took him to a facility. And sitting outside, unable to form a prayer himself, he asked his dad to pray for him. His dad told him: I know you can't see it, but one day you will be able to help somebody.

It took ten more years for that sentence to fully land. Today Ryan runs a seven-figure Amazon business, homeschools two boys alongside his wife, serves on the board of Send the Light shipping clothes and necessities to Christians in the Philippines, speaks on stages, and just came back from a five-day fully unplugged vacation, the first in years, that he would not have believed was possible for most of his adult life. He is not where he wants to be yet. He will be the first to tell you that. But he is not where he was. And that distance is the whole story.

This episode is for anyone still waiting to be clean enough to ask for help.