Chuck Norris died last week at the age of 86. Cue the jokes:
Chuck Norris actually died 20 years ago… death is just afraid to tell him.
They tried to bury Chuck Norris… the coffin tapped back twice.
When Chuck Norris was in the hospital, he resuscitated the defibrillator machine.
These funny memes and Chuck’s reputation as THE toughest human being in the world would give you the impression that he was born a superhuman with supernatural toughness and ability—but the REAL Chuck Norris was much different.
Carlos Ray Norris was born in 1940 in Ryan, Oklahoma. A town so small you could sneeze and miss it. His father was a drunk and eventually abandoned the family entirely; his mother worked whatever jobs she could find to keep the lights on. Due to their extreme poverty, his mother lived a nomadic life, moving them between Oklahoma, Arizona, and California to find work, often picking cotton to survive.
Because of this, Chuck was a painfully shy kid who struggled in school. He had zero athletic gifts. No charisma. No skills. By every visible measure, there was absolutely nothing about this kid that would make you say, “That boy’s going places.”
At 18, with no money for college and zero career opportunities, he joined the Air Force, where he was stationed at Osan Air Base in South Korea. While there, he stumbled upon a group of men practicing the martial art of Tang Soo Do in a courtyard. He watched for a while, then asked if he could join.
Did he “school” everyone by jumping in and instantly destroying the masters? Nope. Chuck got his a$$ kicked—repeatedly.
He was slow to learn, uncoordinated, and lost again and again. He lost every competition he entered. There was no “chosen one” moment, no cinematic training montage, no wise sensei pulling him aside to say he had “the gift.”
But what he ACTUALLY had was a near psychotic refusal to quit. He wasn’t tougher than everyone else when he started. He became tougher by choice—by repetition. By submitting himself to patient, painful practice every single day.
When he left the military, he started teaching martial arts and eventually opened his own school. Not an elite training academy, but an ordinary school for ordinary kids and people—a business that would turn into a massively successful franchise with over 2,000 schools worldwide. As the business grew, he built a reputation for excellence and became the karate coach for Hollywood’s elite, including Bob Barker, Priscilla Presley, and Donny and Marie Osmond.
One of his students happened to be Steve McQueen, who encouraged him to go into acting, so when Norris’s friend Bruce Lee called him to star in the 1972 film The Way of the Dragon, he agreed.
You would think that’s the moment everything clicked; Hollywood called and he was an instant star.
Far from it.
His first round of films were low-budget, cheap, and largely forgettable. Critics were not kind, with one writing that he had “all the charisma of a parking cone.” He was told repeatedly by the “experts” that he had no screen presence, couldn’t act, and had no future in cinema.
He kept going anyway; it wasn’t until he was pushing 40 years old that he landed Missing in Action, the film that finally made him a household name. It eventually led to him starring in Walker, Texas Ranger, the show that turned him into a full-blown cultural icon—but that didn’t happen until he was 53. Norris is the epitome of “overnight success” through YEARS of discipline and hard work, which is how all successful entrepreneurs are made. I think about this when I talk to MSP business owners and hear:
“I’ve tried everything.” (You haven’t.)
“The timing just hasn’t been right.” (It never will be.)
“I’m waiting until I have more resources/clients/time.” (You’ll wait forever).
“I’m just not a salesperson/marketer/self-promoter.” (Neither was a shy, broke, and average-intelligence kid from Oklahoma—and that didn’t stop him.)Many want to believe that someone like Chuck Norris was destined to be an icon because “he was born that way” or had some unique characteristic, skill, or advantage the rest of the common folk are bereft of. Not so; if you’re failing, it’s not because you’re missing skill or opportunity. What you’re missing is relentless, deliberate, consistent action, aimed at the right target, and repeated long after most people would have given up and gone home.
Chuck Norris didn’t “drive his mother home from the hospital as a newborn.” He drove himself to the dojo at 5 a.m. every day, including weekends when he could have been sleeping in. For years.
The question isn’t whether you’re “born” with Chuck Norris–level abilities.
The question is whether you’re willing to show up like he did—before the fame, before the money, before you knew what you were doing, before all the circumstances were right, before you had sufficient skill to ensure success—and do the work anyway. Remember, Chuck Norris doesn’t kill excuses. He just stares at them until they apologize for existing. Salute, Chuck.
