https://youtu.be/8V3WroaZvfs
Back to the Redefining High Performance podcast, my name is Ty and I’m excited to be back with you again this week. And as you know, every week, we bring a quick, short episode to you. It’s based in research, it’s practical, it’s inspirational, and hopefully, in the next couple minutes, you’ll walk away with a new thought process, something that you can dive into and use as you move throughout your week.
Today, I want to share with you a story that’s going to introduce a mindset that we have found the highest performers have.
The story is an interesting story. It’s a man who has been an inspiration to me. And sometimes you find inspiration in interesting places. This is the story of Mel Fisher. Mel Fisher is the greatest treasure hunter the world has ever known. He discovered incredible treasure. So let me tell you about Mel Fisher. Mel Fisher was born in Hobart, Indiana, in 1922. After he served in World War II, he moved to California and bought a chicken farm. And it was there in California that he discovered the two loves of his life. His wife Dolores, who we call Dio. And diving. We started diving in the ocean, he loved it. So, Mel married in 1953. They sold the chicken farm, and they moved to Redondo Beach. And they opened up the state’s first dive shop. It wasn’t much, it was called Mel’s Dive Shop. But it was kind of the only place we could go and get snorkel equipment or scuba gear.
Mel and Dio started to build this little business. They offered free dive lessons to anybody who bought equipment, they modified a lot of existing equipment. And they started making some of the very first underwater movies showing people the glories of the ocean. They were some young ambitious, trying to build a business, right? So they did some funny things at one point to gain publicity. Dio – she challenged the current woman’s record of 50 hours of staying on the bottom. So on August 2nd, 1959. She was 23 years old. Dio descended into an empty dive tank with most of each aquarium and onlookers and film crews, and news were there. And for the next 55 hours, 37 minutes, and 11 seconds, she stayed underwater.
That’s crazy to me. I mean, what do you do? They set a TV outside of the tank that she could kind of watch TV. He dove in and played, like, car games underwater. checkers and chess, I don’t know, they figured it out. She set a world record. Well, they were just growing this business, and around the same time Mel began diving on shipwrecks and he discovered this new passion. He loved the idea of discovering historic salvage and treasure hunting. And so, it’s something he started doing throughout the Caribbean and some of South America.
And then he heard about a 1715 fleet that sunk off the coast of Florida and so Mel and Dio made a decision. They picked up their family, had a couple of kids at this point, moved across the country to Florida, closed their shop and he decided to search for treasure full-time. This is not a practical person, this is somebody who’s just going after their dream, right? Very quickly they discovered some unbelievable findings. They uncovered an entire carpet of gold coins on the seabed.
And found more and more of the 1715 fleet. Well, with all the success, they kept looking for new treasure to find, and in 1968, a friend gave Mel a copy of Potter the Treasure Diver’s Guide. And in that guide, it described the Nuestra Senora de Atocha as the greatest treasure that had ever and according to the guide, it crashed somewhere off the Florida Keys. Mel and his team went and they started searching the ocean floor every day for 3 years without finding anything from the Atocha. And then in 1971, one of the divers found an 8.5 foot gold chain. Not sure if it was from the Atocha trip or something else, but it kept him going for another 2 years. Two years later, five years into the search, Mel’s son, Dane, found a single silver bar.
With numbers inscribed that matched the Spanish manifesto, so they knew it existed, and they kept searching.
Well, on July 13th, 1975, after 7 years of searching. Can you imagine that? Persistent? The dedication, the commitment.
Mel’s oldest son, Dirk, found 5 bronze cans from the Atocha, and everybody thought the mother load was close. They thought they were gonna find it. But literally the next day, tragedy is struck me. One of their ships, the North Wind capsized during the night. And Mel’s son, Dirk and Dirk’s wife, Angel and another diver named Rick Gage were killed.
The resilience, the fortitude to keep going through all of this – this was not easy. They searched the ocean floor every day for more than a decade.
Mel under the loss of his son, his daughter-in-law, and other divers over the course of this. He constantly had to convince investors to fund this search. I mean, this was not an easy thing, but Mel had this famous saying, every day he would wake up and he would say, todayis the day, and it wasn’t just naive optimism. It was grounded resilience. So he kept searching. Well, for him the persistence, the resilience, it paid off. On July 20th, 1985, after nearly 17 years of searching. A magnometer indicated something down on the seabed, and two divers dove down to see what they had found, and they found they were sitting on an entire reef of silver bars. They found it. They found the mother load. So they pulled this treasure up. This is what they found. They found 127,000 silver coins, more than 900 silver bars that weighed 70 pounds apiece, more than 700 high-quality emeralds and 2,500 other lighter stones and over 200 pounds of heavy gold disc. Fits, disc, and chains.
estimate, put the wreck value over $400 million.
Now, why do I tell you that story? It’s not so you go searching for treasure. It illustrates to me a mindset that we’ve found exists in the highest performing people. When we talk a lot about adaptability, right, adaptability is the most crucial skill for you to be successful in today’s world. There’s a mindset within the idea of adaptability, and that is “Everything is Figureoutable.” Everything is figureoutable. There’s this powerful mindset set that sits at the heart of adaptability.
Everything is figuredoutable. It’s a belief that no matter what challenge you face, there’s a way through it. It may not be easy, it may not be fast, it may not be simple. But there is a way, right? There’s a way you can get through it. And just like Mel, this isn’t naive optimism, this is grounded resilience. It allows high performers to stay resourceful instead of resentful.
Proactive instead of paralyzed. because think about it, when you believe that everything is figureoutable, you shift from frustration to curiosity. What does that allow you to do? Curiosity is a superpower. And so when a process breaks, you don’t panic. You problem solve. When a deal falls apart, you don’t retreat. You regroup. And when circumstances shift, you don’t stall, you strategize. That’s what curiosity does. It allows you to look at it and go “everything gets figureoutable.” In our research and in real life, adaptability and belief go hand in hand.
People who believe that things are figureoutable, they don’t just weather change, they work with it. They improvise, they learn, and they move forward. This mindset fuels innovation. It fuels growth, it maintains relentlessness, it allows you to be resilient. And I’ve seen it firsthand in athletes, in entrepreneurs, and in leaders across every industry, the ones who thrive aren’t the ones with perfect plans.
They’re the ones who, when the plan falls apart, they trust themselves to figure it out. Right, there’s something in them, they truly believe this. There’s a famous quote by Mike Tyson that says “everybody has a great plan until they get punched in the face.” Well, at that point, you go, okay, this is figureoutable. How do we move forward? The next time you’re facing a challenge, I want you to remind yourself of this simple truth. You may not have all the answers, but you do have what it takes.
Everything is figureoutable, so stop being afraid of change and start being fueled by it.
That’s the mindset that I want you to carry forward this week.
take some inspiration from Mel Fisher, from his resilience. Today is the day. Everything is figuredoutable. And hopefully this week, you can approach things with a resolve to be able to move forward with figuring these out.
I appreciate you listening, I hope this has been helpful. If this has do me a favor, share this with somebody. Make sure you like, subscribe write a review. This helps us to reach more people to share this message, and if these are powerful, I’d love to connect with you. Find me on social media under Ty Bennett. I look forward to meeting you and having even conversations. I’ll talk to you soon.