What Epilepsy At A Young Age Taught Me About Leadership
The Day Everything Changed February 3rd, 2006. A day unlike any other day. I was hitting the highway at
The Day Everything Changed
February 3rd, 2006. A day unlike any other day. I was hitting the highway at about 110 km/h, cold wind flowing through the car, glad to finally be out of the office, exhaling the weight of market visits outside of Beirut. Music was loud, very loud; Rachmaninoff was shredding his piano while the Moscow Philharmonic Society orchestra angrily battled behind him in his Piano Concerto No. 2. Nothing felt better. And then suddenly… nothing. All went black.
When I woke up, it was not cinematic clarity. It was hazy. The kind of haze you feel waking up from general anesthesia, where it takes minutes for the brain to remember it even has a body. My muscles ached as if I had just done the most punishing workout of my life. My jaw throbbed with the dull, relentless pain of clenched tension. Moving felt like betrayal.
I was still lying on the asphalt in the middle of the highway, surrounded by about fifty strangers, Red Cross workers, ambulance sirens, policemen, and murmurs of panic. But the first thing I noticed was not them. It was a car, wrecked, crushed against the right wall, glass shattered and glittering like broken stars. My first thought was: Poor guy, he’s surely dead. It took me a minute to realize I was the guy.
Confusion spilled in. Where am I? Why am I on the ground? Why are these people staring at me? Am I dead? Questions that made sense, and some that did not; and then the pain hits: head concussion, broken shoulder, broken ribs, just a couple. At first, caregivers and policemen thought it was a speeding accident though I do not remember that I lost control at some place. Later, at the hospital, after a long series of tests, an EEG, and a sleep in EEG, came the real diagnosis: epilepsy. I was stubborn, a bit of an idiot, rejecting all treatments. It took 24 similar episodes; home, office, pool, supermarket, client’s meeting room, restaurant a couple of times, and so many other places over the next couple of years, till I surrendered to reality.
The treatment? Yes, a couple of pills for life, okay fine, but the big hit was: “Change the way you live”. That was the doctor’s advice. But he never said how.
What Is Epilepsy?
Epilepsy is not just “a seizure disorder,” as it’s often reduced to in simple definitions. It is a condition in which the brain’s electrical circuits misfire. Imagine your brain as a city with billions of lights turning on and off in a synchronized flow. Epilepsy is when the power grid suddenly surges, sending chaotic waves of electricity across the city, shutting some areas down and overwhelming others.
During a seizure, consciousness can vanish without warning. Muscles contract violently, jaws clamp, memory blanks out, and the body collapses into a vulnerable state. For the person experiencing it, time skips. For everyone else, it’s a terrifying spectacle of fragility.
Epilepsy forces you to live with unpredictability. There is no calendar for when the next seizure may arrive. You learn quickly that control is an illusion. But you also learn how to prepare, how to adapt, and how to rise again after every collapse. It is not just a medical condition. It is a crash course in resilience, humility, and leadership.
The Leadership Lessons Epilepsy Forced On Me
Epilepsy didn’t just change how I lived. It changed how I led. When your brain can betray you at any time, leadership stops being about control and becomes about strategy. The condition turned me into a chessmaster, but also a pragmatist. Here are the key lessons epilepsy carved into me, lessons that still shape how I lead teams, companies, and even myself.
1. Be a Chessmaster: Think Six Moves Ahead
With epilepsy, you cannot afford to live only in the present. You must always calculate possibilities: What if it happens while driving? What if it happens in a meeting? What if I am alone? That constant forecasting taught me to think strategically in business. Anticipate market shifts. Anticipate competitor responses. Anticipate human behavior. The best leaders don’t just play the move in front of them, they see the ripple six moves away.
2. Live Fully in the Present
Paradoxically, epilepsy also forces you into the present. Because you never know when your system will collapse, you learn to squeeze meaning from now. This balance of long-term thinking with present focus became my leadership style: prepare obsessively, then act decisively in the moment. Leaders must think like chessmasters but live like jazz musicians, improvising with what they have.
3. Create Decision Makers, Not Followers
I learned very young that I couldn’t be everywhere. There would be days when I simply wasn’t capable of leading in real time. That meant building others who could. Leadership isn’t about creating dependency. It’s about creating more leaders. A company where everything waits for the CEO is a company waiting for collapse.
4. Build Systems, Not Departments
Departments are walls. Systems are bridges. Epilepsy taught me that fragility comes when everything is siloed. If one circuit fails, the system must reroute. In leadership, this means designing organizations where departments talk, collaborate, and compensate for one another. Leaders must create systems that adapt, not departments that wait.
5. Accept That Control Is Illusion
When you have epilepsy, you stop pretending you control everything. You cannot control the next seizure, just as leaders cannot control every outcome. What you can control is your preparation, your mindset, your ability to adapt. Leaders who cling to control collapse under chaos. Leaders who accept uncertainty thrive in it.
6. Prepare for Collapse and Rehearse Recovery
My seizures taught me the importance of not just prevention but recovery. Every fall was followed by a system for getting back up. Businesses need the same. Leaders must build playbooks for failure, knowing it will happen. Crisis rehearsals, recovery strategies, contingency plans; these are marks of resilient leadership.
7. Resilience Is Not Muscle, It’s Elasticity
Strength alone breaks under stress. Elasticity bends, absorbs, and returns stronger. Epilepsy forces you to stretch into uncomfortable spaces, then recover. Leadership is the same. The great leaders are not the ones who never fall. They are the ones who bend without breaking and teach their teams to do the same.
8. Energy Management Matters More Than Time Management
After a seizure, energy crashes. You learn quickly that time means nothing without energy. The same is true in leadership. You can have a 12-hour day, but if your energy is drained, your impact is zero. Smart leaders manage energy, theirs and their teams’ as the most precious resource.
9. Trust Is Everything
When your body can betray you, you depend on the people around you. In business, I learned the same truth. No leader succeeds without trust. Not contracts, not policies, not job descriptions; trust. Build it, or your leadership collapses.
10. Redefine Winning
Epilepsy stripped away illusions of perfection. Winning became not about never falling, but about always rising. Leadership, too, isn’t about flawless execution. It’s about persistence, recovery, and continuing despite the chaos.
The Psychology of an Epileptic Leader
Leading with epilepsy means you operate in paradoxes. You are hyper-aware yet strangely detached. You see fragility in yourself, which makes you more empathetic to fragility in others. You become less judgmental of mistakes because you know collapse can happen without fault. But you also become less tolerant of excuses because you know resilience is a choice.
The psychology of an epileptic leader is built on humility. You stop pretending to be invincible. Instead, you lead by showing that invincibility is a lie, but progress is still possible. Vulnerability becomes strength. People follow you not because you never fall, but because you show them how to get back up.
Conclusion
Epilepsy at a young age was a curse, but also a teacher. It stripped away illusions of control, perfection, and invulnerability. In their place, it left me with strategy, resilience, humility, and systems thinking. It forced me to become a chessmaster while teaching me to live in the present. It demanded I create decision makers, not followers. It shaped me into a leader who understands that collapses will come in business, in markets, in life, and that true leadership is not about avoiding them, but about preparing systems and people to recover from them.
The seizures may have been unpredictable, but the lessons were clear: leadership is not about never falling. It is about teaching others how to rise.
Epilepsy entered my life on February 3rd, 2006, and taught me lessons no MBA program could. It showed me the fragility of control, the necessity of resilience, and the power of systems over silos. It trained me to think six moves ahead while living fully in the present. It taught me to build leaders instead of followers, to prepare for collapse and rehearse recovery, and to manage energy as the true currency of impact. The psychology of an epileptic leader is built on humility.
