Dan Thurmon knew his entrance wasn’t good enough. He didn’t feel quite connected with the audience. So he took a do-over, raising the stakes in dramatic fashion by entering with a roundoff that included flips, cartwheels … and oh yes, nailing the landing.

Dan Thurmon just nailed it at the #asipowersummit @asicentral @DanThurmon pic.twitter.com/UVenbitP7u

— Jon Norris (@jnnorris) October 28, 2019

It was a memorable opener to an energetic morning keynote speech at The ASI Power Summit that included gymnastics, juggling and riding a unicycle. But Thurmon didn’t deploy these amazing skills just to impress the audience. He used them as key visual reinforcements to drive home his message about balance, vision and success.

Take the handstand he did on top of the onstage lectern. Thurmon kept his balance, but as he pointed out, it required countless minute adjustments to keep from falling off. The same thing is true in work and life, he said. Achieving complete balance is impossible – you’re constantly moving and adjusting just to maintain it. “Balance is not what you get,” he said, “it’s what you do.”

Dan Thurmon incorporated various stunts and acrobatics into a keynote about balance, vision and success.

Thurmon’s juggling display offered key lessons on embracing persistence and always looking forward. When Thurmon first learned to juggle as a teenager, he figured out the pattern that was necessary to juggle three balls. Adding a fourth ball required a whole different way of juggling; he couldn’t do the same thing he did before. “You must become willing to embrace that new pattern,” he said. “Most people don’t want to do that. They want to protect their diminishing pattern.”

Learning juggling, or any skill, isn’t easy. When you start, you’re going to drop the balls, Thurmon said. “The only difference,” he added, “is the people who can pick up more drops.”

Thurmon, a member of the Speakers Hall of Fame, offered several other key messages about looking up, leaning in and pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. To demonstrate, he brought out a set of large swords and proceeded to juggle them without (thankfully) blood or injury. “If you limit yourself to what’s comfortable,” Thurmon said, “you deny yourself what’s possible.”