When Michael Hingson was born, the doctors told his parents that their baby – who was born without eyesight – would have to be sent to a home for handicapped children because blind people can’t accomplish anything.

“My parents said back to the doctors, ‘You’re wrong. He can grow up to do whatever he wants, and we’re going to give him that opportunity,” recalled Hingson.

Motivational keynote speaker Michael Hingson, who has been blind since birth, recalled how he and others survived the attacks on Sept. 11 while working in the World Trade Center. He was joined onstage by his guide dog Alamo.

On the ASI Power Summit stage, Hingson – the event’s motivational keynote speaker – shared his life story, from succeeding in sales to surviving the attacks on 9/11 while working in the World Trade Center. Throughout his speech, he explained that the only thing that’s ever held him back is how others viewed his condition.

“Blindness isn’t the problem,” he stated, “it’s our attitude about blindness.”

Joined on stage by his guide dog Alamo, Hingson told how he rode his bike as a kid, became an Eagle scout and graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in physics. When faced with the option of being laid off from a job or jumping into sales, Hingson quickly chose the latter option, in a time when only 30% of blind people were employed. (Today, that figure is 50%.)

All his life Hingson had been fully aware of the stigma others have of blind people, but that didn’t get in his way. In one instance, after starting and selling a company, he applied for a job and wrestled with revealing to the employer that he was blind. His longtime wife Karen (who died in 2022) urged him to be transparent about his situation, reminding him that Hingson always promoted the philosophy of Dale Carnegie to “turn perceived liabilities into assets.”

As a result, Hingson wrote in his cover letter that “as a blind person, I’ve had to sell all my life just to be able to buy a house or convince people to let me rent an apartment. So, when you’re hiring someone for this job, do you want to hire somebody who comes in and sells for eight or 10 hours a day and then goes home because the job is over? Or do you want to hire somebody who truly understands sales for the science and art that it is and sells 24 hours a day as a way of life?”

Hingson got the job and began parlaying that into opening new offices for companies. That included being able to purchase cheap office space in 1999 at the World Trade Center because, as he was told, occupancy rates had been low since a bombing on the building in 1993.

Motivational speaker Michael Hingson outlines how we can be more inclusive and why he was able to escape the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 because he was blind from birth.

At 8:45 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, as he was reaching for letterhead on the 78^th floor of Tower 1, Hingson heard a muffled explosion followed by the building tipping 20 feet then bouncing back. “No one knew what had happened,” he recalled. “It had nothing to do with [me] being blind.”

Because of his blindness, Hingson had spent time walking around the complex, talking with personnel and learning the emergency procedures and where things were located. “I needed to know the options,” Hingson said. “The difference between me and you is I don’t read signs. I don’t want to read signs. I want to know.”

That knowledge proved invaluable in the moment. He and Roselle, his guide dog at the time, were able to calm down the people he was with and get them into the stairwell to evacuate, moving floor by floor with calm and purpose while comforting and motivating those who needed it. “We knew we had to keep panic out of the stairwell,” he said.

“Blindness isn’t the problem, it’s our attitude about blindness.” Michael Hingson

Hingson described the rest of his harrowing escape, from being engulfed in dust and debris when the towers collapsed to finding refuge in a subway tunnel, to the moment he finally made it home. He recalled how Roselle, finally at home and with her harness removed, began playing tug-of-war with his other dog. She knew the crisis was over.

“Dogs don’t do ‘what if’ and we need to stop doing so much ‘what if,’” he said. “There’s a lot of reasons to think ‘what if’ for the things you have control over, but don’t worry about the things over which you have no control. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can deal with them, but don’t worry about them. Don’t let them ‘what if’ you to death because all that’s going to do is to create more fear in your lives.”

Hingson concluded his talk by putting out a call for greater inclusivity for the products and services that promo companies offer. He also stressed that everyone has a disability; for people with sight, that disability is “light dependence.”

“Disability is not a lack of nor is it inability. Disability is a characteristic that every single person on this planet has, including all of you,” he said. “And it’s something that benefits itself differently for different people. But everyone on the planet has some sort of disability. Don’t exclude anyone.”