Doug’s Superpower
I was born fighting. Three months premature, with holes in my heart and lung. The doctors didn’t think I’d make it. But I did. That was the first sign of my superpower: resilience.
I grew up in Flaxmere. It wasn’t an easy place, but it taught me grit. It taught me work ethic. By the time I was 16, I was a husband, a father of three, and working in transport — the industry I loved. Transport became my life. I was a workaholic, and proud of it.
Then, one day, driving a truck-and-trailer over the Napier–Taupō road, I suffered a stroke. My chest imploded, my vision blurred, and I nearly went off a cliff. Somehow, I pulled the rig over before blacking out. Six months later, I was back at work. Another test of resilience.
But my real test came years later. A steel pipe, six metres long, fell while I was saving a workmate. It crushed my back and changed everything. Doctors told me I might never walk again. They told me I would never be pain-free. For a time, I believed them. The nights were long, the pain endless. Pills dulled my body but couldn’t touch the darkness inside me.
Yet even then, my superpower wouldn’t let me stay down.
I began dragging myself through the streets of Auckland in the middle of the night. Fencepost to fencepost. Crawling through grass. Gripping poles and branches just to move forward. I hid my face so no one would see me broken. It was humiliating. It was painful. But it was also the beginning of my fightback.
That’s when I began to truly understand my superpower. It isn’t just resilience. It isn’t just willpower. It is something woven into my very fabric — the conviction that I will rise again, no matter what.
And I realised something even deeper: my superpower doesn’t exist for me alone. It only grows when I use it in service of others.
When my granddaughter was in Starship Hospital, I walked for her. At first, just to the letterbox. Then the fence. Then the corner. Eventually, 40 kilometres there and back. I made that trip nearly 290 times, until I was running it in just over two hours. I wasn’t walking for me — I was walking for her. And because of that, my superpower burned brighter.
Later, when I began training others, it grew again. I started with two women. One was a breast cancer survivor. The other had undergone gastric bypass surgery. I trained them for free, teaching them how to push, how to keep moving, how to believe in themselves. They told two friends, then four, then ten, until I had 180 people training with me in free community boot camps. Over the years, that number grew to more than 6000.
With the Influence Crew, we’ve run marathons and journeys across the world — New York, Hawai‘i, Jordan’s Petra Desert, Mexico’s Lost City, Gisborne’s First Light, and even the Great Wall of China. Always with the same motto: no one gets left behind.
That’s my superpower. It is resilience, yes. But more than that — it is conviction. It is the will to rise again and again. And it only comes alive when I use it to lift others.
When I’m not serving, when I’m not helping, when I’m not guiding — the superpower fades. It feels absent. But when I stand beside someone who thinks they can’t go on, and I show them they can… the fire ignites. The energy becomes unstoppable.
That is who I am. That is my essence. That is my superpower.
I don’t share this story to impress you. I share it to remind you of this truth: my superpower is not mine alone.
You have it too. That resilience. That will. That conviction.
It is in you, waiting.
It comes alive the moment you decide not just to fight for yourself — but to rise for others too.
Don’t wait for permission. Begin your fightback. Discover your superpower. And remember — no one gets left behind.
