The Night Jana Wrote Four Words That Changed Her Whole Life

By Jason Shelfer

Host of The Living Lucky® Podcast | LivingLucky.com

I’ve told this story from stages all over the world. I’ve told it on the podcast, in coaching sessions, at kitchen tables, and at gas stations to strangers who needed to hear it.

And every single time, something happens in the room. Or on the other end of the phone. Or across the table. People go quiet in a particular way — the way you go quiet when something lands not just in your mind but somewhere deeper.

This is Jana’s story. But I’ve watched it become a lot of people’s story too.

On May 23rd, 1990, Jana was a teenager living a full, active life in rural Kansas when a car accident changed everything in an instant. She was paralyzed from the chest down. At 15 years old, in a moment she didn’t choose and couldn’t have prepared for, the life she had known was completely rearranged.

She was transferred to Craig Hospital in Colorado — one of the country’s leading rehabilitation centers for spinal cord and brain injuries. The kind of place where the hallways are full of people learning to navigate a world that wasn’t designed for them. People relearning how to do things that used to be automatic. People in various stages of grief, anger, determination, and everything in between.

For weeks, Jana was somewhere in that mix. Fifteen years old. Trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense. And every night, she cried herself to sleep.

Every night. Until one night she didn’t.

It was a day that started in the lobby, waiting for just another day of routine rehab therapy.

There was a man in that lobby paralyzed from the neck down. He couldn’t move anything below his chin. He looked at Jana and asked her to scratch his nose.

She did.

And then he said eight words that stopped her cold.

“You have no idea how lucky you are.”

I want to be honest with you about what happened next. Because this is not a Hallmark movie moment, and Jana would be the first to tell you so. She didn’t float back to her room on a wave of gratitude and sudden clarity. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had just been told she had no idea how lucky she was — by a man who couldn’t move his arms — while she sat in a rehab hospital unable to move anything below her chest.

She was, by her own account, a little pissed off.

And that night she opened her journal with some of that energy still in her. A little snarky. A little defiant. And she wrote four words that were less a declaration of gratitude and more a challenge thrown at the page.

How lucky am I?

What happened next is the part that still gets me, even after telling this story hundreds of times.

The question — even asked with attitude, even written with a little edge — took her around a corner she hadn’t seen coming. Because it had a different frame than anything she’d been asking herself. Instead of pointing at everything that had been taken, it pointed at what she still had. What she could still do. Her abilities, not her disabilities. The things that were still true even now, even here, even in this.

The question did the work. Even when the person asking it wasn’t ready to receive the answer.

This is one of the most important things I can tell you about the 4-Minute Formula, and most people never hear it said this plainly: you do not have to be in a good place to ask these questions.

You do not have to feel lucky before you write “how lucky am I.” You do not have to be grateful before you write about gratitude. The question works regardless of the mood you bring to it. The Reticular Activating System (RAS) doesn’t care whether you’re asking with reverence or with an attitude. It just goes looking for the answer.

Jana didn’t know any of that the night she wrote those four words. She didn’t have a formula or a framework or a coach. She had a journal and a question and a little defiance — and those threethings turned out to be exactly enough.

It took her years to recognize what that night in the lobby gave her. Years to see the man’s eight words as the gift they were. The hero’s journey doesn’t come with a narrator. You don’t know you’re at the turning point while you’re in it. You only know it looking back.

Looking back, Jana can see it clearly now. That question — written by a teenager in a rehab hospital in Colorado, a little snarky, not quite ready to believe it — is the seed that grew into everything Living Lucky® is today.

Here is what those four words actually did, in the language we now have for it.

When Jana wrote “How lucky am I?” she gave her Reticular Activating System a new assignment. The RAS — the filter in your brain that decides what to notice out of the 11 million bits of information flooding in every second — received an instruction: go find the evidence. Instead of scanning for everything that had been lost, which it had been finding in abundance and finding every day, her brain started quietly, almost imperceptibly, scanning for evidence of luck.

The friend who showed up. The nurse who was kind. The small movement that came back that the doctors hadn’t promised. The sunrise through the window. The fact that she could still feel her face and use her hands and write in a journal.

None of those things erased the hard. But they existed alongside the hard. And because Jana asked the question — even with attitude, even half-reluctantly — her brain found them.

That’s not magic. That’s neuroscience. But being in that rehab facility at 15, it probably felt like both.

Jana went on to become an Elite Multi-Medalist in the US Paralympics. She played on Team USA Women’s Para Basketball — winning a Bronze Medal in Atlanta in 1996, competing in Sydney in 2000, and winning GOLD in Athens in 2004.

Then in September 2024, at age 49, she entered her very first adaptive water ski competition.

She finished last.

Thirteen months later, she stood on the podium at the Adaptive Water Ski World Championships in Mulwala, Australia — World Champion, with world records in trick skiing and a silver medal in Jump. She was named USA Adaptive Athlete of the Year and International Adaptive Athlete of the Year.

In 2025, she was inducted into the US Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame alongside her 2004 Athens gold medal teammates. One of the highest honors in American sport.And she did all of it — every single chapter of it — asking the same four words she wrote in that rehab journal on the night everything changed.

How lucky am I?

I’m not telling you Jana’s story so you can admire her. Although you should, because she is remarkable. I’m telling you this story because I have watched that same four-word question do something similar — on a smaller scale, on a larger scale, on every scale — in the lives of people I coach every single day. Not always gold medals. Not always world records. But always something. A decision finally made. A relationship finally honest. A dream finally written down and taken seriously. A person finally willing to bet on themselves.

The question works because it is not passive. It is an instruction to the most powerful filter system you own. It tells your brain what to go looking for. And your brain — loyal, tireless, literal — goes looking.

Jana figured that out at 15 because a generous man with no use of his arms looked at her and told her she had no idea how lucky she was.

She was a little pissed off about it. She wrote the question anyway. And everything that followed is the answer.

You don’t have to wait for a moment like that. You don’t have to be in a good mood or a grateful state or a place of readiness. You just have to write the question.

The question will do the rest.

The 4-Minute Formula Journal is built around the four questions that Jana’s story gave birth to and its available on Amazon and at livinglucky.com.

How lucky am I?

Write those four words down. Right now. By hand if you can. Whatever mood you’re in. And let your brain go to work.

Start Living Lucky® — four words. That’s where it starts. That’s always where it starts.