I recently gave the keynote speech for a global telecom company’s worldwide sales conference in Dallas, Texas. Just as I was walking out the door to catch my Uber ride to the airport, one of the attendees stopped me. “I wanted to tell you how much Theo’s story inspired me today,” he said.

Tears welled in his eyes as he explained that his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer the prior year. She was in remission now, but the experience had really disoriented him. He couldn’t concentrate on work, he wasn’t motivated by anything, he struggled to sleep, and he had gained more than twenty-five pounds. But Theo’s story of determination against the odds had inspired him. “I have to do something,” he told me. Today, he said, would be the day he got into the hotel pool and began to exercise and he was going to make some decisions about his career situation.

Everyone has a story. You have a story, and you should tell it. Because you never know when someone needs to hear your story to help them fight through their own loss or adversity as they find their way to the thing they do best that the world needs most from them. Theo said me one afternoon, “Learning to walk again was the easy part. Learning to live again was the challenge.”

Tuesday, September 17, 2013 was shaping up to be special. After all, it was Farid Tabaian’s thirty-third birthday. He was living in the mountains, and he intended to honor his mother’s advice. A native son of Colorado, born and raised in Boulder, Farid was particularly close to his mother.

She met Farid’s father at Northwestern University, after he immigrated from Iran, escaping the country’s 1979 Revolution, to attend college. The two later moved to Boulder, where Farid’s father earned a PhD in linguistics at the University of Colorado and then spent a long career in manufacturing. Farid’s mother, a teacher, became a Montessori school director.

Farid’s voice softens, though, when he speaks about his mother. “Any time we talked about what I should do in life,” he said, “her advice was always simply: ‘Follow your passion and do what you like.’” Never sure what that meant for him, Farid cruised through high school without any particular focus. He decided to attend the University of Colorado mostly because it was near home and the mountains he loved.

Growing up, he was always that kid in the car navigating and holding a map on family vacations. He had first been introduced to cartography through a high school geography teacher who piqued Farid’s interest in maps. But Farid didn’t fully connect with making maps as a vocation until he registered for a couple of geography courses at the University of Colorado–just because it sounded kind of interesting. “I stumbled upon a world there,” he recalled, “that I never knew existed.”

Jim Robb, who became Farid’s mentor, was the director of the cartography lab, and he encouraged Farid to consider the field as a profession. “I got to college,” Farid said, “and discovered you could learn to make maps and make a living from it. And I fell in love with it.” He took a corporate job for a few years after graduating with a degree in Cartography in 2003 making maps of the U.S. power line grid.

The job helped develop his skill, but Farid grew tired of the big company environment. He preferred being outdoors and craved having more time to ride. He just wasn’t sure how to do that and still make a living. When his mother became ill, finally succumbing to cancer at the young age of sixty-four, he began to understand what she truly meant with her advice: “You have to work, but you have to enjoy life too.”

By the time Farid lost his mother in 2010, he had left the safety net of corporate life and had found his way to Salida, Colorado to start his own business making maps for mountain bikers. He specialized in small sized water proof, tear proof, fold proof and what he likes to call “fool proof” Colorado mountain biking trail maps that he sells only through locally owned stores or his website, where he also dispenses advice, news and facilitates discussion forums. Farid is meticulous in his work, usually taking four to six months to finish a map project. Rarely satisfied, he considers his first map, the one of Durango, to be his best.

His mother’s words of advice echoing in his memory, Farid planned to take the day off on his birthday to ride the Monarch Crest trail, near his home in Salida.  A shuttle bus would drop him off for a 6,000-foot descent through some of Colorado’s best scenery.  Undeterred by news his brother couldn’t make the trip with him, Farid called anyway to reserve his seat on the shuttle bus for the next morning. But he ran into a generally uncooperative reservation agent. The call ended unceremoniously and without a reservation for Farid.

Unwilling to let the experience sour the mood, he decided to scuttle the Monarch Crest ride in favor of another trip down Doctor Park Trail.  He had ridden Doctor Park dozens of times before, but it was still his favorite, and he wasn’t going to waste what promised to be a “chamber of commerce” fall day.

Farid packed his gear and bike into his van, followed the familiar hour-long highway west to Gunnison, turned north on the Gunnison National Forest road winding along the Taylor River, and made camp. He slept in the van at the North Bank Campground, just at the end of Doctor Park Trail where he would finish the next day.

The next morning, he set off on the road to the trail-head on his mountain bike as he had done so many times before. But on this day, he came upon a group of four women who had spent the night at Taylor Canyon campground, just a half mile down the road. They were attractive, looked interesting, and he was single. “Happy birthday to me,” he thought to himself, and he stopped to say hello. Farid was easy to look at himself, so the ladies took notice as he slowed to a stop next to their campsite. He stands a little over six feet, is mountain bike fit, and sports a black, perennial three-day beard. His dark, Persian eyes add a shadow of mystery to his laid-back demeanor behind an easy smile.

The women told him they were from Switzerland, vacationing together for a couple of weeks. The women had never been to the Crested Butte area but heard it was a required destination for avid mountain bikers. Farid mentioned he was in the trail map business, and when they quizzed him on recommendations for their trip, he gave them one of his popular water proof pocket maps of Crested Butte mountain biking trails.

Intent on riding alone at his own pace since it was his birthday, Farid was anxious to get on the trail. He parted ways with the group, but not before exchanging contact information and agreeing to meet up for dinner later that night.  But they did encounter each other at least one more time, at a resting point about half way up the trail, at the end of a very steep and technical section. As they chatted and absorbed the scenery, four young men came blasting up the hill one by one and paused at the same spot to catch their breath and exchange a few pleasantries before moving on.

Farid soon followed, and he was cruising through the same cool forest air shaded by an aspen grove and the steep embankments of a deep gulch, when he came upon a figure lying motionless on his side near two aspen trees just where the trail takes an awkward turn. He intuitively knew something was very, very wrong and jumped off his bike to ask the fallen rider, “Hey man, are you ok?”

And then, Farid decided to help. “I just knew we needed to get people in there as quickly as possible,” he explained. “I am a map maker, and I know that area very well. It’s a narrow gulch where he was–very hard to reach, twenty miles from the nearest town, and there was no cell phone service.  But I knew I had service at the top of the trail.  So, I knew the best was to hoof up the hillside as far as I could go. I Called 9-1-1 probably ten times until I could connect.  I was running on pure adrenaline, breathing so hard, because that hill was extremely steep.”

***

Find out more by visiting www.findingtheo.comor buy the book Finding Theo: A Father’s True Story of Loss, Courage, and Discoveryanywhere books are sold, and check out Farid Tabaian’s website at www.singltrackmaps.com.