As a business economist, he earned quite a bit of money, but something just didn’t feel right. Rolf Schrama eventually understood that he was overcompensating for his disability. So he resigned from his job, became a paralympic sailor and then a professional speaker. ‘In some sense, a university degree can be a burden.’
He lives in an idyllic place, looking out over he water in West-Graftdijk. “Look, there’s my old lifeboat.” Rolf Schrama points outside. “I don’t have a sailboat anymore, but I can still get out on the water every now and then.”
The sailboat he mentioned was an integral part of his life just a year ago. For four years, he and his sailing mate Sandra Nap travelled the world to train for the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. “It was our last chance to compete, because sailing has now been eliminated from paralympic sports.”
No hard-nosed businessman
The loss of paralympic sailing also meant the loss of an income, so Schrama became a professional speaker and writer on topics such as pushing your limits, setting goals, dealing with change and following your passion. Next year, he hopes to publish his autobiographical novel, about the other transition he made at the age of 31.
That year, Schrama decided to quit his career as a successful business economist, and to take a good look in the mirror. He wanted to find out who he really was: not a tough businessman with a 2-meter tall ego, but a man measuring 1.25 meters with a rare form of dwarfism (diastrophic dysplasia) who was looking for his true passion.
He eventually found that passion, first in sailing, and now in speaking and writing. “Inspiring and motivating others is so much more valuable than a career focused entirely on making money.” So he immediately said yes when VU Amsterdam asked him to coach the student who won that year’s StudenTalent award.
Hey, I recognize that coffee mug! The plastic VU cup. Did you bring that out especially for this interview? “Ha ha! No, I’ve been using it ever since I wrote my thesis. My friends and I would take our coffee breaks at the Economics faculty. My wife sometimes pokes fun at me for drinking out of that cheap plastic cup, but it’s come to mean a lot to me.”
Your life has changed dramatically since you studied at the VU. How do you remember that time? “It was good. Of course, my study programme had a lot of the frat boys, in their red trousers and polo shirts, but I kind of rebelled against them. Otherwise, I got along fine with everyone. I lived at Uilenstede, and I had a great time there. My friends and I were also members of the study programme’s investment club. Once per week, we would meet in the bar to talk about whether we were any richer or not. But if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t study business economics. There are so many more interesting study programmes.”
‘Ever since secondary school, I only had one single goal: To become rich.’
Yet you kept at it, and after university you went to work in the financial sector. “Yes. Ever since secondary school, I only had one single goal: To become rich. Or perhaps even more so, to excell. I thought that everything would be fine once I had put all my ducks in a row. A good job, a beautiful wife. I had a huge amount of drive, and wanted to compensate for my height. And everything was going my way: I was asked to come work at MLP Private Finance, a fast-growing international listed financial institution. I had achieved my goal, but something just didn’t feel right. It seemed like I was on a train that had come to a standstill. I had lost my inner drive.”
Why was that? “I still hadn’t accepted that I had a disability. I always thought that I could change the world, and I actually did it in the small village I came from. I had enough friends around me, and if someone made a joke about my height, we all jumped on him. Verbally, I was more than a match for guys twice my size. We wanted to re-educate the world.”
“But when I went to Amsterdam to study and to work, all of a sudden the world was just too big. That’s when I realised: even if I earned 5 million per year, I would still never be normal. It was a difficult process to learn to accept that. I had a lot of anger, sorrow, bitterness and fear. It’s terrible that it took until I was 31 to finally dare to see who I really was.”
‘I saw that you need three elements to excell’
On the other hand: some people never reach that point. How did you manage to do that? “Because I dared to let go. I threw all of the certainties that I had financially and in my career overboard. The people around me were initially shocked that I was willing to throw away such a ‘good’ job. But what is a good job? That’s different for each individual. I had come to the realisation that you need three elements to excell: persistence, talent and passion. For a long time, I was only motivated by the first two, until I realised that the most important motivator is passion.”
“Before, I would lecture others that they just had to work harder – I thought laziness was a weakness – but hard work is not the key to success. It’s doing what you truly love. The rest will follow if you do that.”
How do you foresee your role as the coach of the StudenTalent award winner? “I’m mainly interested in the students’ motivations and convictions. What are their dreams, and what do they think is important in life? Don’t kid yourself: in some sense, a university degree can be kind of a burden. The higher you climb on the social ladder, the more difficult it will be to let go of that status. Your options begin to narrow more and more as you get older. At university, you learn to approach things from a scientific perspective, and to suppress your emotions. That’s a shame, because eventually you’ll get stuck.”
‘Convictions that we come to see as absolute truths can get in your way’
So should we rely less on our mind and ability to reason? “Yes, if we use it to convince ourselves of the wrong things. Not everyone has a physical disability, of course, but we all suffer from disabilities between our ears. ‘Convictions that we come to see as absolute truths, for example. I used to think that I had to use my brain to make money. I never have thought that years later I could earn a living as a top athlete. I use examples like that to get my audience thinking at my lectures. Everything you can dream of is possible! Why are we so convinced that money is still the most important measure of success? We need a new currency to measure that. I still don’t know which one yet, though. Maybe that’ll be my next project.”
You’ve written a book, and you’ve been nominated for the title ‘Most inspiring person with a disability’. Is excellence still important to you? “To a certain extent, yes. Naturally, I hope that my book will become a bestseller, because I want to share my message with others. But now, passion is the most important thing. I also try to live more in the moment. A few years ago, I was at a conference in America for people with dwarfism, and for the first time met other people with the same disability that I have. Most of them could not or could no longer walk. That gave me new insights. If you know that you won’t be able to walk tomorrow, what would you do differently today? Take a long walk, right?”
What is your average work week like? “It’s less regimented than when I was a competitive athlete. I not only give lectures at companies, but also at schools, so the summer is a fairly quiet period. I sometimes have trouble dealing with the quiet and loneliness that I experience while writing. Right now, I’m working more on my book, in the hope of having it finished by mid-September, just before the birth of my first child.”
“It’s kind of funny, actually: for my whole life, I wanted to lead a ‘normal’ life, but it was only when I let go of that ideal that I finally got it: a wife and a child. Later, when I’m riding around in a custom-built cargo bicycle with our baby, I’ll get all sorts of strange looks. But I know now that those looks aren’t meant to be mean, and I’m able to laugh about it now. Humour and self-mockery are tried and tested tools to make the world a better place.”
> Rolf has been nominated for the Golden Venus de Milo, for the most inspiring person with a disability in the Netherlands. Vote for him!
MOET NOG CONTENTBLOK WORDEN INGEVOEGD!
