Andrew Mott

"When they told me I had a year to live, the first thing I felt was gratitude."

Andrew has spent his adult life in places most people only see on the news — and what he found there wasn't darkness. It was clarity.

The diagnosis came at 27 — sudden, terminal, uninvited. It was supposed to be the end. Instead, it deepened the thing his work had already given him: gratitude, even for this.

That's what he carries onto a stage. Not a lecture, not a highlight reel — a reason to look at your own ordinary Tuesday, your team, your people, and see how much is actually there.

Andrew Mott — editorial portrait on a city street

About Andrew Mott

Andrew Mott is a keynote speaker, firefighter paramedic, and humanitarian. The work has taken him to the earthquake in Haiti, the refugee camps of Bangladesh, and the front lines of Mosul — and through Ecuador, Bolivia, Kenya, Nepal, Turkey, Greece, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

None of it was a plan. At eighteen he joined a firehouse. At nineteen, two weeks in Uganda rearranged what he believed a life was for. He never went back to normal — and never wanted to.

Today he brings all of it to the stage — to corporate teams and conferences, rooms full of capable people moving fast. What he hands them can't be hired or bought: a lived sense of what every hour is worth. No theory. A record.

Keynote 01

Run Toward

Firegrounds, war zones, disaster zones — what a life of moving toward teaches about courage, decision-making, and doing the hard thing first.

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Keynote 02

The Gratitude Diagnosis

A practical case for gratitude as an operating system — built in a hospital bed, not a seminar. Why the strongest response to uncertainty was never control.

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Keynote 03

Triage

When everything is urgent, what actually matters? Prioritization under pressure, drawn from frontline mass-casualty medicine — for overloaded teams and the leaders who run them.

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Keynote 04

The Edge of the Map

130 countries in a decade — most of them nothing like home. On pushing past the limits your culture, your industry, and your own mind have quietly set for you.

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The Long Version

The Story

Andrew Mott joined the fire service at eighteen, fresh out of high school in 2008. A year later he left the country for the first time: two weeks of mission work in Uganda. What he saw there made going back to normal life impossible. So he didn't. He came home, sold everything he owned, and moved to Kenya to keep serving.

That set the rhythm for the next decade: serve at home, fly toward the crisis abroad, repeat. When the 2010 earthquake leveled Haiti and killed hundreds of thousands of people, he went immediately. It was his first disaster response. It would not be his last. Ecuador. Bolivia. Nepal. Turkey. Greece. Afghanistan. Bangladesh. Between deployments he kept moving — some trips for the work, others just to widen what he understood the world to be.

In Bangladesh, he gave medical care to families who had fled the violence in Myanmar on foot. When diphtheria swept the refugee camps, his team fought it with almost nothing — too remote for advanced care, too late for some. A three-year-old boy died in their arms. Service, he learned, is not a transaction. It costs. And it is still worth everything.

The trust those patients placed in complete strangers — I will never forget it.

Then Iraq. Three years, two roles: paramedic on diplomatic assignments, and combat medic in the war against ISIS. In the battle to retake Mosul, the wounded came in waves and without warning — tourniquets, wound packing, airway control, triage. Decisions made in seconds, for strangers, under fire.

At 27, he flew home to Columbus, Ohio, for five days between rotations. On his second day back, walking down the street, he went blind. One moment he could see; the next he could not. No warning, no symptoms. In the emergency room they found a brain tumor — glioblastoma. The doctors told him he had six months, maybe a year, to live.

I had been living every moment like it was my last — long before I knew what that meant.

Surgery took the tumor; radiation and chemotherapy followed. His vision, they said, was gone for good. Then the swelling in his brain eased, and his sight began coming back — half of it, anyway. To this day, half of each eye is dark. When he recovered, he began reconnecting with every person who had ever meant the world to him. And then he did the most Andrew Mott thing imaginable: he returned to Iraq and finished the work.

Andrew Mott in the city at night, looking ahead

That was more than eight years ago. The scans are still clear. Andrew is still in the fire service, and now a father. He tells these stories from stages not because they're his, but because of what they prove about you: there is no guarantee for the next second — and that's not a reason for fear. It's the reason for gratitude.

Off the Stage