You dream a thousand days and nights and work to the point of exhaustion to build something of great and enduring value. And then you turn around to see that it has fallen from the sky. Crashed to the earth. Lying there in pieces on the ground. What you do at that moment of truth is of overwhelming importance to your success, or lack of it, as a businessperson, marketer, entrepreneur, liver of life, lover, inventor, and romantic.

It begins by recognizing that it is not really a moment of truth. It is a phase of a continuum. If you are to make your true mark as a business person, marketer, liver of life, lover, inventor, romantic:

You must recognize right there at that moment of head on confrontation with the realities of life, that the pieces can be put together again. Or that they can be rearranged into a different type of satellite that will follow another flight path. Or that you can scrap all of the pieces you built your dream on and find others and others and others until you create the code breaker and the great and enduring achievement of your life stays in orbit. A beautiful vision to behold. Everyone is a genius, a winner, a king or a queen when a product, a service, a company, a love takes off. When it soars from a laboratory, a boardroom or a country road, and glides into the blue. But few of the kings, queens and geniuses retain those titles when they are standing there, alone and pole axed, staring at the pieces on the ground.

The greats, which we all can and should aspire to be, view these moments as beginnings, as challenges, as calls to action to find out what went wrong and how to fix it. Or more than that, to rethink everything from the blueprint stage and up and to create a new kind of satellite, software, company, that defies convention, flies in wild gyrations as opposed to predictable orbits and creates a new category far different than what you dreamed of from the start.

A category that first came to you when you stared at the pieces on the ground and saw not the disconnects but instead where the wise and true connections could be made. Anyone can walk away from anything, depressed, defeated and even bitter that it didn’t have a happier ending, a more fruitful result, a more stunning breakthrough. John McEnroe was just another talented mid-level kid on the tennis circuit until he walked on the court one day, saw the pieces on the ground, and
said, “this isn’t about beautiful ground strokes, it’s algebra. It’s all about angles.” with that he rearranged the pieces and became champion of the world.

It’s what we do when we see the broken pieces, not the achievements, that makes the difference in our lives. In our grand and blessed continuum.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Recovered.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under Business, Entrepreneur, Management, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.