Conventional wisdom advises that everyone is entitled to a second chance. Make a mistake, make a bad choice, and the second chance is waiting in the wind.

“Entitled to,” are the key words. Perhaps you are, but in many cases you aren’t getting it. So often there are no second chances. None. Call the police. Pray to God. Petition the Pope. All to no avail. Life says no and its no. Period.

However, you have an opportunity in your career to achieve a true breakthrough. A major speech. An invention that has the power to change an industry. A financial projection everyone expects you to beat.

And you don’t. You fall short. All of the fairy tales of how life is supposed to work say, no problem, you’ll have another chance.

You don’t. In most cases, you blew it. Once you blow the speech, you can’t give it again. Not the next day. Miss the financial projection and the halo you once wore in the company is replaced by a cloud. The golden child is just another disappointment. You aren’t getting that promotion you were counting on. Not in the near future. This is life, not a Hallmark TV special.

Ever loved another person and fell out of love? Tried to rekindle? To make it work again? Well, if you have, and we all have, it doesn’t work. Once love is dead, it is D.E. A. D. It cannot be brought back from the once was. It is extinguished for eternity.

Is that fair? No, but fair is an artificial term as well. Nothing is fair. You can’t pin your hopes on fair. You can’t build your business on fair. You can believe that love, or lack of it, will be fair.

What you can do is to hone the art of recovery. There are no second chances but there are fifth and sixth chances. And that’s where the real opportunity lies and where the winners in the unfair game of life seperate themselves from the whiners.

When you fail at something, when you dissapoint, when you lose something of great value, when you see the success or the love or both slip away, a rainbow will not appear to save you. There will be no instant cure. Instead, you can, if you have the vision and the drive, embark on a new journey- of pain and joy and ultimately of determination and exhileration – and reconnect with your dream and exceed it.

The rub is that this will come not in the day after the fall. Not in weeks of the loss. Not after a good night’s sleep and a pep talk with yourself. When I was 17 I had a terrible loss and as it turned out, a wonderful learning experience. The loss crushed me. Depressed me. Isolated me. And my second chance, my fifth chance, took four years to materialize.

The experience taught me to build a buffer around all that I do. To go for everything in life like a wild-eyed dreamer but as I tear through the wilderness of business and love and art, I recognize that I will fail now and then, over and over again. I just leave the room and resources to recover.

It will take time. It always does. There is no Land Of Second Chances. But The Land Of Fifth Chances? I learned how to live there years ago. And I am deeply thankful for it.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tags: Business, career, msco, the second chance

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 10:17 am and is filed under 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.