So some months ago, I sat in a meeting room and saw hours and hours of hard work and planning, crash and burn in flames. Five people sat in the room, none of them said YES. Why did it happen? Does it matter if the referee call was wrong in the last 30 seconds of the game and your home team lost? No matter how upset you get - the record book will still say LOSS.
So the reason of why that happened is really not that important but if you are curious about it: it is the same old thing of WHO. Everything (the PowerPoint, the pitch, the room temperature, the process) was good. And the five people actually liked everything they heard - they just had no money to give to us. WHO was wrong. Those five entrepreneurs should not have been in that room to begin with. So good game. Zero points.
Can't get orange juice out of watermelons. Need oranges for that.
So now what? Seven years ago I would have gone into a complete state of shock for weeks. Depressed. Disgusted with my self. Drowning in a sea of self doubt and pity ("Why me? Why do all these bad things happen to me only?") I would have made my life and my associates life miserable for at least a good month.
Now it took around 60 minutes and one cold Blue Moon to brush it off. Went home, ate some food I had cooked the night before, and read a 50 page contract that just got faxed over, moved this business to the bottom of priorities for the next 60 days and pushed two other projects on top of it, thought of a good domain name for the online marketing business, got talking to a vendor who wants to break in to the same industry and wants to do a joint venture and has access to a list of 13,000 local business who are his past clients, Nora was still in love with me and had some fresh baklava from this hole in the wall bakery in Oak Park, thought about dumping my iPhone and checking out the new Google phone (the virtual keyboard on iPhone is terrible for writing anything more than a domain name) and then finally read around 50 pages of the new John Sandford novel before passing out.
Over all a pretty good and productive day despite my plan going down in the flames earlier. Brian Tracy says that everybody falls down. It is how soon you get up that matters. Took me seven years to understand that.
The dark side of speeding everything up is you will see failure fast. And then you just move on. For some that is hard to digest. I know. It is not easy to internalize that. Took me a while too. Knowing is one thing. Understanding is another.
But very few things are that bad or that good. It is our own childish expectations, this fantasy that we secretly carry in our own heart that somehow everything is going out to turn out to be perfect that is at the bottom of our own disappointments.
Hey, I am pretty pissed that nobody signed BUT in a world full of potential - they are ONLY five wrong people.
That is all.
A mistake was made. Penance paid in time and money. Now we either fix it or dump the idea. What else is there to do? The sky is still blue. The moon still came out. And there are deals to be made, things to put in play, people to meet and plan my next wine tasting party.
Life is good and full of opportunity. Even on days like when my fantasy of everything going right did not came true. Couple of hours were bad but that is why we have 24 hours in a day.
The rest of the day was pretty good.
