Although I’ve been to New York more than a dozen times, most of those trips blur in my memory—except for one. That standout journey was the one my friend Georgia and I made several years ago. We arrived about the same time as a huge snowstorm rolled in. Thinking that a little snow and sleet was no match for two intrepid Minnesotans, we set out to visit places we had been eager to see. After we stumbled into Tiffany’s while I attempted to clear the sleet off my glasses, we realized that our visit was mostly going to include our hotel room. That was just the beginning of a trip that was loaded with unexpected adventures.
Then there was the time I got stuck in the middle of an Italian train strike and ended up spending hours stranded in Bologna where I hooked up with a delightful family from the Philippines. Both the father and mother were entrepreneurs, as was the eldest of their four children. Hours later, when we parted in Venice, we hugged each other and the father said, “We will always think of you as Auntie Barbara.” And I will never forget the Delgado family.
Every traveler has stories of plans gone awry, of course. These are often the stories that we entertain our friends and families with when we return from an adventure. Sometimes they’re funny, occasionally heroic, and almost always they’re memorable.
The same is true for entrepreneurs. We screw up. Things don’t go as planned. We have disappointments. We lose a contract. So what?
A woman once shared her frustrations with me as she was launching a new business. After I listened to her story, I said, “Imagine a movie that goes like this: Janet started a business and it was instantly successful. It would be boring to watch and it’s boring to live.”
There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter recently from folks who are clinging to jobs that they loath. While they’re dithering, they’re avoiding collecting great stories of their own, stories they’ll be telling their grandchildren someday. Of course, if predictability is a higher priority than surprise and delight, they need to keep doing what they’re doing.
So let’s review the wise words of the fine storyteller Paulo Coehlo: Too often we decide to follow a path that is not really our own, one that others have set for us. We forget that whichever way we go the price is always the same: in both cases we will pass through both difficult and happy moments. But when we are living our dreams, the difficulties that we encounter make sense.
They also make the best stories.
How do you pack so much inspiration into such a short post? Wow! Thank you!