I found my son’s pet dead this morning.
I was not expecting to be writing this particular piece today, but some mornings have their own direction.
My best friend Dave used to boast about his luck. Not just good luck in the ordinary sense. He had what he called incredible luck. Huge pendulum swings. Not just unbelievably fortunate, but unbelievably unfortunate too, in ways that other people’s lives simply did not seem to accommodate. The stories on both ends of the scale were remarkable enough that people who heard them assumed he was exaggerating.
He was not.
Last year, Dave had a stroke. He dropped dead.
The doctor said the odds were so low that it was like winning the lottery in reverse. But that was Dave. Always beating the odds. Right to the end.
Mike Tyson said something that I have been thinking about since. “If you’re favoured by God, you’re also favoured by the Devil.”
There is a winding thread through almost every culture that carries the same idea in different clothes. Yin and Yang. Karma. The light and the dark. What goes up must come down, and what has gone down has earned the right to rise again. The specifics vary. The underlying pattern does not.
You think you are getting your head above water and life steps on your face. You think it cannot possibly get worse and then, somewhere in the dark, the sun starts to breach the horizon.
That is not just sales. That is the whole thing.
The wins in sales can be extraordinary. The crashes can genuinely hurt. A deal you have worked for six months, built a relationship around, restructured your quarter to accommodate, that closes and sets a new benchmark for what is possible. And then two weeks later something you thought was done falls apart for a reason you did not see coming and could not have controlled.
The pendulum swings. It always has.
The question is not how to stop the swing. You cannot. The question is whether you have the constitution to stay in the game through both ends of it. To take the crash without deciding it is permanent, and to take the win without deciding it is the ceiling.
Paulo Coelho wrote that ‘it is the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting’. Not the certainty of it. The possibility. The gap between where you are and where it could go is where the energy lives.
I have said for years that if you accept mediocrity and safety, if you choose to avoid the pain of failure, you also avoid the joy of success. That is the trade. It is always the trade. Safety is real, but it costs something that most people do not fully price at the time they are choosing it.
Dave understood that. He lived it completely, in both directions, right up until the day he ran out of reversals.
Lucky is complicated. But it is still better than the alternative.
Rest easy, mate.
For more thinking on the realities of sales, business, and the long game, there is more at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
