The Usual Excuses

I have been wrapped up with the new book and working with my staff to install a $100,000 equipment upgrade at Centratel. For those reasons, I have neglected this Blog. So, here's an update and I will be better about staying up with it. Here is an excerpt from Work the System. It has to do with when I first got a clue about what was wrong with my business and my life. It was six years ago:

The Enlightenment

It is Often Darkest Just Before Dawn -Sojourner Truth, 1850

So, for eighteen years I hammered my small answering service into some kind of subservient yet mocking submission. Everything depended on me, it seemed, and if I let up for one moment my world would come crashing down.

Over all those years I never let up for an instant.

And then, finally, I hit a brick wall. In my arsenal of last-minute bailout strategies, I had no measured solution to the deathblow crisis looming ahead – the inability to cover an upcoming payroll. Just a week away, when I would have no pay checks for them, my staff would surely walk out, instantly ending my business as our clients raced elsewhere to find another answering service to handle their emergency calls. In a single moment, the business would close its doors and everything I had accomplished in the past two decades would be lost, not to mention that my staff of 12 would be out of work and my 300 loyal clients would be in crisis.

To boot, the thought of having to get a job – of being someone’s employee – sent shivers down my spine.  After all those years of being on my own, working for someone else would be a nightmare for me and for my new employer.

I was 52 years old and looking into a financial and career abyss, the depth of that nightmare compounded by my mental and physical wreckage. It was more than an interesting coincidence that the imminent end of Centratel was dovetailing with an almost certain mental and/or physical breakdown.

But then, late one night while lying awake in bed and just a week away from losing everything, I was yanked out of my box. Without coaxing and for no apparent reason, two simple, pragmatic questions came charging out of the ether: “What have I been doing wrong all these years? And, since the end is coming, any option should be worth considering, so, what have I got to lose?”

The “nothing-to-lose” position was key. The certain end of my business not only opened my perception gates but gave me the freedom to consider anything: Any new idea was now an option. I had a week to stretch into unknown territory; to experiment, because…what was the difference? As a last effort I would either save the company and myself or I would go down in a blinding flash.

And, my pride was completely demolished. This was another key. I had been self-absorbed, protecting my ego by not looking hard at my own performance – and now there was no more ego to protect. It was time to beat myself up in a completely objective and pragmatic way. Out of that self-pounding, answers came.

In my physical and mental desperation, and knowing that I had nothing to lose, I underwent an enlightenment of sorts. It sounds corny, but a vale lifted from in front of my eyes. As I laid there in bed, I suddenly saw my entire world from a bird’s eye perspective. Extricated from the details, stepping up and out of the game, I looked down to see that my life was an array of systems and not a chaotic jumble of events, people and things.

So, that night, because of my desperation, I stepped outside the game and saw that the solution to the problem was not to find a more efficient way to whack the mole’s  heads; the solution was to find a way to eliminate the moles altogether. I had to put down the hammer and root down into the mole tunnels and eliminate them completely. And, while I was down there taking care of the business of mole extermination, I would also find a way to keep their mole relatives from returning.

Late that night I looked at the game itself rather than the moles, taking a vantage point “outside and slightly above” it. It was the game that had to change, not how I was playing it.