Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: resilience

  • Some Days All We Can Do Is The Best That We Can

    Some days all we can do is fight best we can!

    I have chronic fatigue that I try my best on a daily basis to fight through. And some days are worse than other days. Today is one of the worser days.

    Larissa woke me up at 8:30am. I was in a deep sleep and dreaming so deeply. And here we are six hours later and I’m so tired. Which makes me so unmotivated. But there is a house to run. And bills that need to be paid since I’m not independently wealthy. Which means I have to try my hardest to soldier on.

    In spite of everything, I think I’m doing okay. I did the dishes and changed the sheets on the bed and did three loads of laundry. I wrote a blog post, I coordinated a pest control call, I prepared for and then had one interview, scheduled a second interview. Now I’m starting to turn my attention back to real estate like I’m supposed to.

    There was a time when it wasn’t hard at all to move. My ex-wife used to tease me like that US Army commercial: “You do more before 9am than most people do all day.” Except that was 25 years ago. Today, 15 years after lung disease and 15 years into Ankylosing Spondylitis, I barely am out of bed before 9 am. And all day long is a battle to stay productive. But whether I succeed or fail, I can honestly look in the mirror and say I do my best. Even when I’m laying down (as I’ve done twice today) I’m hollering at myself inside to get up, to get moving, to keep fighting. Which is why I’ve been able to get (as little) done as much as I’ve gotten done by 2pm today.

    Anyway. I remember reading about chronic fatigue in a magazine in the 1990s and thinking, “That must be hell.”  I had no idea that I too would someday come down with chronic fatigue. And I can indeed confirm that it’s truly hell. Except I’m doing the very best I can to pull myself out of the flames and to at least have a few good moments each day. That’s all I can do.

    Here are to good days. And here is to life. And here is to the will to fight. I wish for all of us good days, and life, and the will to perserve.

  • In A Way, It’s A Resilient Optimist That Excels in (True) Sales

    Today we’re working on what essentially is a Request For Purchase (RFP). Not technically an RFP, but what essentially adds up to an RFP: a potential home seller who we met with already, met with again, gave a listing presentation to, met with again, and now after she went radio silent for a few months sent a list of 10 questions that she wants answered by the three agents she’s considering.

    So much “hurry up and wait” with this person who doesn’t seem able to make up her mind on when she wants to sell, if she wants to sell, and who she wants to sell with. I keep asking myself, are we just wasting our time in meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting and with all these various requests for information for a person who seems reluctant to just make a decision?

    To be honest, I’ve gotten increasingly cynical over the years.

    I think back to a software opportunity I had back in 2003.

    A client was upgrading their hardware and so many of their software vendors were charging exorbitant rates so that the client could continue the same exact software (pre-SaaS days) but on different hardware. So suddenly software that cost my client $2 million to run per year was suddenly going to cost $12 million to run per year although they weren’t going to be actually doing anything differently with that software (same business cases, same number of users, etc. etc. etc.). Of course, the client was very frustrated.

    Of course, I detected a chance to help the client. But jas as importantly, I smelled blood. We could take advantage of our competitors charging so much and look into replacing them for less money.

    It’s hard to remember now, but the economy wasn’t awesome in 2003. Companies were still recovering from their exorbitant spending on Y2K and “e-business” from the 1990s, still recovering from the post 9/11 and post-Enron layoffs of 2001, and just weren’t investing a lot of money in new software. So we software sales reps had to seize any opportunity we could when we could if we wanted to make quota and (like me) pay for our kids’ private school tuitions. And so I sprang into action.

    For four months, I had sooooooooooo many meetings with this client. I overviewed the general idea (replacing the more expensive competitors’ software with our software). I did discovery meetings to find out how they were using their software, then internal meetings to find out if we could indeed replace some of our competitor’s software for cheaper, then showing the client how we would run the software cheaper and doing demos on that software, then meeting with all the various stakeholders at the client site who used the competitors’ software to show them how they would be able to use our software in the same way, and so on and so on. And, by the way, the client was a three hour flight away and this was before Zoom so this meant nearly every week I was flying for three hours each way to conduct all these meetings.

    At any single step of the way, the client could have said, “Screw it, I’m not going to upgrade all my hardware,” which would have meant he didn’t have to deal with the software upgrade fees. Or a stakeholder could have said, “We’re not replacing our software! We’ll just increase our budget to continue running the same software.” Or the software companies we were looking at replacing could have said, “We’ll waive the upgrade fees.” And any single one of these scenarios would have killed my opportunity and erased all my hard work.

    But I continued on. Every week for four months I hopped on a plane, left my beloved kids and home (and car) for a few days, and tried to make magic happen because I believed that I could make this happen and that I would get a nice commission check at the end while saving my client a lot of money.

    Finally, at 6pm on Friday August 29th 2003 (I’ll remember the date for the rest of my life), after a hectic week where we were trying to get this signed before month end so my bosses could meet their monthly numbers and we could keep the higher-than-normal-but-expiring-at-the-end-of-the-month discounts that my desperate bosses had approved, the client signed. I’d done it!! That three hour flight home late Friday night? Some of the best three hours of my life. I sat there in silence, nursing a celebratory vodka soda, reveling in the joy and relief that it was over, grateful that my hard work was going to save my client money and fill my family’s coffers and also give my family a free trip to Hawaii for making quota. The deal was signed. The client was going to benefit, and my company was going to benefit and my family was going to benefit.

    Looking back, it was such a long shot. I can’t believe it actually happened. I don’t know that I’d believe today like I did back then, that I would pursue it as doggedly today as I did back then, because the reality is I’ve seen too much since then. I saw the time that a rep was on the verge of winning the deal and — boom — the client was acquired and so the deal was called off. I saw the time when my peer did everything I did in 2003 and was about to ink a major deal with a 6-figure commission check except she was laid off before the deal was inked because the Suits In The Ivory Tower wanted to make their profit numbers so cut sales headcount. Not long after she was let go, the deAL was signed and our company got its money but another rep got the commission check for my peer’s amazing work. That’s the stuff that keeps me awake at night. That I hadn’t experienced or witnessed back in 2003 so believed anything and everything was truly possible with enough perseverance.

    Anyway, I’m realizing that to be a truly passionate sales person, a person has to be a resilient optimist to the extreme. To believe. To doggedly pursue. To doggedly jump over every single hurdle while continuing to believe that when all their hard work is over the contract will be signed and everyone wins. They have to be like Teddy Roosevelt Jr. on D-Day when everything seemed to be going awry and he said, “We’ll start the war from right here” then started doggedly moving forward in the face of (literal) death.

    Thinking on all this, I’m proud of myself. I’ve done it. I’ve done it more than once. I’ve done it as recently as the past few years, doggedly pursued the impossible and then come out ahead. And if I’m honest with myself I’ll do it again despite my reservations. In fact, we’re going to submit this pseudo-RFP and win the listing.

    And as much as anything, I believe this: a great sales person (not a lucky one, or a right-time-right-place one, but a great one, a truly great rainmaker, must be the resilient optimist to the extreme.

  • Gray Skies Are Worthy Too

    Yesterday life felt amazing.

    The sun came out. By afternoon we were on our friend’s boat on Lake Sammamish with amazing blue skies overhead and Mt. Rainier peaking over the trees in the distance, and although I’m not a fan of boating I just felt on top of the world in that moment. In fact, every time the blue skies come out in Seattle I just feel so amazing inside, and I feel like anything is possible and I appreciate life soooooo much.

    But the gray days are worthy too.

    I think I was 20 when I started to realize I may have SAD. After an amazing Spring and Summer and Autumn (when it was still 80 degrees in October) where I just felt so happy and alive every day, when the gray skies returned that December and January suddenly I felt so heavy inside. I thought maybe I was homesick (what with being in a small town college hours away from my big city home) and maybe a little lonely (what with most of my friends being back home), and this belief was solidified when my spirits improved immensely as I met more and more friends the second half of the school year and we experienced a warm and sunny spring. Then I came home from school for the summer, and Seattle just had the most amazing weather (like most summers in Seattle), and I was in the best spirits from February all the way through into September that year.

    Then the clouds returned. Starting in September, it was a very very rainy year ahead, including record rainfall and generational flooding, and suddenly I felt so very heavy again. Exhausted. I thought maybe I missed my summer job back home, or the friends who’d transferred away between my first and second year away at college, or maybe was suffering a little from my mom’s challenging times she was going through at the time. During that time, I started to withdraw: I exercised a lot, studied even more, and stopped going out as much. I didn’t realize just how much it was the clouds/gray weighing on my spirit.

    I’m in my 50s now. I can look at the repeated patterns over the years that I didn’t have the luxury of doing when I was in my early 20s. And every single year I suffer when the weather turns gray. On the outside I seem fine. But on the inside I start feeling heavy. Listless. A little trapped. And then the blue skies return and suddenly I feel like anything is possible again, that everything is just great again.

    So yesterday on our friend’s boat, when the sky was so blue and I just felt so amazingly at peace sitting there with my friends, I realized that I need to work on improving my inner spirits (key word: inner, on the outside I seem totally fine 🙂 ) when the weather turns gray. Because the weather is gray soooooooo much in Seattle, at least half the year, which means I’m essentially giving up half my time (life) to struggling inside when the weather turns gray.

    Thankfully I’m a fighter. When the chips are low I’ve always been able to persevere. And I’m determined to enjoy the other half of my life too, the one where the skies turn gray. I will persevere. The second half of my life will be sunny times in my soul even when the skies turn gray 🙂 Because every single day of life is worthy, even the cloudy gray days too.

  • Sometimes I Feel Almost Like The Old Me

    Time was I hopped out of bed first thing in the morning.

    I made coffee, ate a healthy (fruit) breakfast, did the dishes, fed the dogs, then either walked/ran or hustled to the gym for an hour before starting my 10-12-hour work day. During the day I moved moved moved, and frankly didn’t have a lot of patience without the drive or energy I had. After the kids were in bed, after I’d read them a story and helped them get on their pajamas, then I’d ready or watch movies or work some more.

    That was before 2011. Before lung disease clawed away all my energy. For two years after that, it was all I could do just to function in life. That was total hell.

    I remember asking my doctor, “Is it hopeless? Will I always feel this tired?”

    He looked me in the eye, and said, “You know, we can look at this way: the old you, the one that was at the top 1% for energy, is gone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get you feeling better than you do now.”

    It took the better part of five years, but by 2017 I was starting to feel normal again. Nowhere near the old me, but not perpetually overwhelmed and exhausted all the time.

    Then in early 2020 I got Covid. The fever lasted a week, but it taxed the heck out of me and in the six years since I haven’t quite felt the same again, although I felt a heck of a lot better than I did in 2012 and I continue to improve from 2020.

    But there are days I start to feel like the old me. The pre 2011 me. Hyper manic. Energetic. Like the last few days.

    Evy is on break this week. And I didn’t have to volunteer this week. And I am working as my own boss in real estate versus working for Micromanagers From 21st Century Corporate Hell. And the result is I’m feeling good. So very good. In fact, the last few days I’ve felt great. I’ve cooked. I’ve cleaned. Done laundry. Been productive as heck at work. And I start to feel like the old me, the me before 2011.

    It feels amazing.

    I’m grateful.

    I’m grateful I used to have so much energy. Grateful that I know what that feels like (amazing!). I’m grateful that I survived lung disease, and that I feel better today than I did in 2012 and again in 2020.

    Life is a journey. I’m grateful for the journey of the past few days.

  • My Autobiography Title Would Be “Ugly Boy” (AKA Takes A Licking And Keeps On Ticking)

    If there were a biography about you, what would the title be?

    As a teen, I was teased a lot about my looks.

    But my favorite tale is the time in eighth grade when my classmate burst into class. “Hey everyone, get this!” He called out to the class. “Tony’s grandma was looking at our yearbook last night and stopped and pointed at a picture and said, ‘Now that boy’s ugly.’ So Tony looks who to see it was and it was Rob!” Of course, I’m Rob in that story, and I can still hear the laughter from my classmates.

    To make a long story short, that was a painful comment but I kept my head up. And I have many many faults, but I’m a reasonably confident person who didn’t let that teasing about my looks in my formative years bring me down and in fact had a lot of fun in my teen years. I’m actually kind of proud of that if I’m honest, that I hung in there and resisted the urge to withdraw from the world despite some heartless ribbing along the way.

    I’ve had a lot of luck in my life. But I’ve also had my share of times where I was kicked in the groin. I had undiagnosed autoimmune disease as a kid but somehow emerged from that reasonably productive as an adult. My first marriage was to a selfish narcissist who eventually kicked me to the curb after extracting every morsel that she possibly could from me but again I emerged from that too (and today am re-married to a much better person). And perhaps luckiest of all, I was diagnosed with a potentially terminal (50/50) lung disease at age 42 but not only survived that but emerged from it mostly okay.

    So I feel like I’ve lived a lucky life where I have so much to be grateful for, but also one where I’m frequently called “Ugly Boy” (mostly figuratively but one time literally) that I have had to stave off and then emerge from. And I have done just that.

    I feel so fortunate for all that. So grateful for that. I am proud to say that I was called “Ugly Boy.” And that I emerged from that a-oh-kay 🙂