chances and choices

Something happened for my birthday this year that I never saw coming: The Canadian Tenors sang "Happy Birthday" to me. It was definitely a "top five" moment and the combination of their four voices focused on the celebration of my entry into this world was the sweetest sound I'd ever heard. It was like a dream. Surreal to say the least and something I'll continue to process for some time to come.

When I was driving back from their concert with my wife Tania and business partner Aly, it occurred to me that that night and everyone in it was the result of a single choice I made more than 22 years ago.

I was in the second year of design school taking a course on entrepreneurship in the MBA school. Hal Thompson came to the class at the request of our professor to give us some real world perspective. Hal was a gold medalist from both the engineering school and the business school he attended and as a young man had been exposed to a roller coaster of business experience. At the end of his lecture, he handed his business cards out to the 24 students in the class (23 MBA candidates and me) with the offer to spend an hour with whomever called him. I thought that if someone of his calibre was giving away free hours, it was a no-brainer. It turns out I was the only one who called.

When I started my first business–an industrial design consultancy–Hal was my mentor. Several years into that enterprise, I complained to Hal that I was lacking a sense of purpose and he introduced me to a company called Context Associated, which offered a series of personal growth courses.

In the second course in their series, I met and promptly fell in love with Tania. We've been married over 15 years.

After I completed all the courses I fell in in love with the personal growth business and bought the rights to market the courses in Calgary. That venture ultimately did not succeed but I met Aly in one of the courses and ended up hiring Phil from Context to be my coach.

I moved out of the seminar business and into the coaching business and Phil introduced me to one of his clients called Tom.

I did a good job coaching Tom and Tom introduced me to John. Their families vacationed in the same area every summer.

I did a good job coaching John and John introduced me to Dave. They were professional colleagues.

I did a good job for Dave and Dave introduced me to Richard. They were also professional colleagues.

I did a good job for Richard and Richard introduced me to Brett. They had done some deals together.

I did a good job for Brett and Brett introduced me to Jeffrey. Jeffrey manages the Canadian Tenors. The Tenors are becoming very successful and Jeffrey wanted Aly and I to coach them. Like any other kind of elite performers, the Tenors are facing the challenges typical of success and Aly and I started coaching them on the day I turned 46. Which is why they sung to me. That result was the last in a series of alternating chances and choices: things I had no control over mixed with things I had absolute control over.

Here is a video of our work with the Canadian Tenors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqiXSCHo34

I can only imagine where this thread of introductions and connections will go next.

So the moral of the story is this: if someone offers you an hour of their time take it. You could end up with a dream wife, a dream partner, dream clients and four guys singing to you like you were in a dream.

False positives and true negatives

Albert Einstein, while being primarily known for his keen fashion sense, hairstyle and oh, of course, that e=mc2 thing, would have been a great blogger had he been alive now.

He is the source of some very deep philosophy about life, as is the case for most great physicists, and his snappy quotes are some my favourites, up there with Emerson, Thoreau and Bush (the latest George W. one being something about "maybe I did make some mistakes".)

Einstein once said that you can either come from "fear or faith".

People make many decisions and do many things out of fear and many of those fears are not founded on reality.

I was once caught in an avalanche and nearly had the breath snatched out of me. This qualifies in my mind as a legitimate fear, linked directly and immediately to my actual death. The irony is that I was not really afraid, just calm, and this has been true for most of the life threatening experiences I've had in the mountains or behind the wheel.

Most of what I'm afraid of is vastly more abstract and fuzzy. I am afraid, in the low ebb sort of way, of amounting to nothing, of getting Alzheimer's and of being eaten by a shark, not all at once mind you, but if I do amount to nothing and get Alzheimer's, a shark attack might be a good way to end up with a swift death and a final write-up in a newspaper. I'm also certain that if I managed to get Steve Jobs' iPhone number, upon hearing he was shopping for a coach, I'd have a difficult time dialing the phone. And don't even get me started about the prospect of singing in public (secretly also my biggest rockstar fantasy.)

In the way I like to think about personal growth, people have four main fears: failure (and paradoxically success), rejection (which includes abandonment and all sorts of social shunning), criticism (humiliation, embarrassment, judgement) and loss (of money, health, life itself). It's a stunning to think about all the misery, value destroyed and opportunities lost to improve the human condition due simply to our natural tendency to avoid situations we think are painted with these fears.

I think the only viable alternative to fear is contribution, and here's where faith enters. Leaders show up when it's time for something to change. A leader sees something missing and thinks up an innovation to fill the gap and resolve the problem. There is so much working against a new innovation that it's remarkable that anything ever changes. In the face of these daunting obstacles to change, the leader must dig deep and find the sometime faint heart beat of the self-confidence, self-trust and self-security required to keep going on the sometimes cold and dark path to abetted future.

In the purity of my aspiration for a better future, I am not afraid. Such is the stuff of courage and the dance with danger.