GOT A GRIP
Wednesday Aug. 1, 2018
Anniversaries of events, much like birthdays, are milestone dates every year. No particular meaning of its own or to anyone else, just our memory.
In fact any particular day is as normal/special/irrelevant as any other day.
But we like to keep score, even if it is no longer relevant – we remember, reminisce and remind ourselves of how good or bad or sweet or bitter that memory might be …
Anniversaries of our birth date, of a wedding (or divorce) date, of a first date, of a first day sober (that’s mine!), of someone’s death, or when we did or didn’t do something significant. That date we started a business, or closed one. That day we did something special. Or that became horridly painful. All these memorable dates have anniversaries. And when we check out ‘this date in history’ – we’ll find birth and death dates of famous people, dates something spectacular happened.
For me ‘spectacular’ was August 1, 1980. First day in my first business. Actually, it was my second business. First one was a side-line part-time business a few years earlier that burnt through its cash before there was a puff of profit.
In July 1980 I borrowed some money from a bank, started my first company and sub-let some office space. Furniture and equipment gobbled some cash and business was slow in coming at first – so there were scary times. But we survived, then thrived. Its end point in 1986 wasn’t so pretty, but those early days were heady. Each year on this date my memory is full – remembering pushing furniture up steep stairs, waiting for the phone company to show up, meeting with my new banker, making those first announcement calls, prospecting for business. The first hire. The second. Steps from things we planned on doing, things that came along … jumped at those. And remembering disappointment of getting a grip on things that didn’t work, on people who didn’t deliver on promises, on business that vaporized or was lost to competitors. And then things flowed, but not before the slow periods caused sleepless nights and fear of losing everything.
Every year on this day I have these memories rolling around in my mind, some good, some bad, some horrid – and some absolutely euphoric.
