How Does Your Story End?

covid-19 May 05, 2020

When I was 20 years old, I took a year off from college and rode my bicycle through Europe for four months. 
 
At least, that’s what I tell people now. 
 
But the story of what happened wasn’t so certain when I was in the middle of it.
 
College didn’t go according to plan
 
I began my freshman year at a top liberal arts university that recruited me to play baseball and attend a nationally recognized business leadership program. 
 
By mid-semester I’d skipped a mid-term and failed another, which landed me on academic probation and put my scholarships at risk. I was burnt out. I didn’t care anymore. I had no fire for what should have been an exciting time in my life. 
 
All I wanted was a break
 
After eking out a cumulative GPA that barely saved my scholarships, I decided to take a year off on a self-imposed sabbatical. 
 
It wasn’t a popular decision, and my parents weren’t fully supportive of putting things on hold. My dad was especially concerned, so when I asked him to sign my leave of absence form, instead he ripped it up and walked out of the room. 
 
At the time, I thought it was anger that drove him to tear up the paperwork, but later I recognized it was fear for my future. He was scared I wouldn’t go back to college, that I’d find something else to pursue while I tried to sort through the confusion that clouded my decision-making. 
 
Was this going to be a sabbatical? 
 
Or was it the start of a new direction – a pivot – in my life? 
 
I worked as a server at the Olive Garden to save money for the adventure. I loved my job. It was new, it was fun, I made good money ($150/day was amazing for a 20-year-old!). More than anything, I got to be myself and sell sell sell. 
 
What did I care if I what I was selling was soup and salad with unlimited breadsticks? It covered the bills and allowed me to travel. 
 
An epic journey
 
My buddy, Gwyn, and I spent April, May, June and July on the road from London to Wales, then over to Amsterdam and down through Paris to the Mediterranean, along the French and Italian Rivieras to Florence, and finally into Rome. 
 
The trip was everything you could imagine two 20-year-olds would plan with $20/day, a couple of printed maps, and no cell phones for our parents to check in on us. We camped mostly in fields along the way and occasionally splurged on a youth hostel every other week to shower and do laundry. 
 
We didn’t have a destination, just the road ahead of us
 
It wasn’t all fun and games though. I was deadly serious about my sabbatical from school. I read voraciously, burning through 2-3 books each week while camping under the stars. My favorite books were those written by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, authors from the infamous “Lost Generation.”
 
The time alone on my bike and in camp with just one other person forced me inside my head to deal with the private parts of life you don’t want anyone to know about, the things you keep to yourself because you don’t yet have an answer that makes sense.  
 
Every day I wrote a few pages in my journal to shape what went through my head while sitting on my bike hour upon hour, mile after mile, town to town. The writing helped me sort through all the change and make some semblance of what was going on around me.
 
The trip, like college, didn’t go according to plan

I had 20% of my money stolen, I got food poisoning that put me in bed for more than a week, and I flew back a few weeks earlier than the 4.5 months I’d planned to stay.
 
And yet, to everyone’s surprise – even my own – I returned to college that fall. I was a new man, refreshed and inspired to live life to its fullest. Yes, I still waited tables at the Olive Garden, but I’d built on what I’d learned during my unplanned sabbatical that year. 
 
The experience turned out to be less of a leave of absence and more of a chance to learn about myself.
 
The three-act story structure
 
Right now, my wife and business partner, Katy, is reading Brené Brown’s Rising Strong, a book about taking control of our narrative and choosing how the story ends. In the early chapters Brown talks about Pixar’s approach to storytelling. She writes on page 30:

Act 1: The protagonist is called to adventure and accepts the adventure. The rules of the world are established, and the end of Act 1 is the “inciting incident.”
 
Act 2: The protagonist looks for every comfortable way to solve the problem. By the climax, he learns what it’s really going to take to solve the problem. This act includes the “lowest of the low.”
 
Act 3: The protagonist needs to prove she’s learned the lesson, usually showing a willingness to prove this at all costs. This is all about redemption – an enlightened character knowing what to do to resolve a conflict.
 
What act are we in?
 
Watch the news and you’ll hear most experts think we’re in Act 2 of our COVID-19 story. While not a health or economic authority, I think we’re not anywhere near the climax of the story (as Pixar would describe it). 
 
We probably have a ways to go before we get to the “lowest of the low.” I’m not 100% confident we know what it’s really going to take to solve the problems we face, because we still don’t know the depth of what we’re looking at and all we have to do to solve them.
 
How does Act 3 end?
 
The bigger message of Rising Strong is that we all have the power to write our own ending. Sometimes we fall in life. I certainly did during my freshman year in college. I descended even lower in the months before I left on my grand adventure. If you ask my buddy, Gwyn, he’d tell you I was probably still down in it during the first few weeks of our trip. 
 
It wasn’t until I was in the hospital with a bacterial infection and a stolen wallet that I hit the lowest of the low – and it wasn’t until several months later that I recognized how far I’d climbed out of that pit.
 
None of us know if we’re at the bottom of this crisis. Besides, it’s different for each one of us, and each of our businesses, in each of our markets. The story won’t end the same for you as it does for someone else. We all have our own hurdles to overcome in our own way.
 
What we do know is that we all have it within us to pay attention to what’s going on around us and rise strong when the time comes, whenever that is…

Till next time, good luck with your inquiries!

Sam

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