What's Yours Is Yours

From childhood we’re taught — and every screen keeps teaching us — that we must chase down our goals. But it also happens that we don’t get the thing we’d all but reached, the thing we’d set our heart on and already pictured in our daydreams, standing literally a step away from our “dream.” In moments like that the world feels unfair, and we ask the universe: “Why me?”, “What did I do wrong?” And we start to blame… ourselves.

My life has had no shortage of these. A few examples:

— I was buying a property from a friend of my friends. The deal turned out to be a tangled one, with the asset being redeemed out of a bank pledge. I put down a token deposit and spent several months structuring everything and getting it approved. The result: while I was away for a week skiing, this “friend” sold the property to another buyer who’d offered him a small premium, cash in hand. He didn’t even bother to let me know.

— A change in the law cost me, overnight, a significant part of a business I’d poured years of my life into. I was so shaken that for almost a month I couldn’t really sleep, gripped by this awful anxiety, asking myself: “How could this be? What do I do now?”

— I was buying an apartment, and everything was ready: the documents agreed, the deal set for the next morning at the notary’s. But that evening, near midnight, the realtor called me and just… cried into the phone. It was immediately clear: the deal had fallen through. The seller had found another buyer offering a far larger sum.

— I was a co-founder and CEO^[1] of a startup with several other partners. Despite our rare mix of skills, we ran into irreconcilable differences over how to run the business and where it should go in the long term. In the end I made a decision that was emotionally hard on all of us — to part ways, after almost a year of working together.

— My company took part in a large government tender where, after long preparation and high hopes, we lost — plainly unfairly, with third parties pulling strings. We never managed to prove we were right.

What stories like this do you have?

What did I realize after all those failures, disappointments, all that fraying of the nerves? In hindsight, every one of those events turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me! Better properties came along; I dodged serious trouble; I found new directions for the business and got out of deeply toxic situations in time.

Everything that happens really does happen for the best. There’s no point agonizing when something doesn’t go to our original plan. Maybe the universe has something better in store, and it’s simply too early for us to know it yet.

What’s meant to be ours will find us, sooner or later. Or rather — at the right time, it will come into our hands on its own.

Learning to accept these situations is a skill too, one we can build: not falling into the emotional “pits,” trusting the better outcome, and going on doing our work. The main thing is not to lose the optimism and keep the inner spark to move forward!

Here’s to trusting the universe! 😎

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1. CEO — Chief Executive Officer. ↩︎