Attention to detail

When in Hong Kong last week, we stayed in a nice luxury hotel (being our honeymoon at all that).

Often it is the attention to detail that stands out. In particular, I was impressed that they changed the floor carpets in their elevators every day.

Everybody will get knocked at some stage.

As a kid, I was a massive fan of Michael J Fox. Despite the stick I got from mates, I insisted he was one of the finest actors around. I loved Family Ties. I'm still a big fan of his - for other reasons which I'll explain in a moment.

This post is not about advertising or marketing. I want to talk about set-backs.

Actually I made a note to write about set-backs just over three months ago. Not sure what triggered these niggling thoughts. Might have been all the talk of the recession. Or maybe Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan theory was rubbing off on me.

So sitting down at my kitchen table one morning about three months ago, I scribbled the following few words in my notepad "everybody will get knocked at some stage".

What was on my mind was this: Things don't always go as planned. Bad things happen. You don't get the promotion you deserve. You get let go from your job. Or you mess up at work. You lose a client or an account. Or you get sick. And these things knock your confidence. They make you question your competence, your motives, your career - even the way you live your life. Now, here's the thing. I guarantee it will happen to you. Because it happens to us all. And we never see it coming until it smacks you in the face. We're often left in shock.

The reason I wanted to write about this was to point out that...we recover.

I'm an optimist. I've been very lucky all my life. I know I'll hit bad times. I don't know what it will be, but I also know I'll eventually get through it. We all will. We're resilient.

I never got to write the post that day. Literally hours after I'd written the note, I got a call to say my granny had died. She was sick but I hadn't realised how sick. Exactly one week later, my auntie died. She'd been diagnosed with cancer just weeks before. My poor mum - her mother and sister, both gone within one week. Then weeks later, I discovered an old friend, aged just 36, had been diagnosed with a serious stage of breast cancer.

I suspect we can all relate to this or a version of this.

This brings me back to Michael J Fox. He wrote a book about six years ago about his fight with Parkinson Disease. Titled Lucky Man, he talks about how he has found more happiness because of his illness. His humility and courage was impressive. His new book Always looking up continues with his story of resilience and optimism. It's inspiring and hopeful. I'm listening to it on audio - read by the man himself.

I do believe everybody will get knocked at some stage. Just knowing this won't stop it but hopefully it helps us make sense of it and recover.