When life happens

Sometimes life sucks.

Life is going to have all sorts of ups and downs, especially if you are trying to go somewhere with your life.

Recently I was delivering a project for one of my clients by developing a world class custom software solution. And guess what, things went wrong…really wrong.

I’m currently a project manager for one of the world’s largest IT consulting firms, and am serving one of the world’s largest brands. We had a big product to launch, the work for which took 8 months.

One piece was missing though, we didn’t check to make sure the system we were upgrading was 100% in sync when we did our upgrade…and what was a small variance turned into a multi-million dollar variance. Ut oh.

There wasn’t just a quick roll back and forget it option for us on this one, and I knew we were going to have many weeks if not months ahead of us to correct this insurmountable issue.

My team worked around the clock for weeks…and needless to say people were seriously upset with us.

It’s one thing to watch people get upset on television, or to have your wife upset with you for leaving the dirty dishes out again. It’s a completely different thing to have people constantly upset with you for weeks, and even months.

Every phone call was heated, and we all knew people’s jobs were on the line if things didn’t get fixed quick.

Understandably, I started to get pulled down by all the pressure. I wanted to quit. I wanted to hide my head in the sand. I wanted to just forget about all the stress.

I shared my discouragement with one of my team members, and the next day he came back to me with some advice.

He told me four simple words; “keep your head up”.

I didn’t want to keep my head up. I wanted to lay down in the ditch. I wanted to roll over and protect myself. I wanted to give up and disappear.

It was painful…I had never had so many people upset with me at once in my life.

Against my natural instinct, I held onto my colleague’s advice. I walked into meetings and held my head up even when criticized. I held my head up even when I didn’t feel like it. I kept holding my head up.

Now that I’m writing this, I’m past the fire storm. Issues have been fixed, and people have calmed down. I guess you could call that a victory.

For me, the real victory wasn’t in fixing the issues, the real victory was found in keeping my head up even when things around me looked dismal.

You might ask why that’s even a victory? Well the truth is I’ve toughed my way through many challenges with my head down, only to find my head was still looking down weeks, if not months later.

The problem is, if your heads down, you run into everything. You bump your head more often. Your perspective gets worse, and things spiral.

Instead, through this trial, I was able to maintain my dignity. The situation wanted to pull me down, and although I felt the pain, I stayed afloat.

In your life and career, you are going to face many trials and tribulations. That is a guarantee. There is no way around it.

What I can leave you with is to keep your head up even through the trials.

When your mind and body tell you it’s too much, keep your head up.

When you are told you aren’t good enough, keep your head up.

When things look hopeless, keep your head up.

It’s a simple way of saying, “have faith, you will get through this.”

Good times will come, but so will the hard times. Keep your head up, for that’s where the real victory lies.