You're out on a limb.
You have to find two new pieces of business a month.
You have to create the proposals.
Sell them.
Then do the work.
And sell it.
Then do it all again.
Then hope to be Net45'd.
Often you feel like you're arrayed against colossal forces that have the might and power to crush you like you're a nothing, which of course, you are.
What's more, the big guys are big. They have the power to control, to a fair degree, prices and deliverables. So you have to, in a sense, get in line.
You have to follow their rules.
Just now, I read the obituary of the last RAF fighter who defeated the Nazis in the Battle of Britain. "Paddy" Hemingway died earlier this week in Dublin at the age of 105. You can read the obituary here.
I can't help but think he didn't follow the rules of the game.
Churchill said of this band of flying brothers “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
If you need convincing, here's some data.
Just 749 RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes faced off against 2,550 German fighters and bombers. Data is numbers. Numbers don't know how account for soul.
Further, most of those Germans had had more practice. They had flown scores of combat missions in eastern Europe, Poland and during the war in Spain.
Actually reading Hemingway's obituary is astounding. He was downed four different times by the Germans. One time he described it this way. It almost sounds nonchalant.
“Somebody clobbered me. They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.
"There were jellyfish everywhere, I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”
Hemingway grabbed an oar and helped row the small boat back to Blighty.
I find hope in obituaries and stories like Hemingway's. Today when almost everyday the little guy is being kicked in the arse by gigantic forces, people like Hemingway show that fighting back, and yes, winning is not an impossibility.
Hemingway, as you'd expect, sums things up well.
“Being the last of the Battle of Britain veterans has made me think of those times. Fate was not democratic. New pilots with just a few hours in Hurricanes did not have the instincts of us more experienced pilots and were very vulnerable in combat. Many did not last long.”
No, fate is not democratic.
Actually very little is.
If there's a lesson in all this, it's about survival.
It's best told, of course, in by Hemingway.
“I am here because I had some staggering luck and fought alongside great pilots in magnificent aircraft with ground crew in the best air force in the world at that time. It was just a matter of taking each day at a time. Others write the history — we were doing our job.”
That's it.
In five words.
We were doing our job.
That's what you do. You ignore the odds. And buckle down.
