One of the top country music songs this year is called “Next Thing You Know” by Jordan Davis. It’s a great song where the storyline takes you from a chance meeting of a guy and a girl that (next thing you know) move in together, get married, have children, kids go to college, and they end up as retired grandparents. It’s a super narrative with a catchy tune as well (the song reached #1 on Canada’s Country Music Chart, #2 on the USA version, and #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 which covers all music genres).
The song led me to think how some small thing can change the trajectory of a person’s life. Here are a few of those moments for me, along with a bit of narrative where appropriate…..
A girl I was dating at the time knew the head basketball coach at a college in my hometown and asked him to interview me for a job. I dropped out of a corporate management training program to take an assistant coaching gig that paid 10% of what I was making at the time. This coaching position led to a search for a daytime job to support myself financially, which is the story in the next bullet.
My sports tourism and events career started through a response to a job posting in the local Sunday newspaper’s want ads (Jobbing.com and Zip recruiter didn’t exist back then, the internet was a new thing). In the interview for this position, my eventual boss knew one of my references which put me over the top of the other candidates. That reference would play a role in another interview down the road as well.
That first boss in this industry gave me that opportunity and helped me get my next two. Years later, I would be in a position to recommend him for a job that he held for over a decade.
I met my wife at a chamber mixer that 30 minutes beforehand, neither one of us was going to attend.
A mentee of mine was working at the Phoenix Sports Commission and introduced me to their leadership group when a vacancy opened up there. This connection allowed me to move back home to Arizona and help reconfigure the organization.
When I left Phoenix Sports my entrepreneurial wife convinced me to open up my own consulting agency. That same wife that I met at that chamber event we both weren’t going to. That business became the Huddle Up Group many of you know today.
One of the largest partnerships we have ever struck came through a former intern of ours that made a couple of introductions that evolved into something pretty big for us.
Okay, there is a lot here, and to be honest we left a ton of detail out of each one of these occurrences (we even left out a few smaller events we could have included). Let us simplify things and boil it down to this……
Each of these events are connected. If any one
of them doesn’t happen, the rest likely wouldn’t have either (think Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future). There is a chain reaction that tethers together every transaction. The whole is a sum of its parts.
As our pastor says on occasion, “The BIG idea is this…..”
You never know WHERE that next connection point is going to come from.
You also never know WHEN it may come.
Build bridges (relationships) that you may not think could ever be part of a major event in your life. Be ready for the event that can hockey stick your life in a positive way. It’s out there. When it happens, give thanks.
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