Bourbon Street Pebbles on the Road to Oregon
Make your plans, then watch for the unexpected support.
In 1994 a friend who owned a human resources company asked if I’d go with him and an employee of his from Utah to New Orleans to help with a trade show booth. He paid me for it. I don’t remember how much. It didn’t matter, because if he had offered to pay me in meals I might have taken the offer. A few years earlier I’d left a job traveling somewhere in the U.S. every weekend. I missed traveling and I had never been to New Orleans.
It turned out to be a pebble in a jar of rocks. The road trip to someplace new was reason enough to go. The trip, though, would end up helping me accomplish something ambitious I had set out to do; move to Oregon.
I’d make the same move six years later, but I had a lot more going for me then. In 1994 my work history was sketchy at best. It was probably best that I was ignorant of how long the odds were against me. I sent resumes to potential bosses in Oregon. One led to some interest from a book publisher. I completed a questionnaire for the company and probably answered it better than those bosses could have expected. I nailed it. Still, they didn’t want to pay me to drive up there and interview. They told me if some other company was asking me to come up, to give them a call.
In New Orleans the first day we worked we set up the booth, then set out for a little sight seeing in the French Quarter. To get there we boarded a bus that looked like a trolley. There were two vacant seats left and they weren’t next to each other. Up front sat a young woman who both my weekend employer and I would agree was, shall we say, attractive? We shall? OK, then.
My friend, drawing early inspiration from Mike Pence, said, “I’m married so I shouldn’t be sitting next to her,” as if the attraction would have uncontrollably taken over both of them. If she noticed what he said, she didn’t let on. I sat next to her and she began chatting with me.
We were both attending the weekend convention and I mentioned I hoped to move to Oregon. She knew someone, she said, that she could probably contact and get me an interview.
A few days after the conference, she did.
I set up a meeting with her source, and while in Portland interviewed with the book publisher, who a week later would offer me a job. Mission accomplished.
The woman I met on that bus and I spoke by phone a few times after that meeting, but once I sufficiently thanked her, she and what she caused became a memory, a story.
That story is one I’ve told a lot, though. It’s about intention, a term that probably gets tossed around by fans of The Secret. The book publisher that hired me was the original publisher of that book, long after I left. The point I make when telling the story is that when we set an intention, we do all the work we can think to do, but then we have to be open to developments we could never have anticipated.
My map to Oregon didn’t go through New Orleans, but my path did.
In 1994 it was normal to have someone pass through our lives and to disappear, seemingly for good. That’s not the case so much anymore. I had remembered her name and when Facebook became a part of my life and work I eventually looked up Laila Tarraf and found her again. Recently that’s how I learned she wrote a book, Strong Like Water, about how her life progressed and what she has learned over years and through tragedy.
What I learned in 1994 is how small events factor into major life moves. I met a woman on a bus and she helped me get to Oregon. In 1990 Money Magazine ranked Bremerton, Wash. the best place to live, something I never forgot, which is probably why I bothered to apply for a job in a place I’d never seen until the day I interviewed there 12 years later. In 2015 I made a routine phone call as part of my job and it led to my current one.
Stephen Covey used big rocks and little pebbles to illustrate how to prioritize your work, but the concept can also apply, perhaps in reverse, to achieving big things. Make the big plans (the rocks), but don’t overlook the value of the tiny detours (the pebbles) that end up filling in important spaces, even the pebbles you had no idea existed, like strangers on a bus in a city off your map.
Cool story about clear intention. I have heard and experienced many manifestations of clear intention that are of a similar nature.
This is really a very cool story! Reading it again, it is very much in alignment (I hear Hans voice every time I consider the word "alignment".) with the concept of clear intention. It reminds me of the time I was looking for a place to hold trainings. You were friends on Facebook with a girl from LO 49. I friended her as a result and she had a bldg that we could use that was perfect for training. That still blows me away.