Take a Chance (Redux)
Note: A version of this essay was originally published in 2020. It was written before I adopted my “500 words or less” rule, but it remains one of my favorites.
In conversations with prospective clients, I’ll sometimes hear (or sense) the hesitation - I’d really love to work with you, but I/we’re experiencing too much uncertainty right now.
“Perfect” I say. “Now is the best time to take a chance.” And then I wait a beat and add “What’s at stake if you don’t?”
My all-time favorite take-a-chance story is the one about how I landed my first role at IDEO in the summer of 1996. It was the Spring semester of my first year at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and my classmates and I were scrambling to line up our summer internships. Well, they were scrambling - interviewing with investment banks, management consulting firms, and the big CPG companies. I was chasing a unicorn.
I had arrived at MIT as a licensed architect with limited business experience and older than my classmates by an average of six years. I had this crazy idea of uniting design and business in an imaginary role in an unknown company that shared this murky vision. In the early 1990’s it was possible to count on one hand the business thinkers who were even talking about such an idea - Tom Peters, Don Norman, Gary Hamel. I got a dose of reality and a sense of the challenge I faced finding a future job when I marched into Sloan’s career development office one day to share my grand plan with the director. “Sounds great” she said. “I probably can’t help you, but let me know what you find.”
Good luck. I was clearly on my own.
So, while my friends were interviewing on campus with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Procter & Gamble, I was sending out letters (yes, my friends, letters - in the spring of 1996 email existed but was not yet the primary means of communication), promoting my deep background in design and construction and my nascent business acumen. I was writing to the CEO’s and Presidents of the top design consultancies, the only companies other than Disney Imagineering (I wrote to them too) that I figured would be interested in someone like me. And If I was going to get rejected, I wanted to get rejected by someone at the top.
One of my letters landed on the desk of David Kelly, the founder of the celebrated innovation consulting firm, IDEO. It had landed there in April and he had passed it along to Aura Oslapas, an accomplished designer in her own right who was establishing a new studio at the Palo Alto headquarters focused on the design of physical environments. It was almost mid-May when I got a call from her. I needed a job that started in just a few weeks.
Several enjoyable conversations followed – back and forth, back and forth. IDEO didn’t actually have an opening, but there was enough mutual interest to keep the dialogue going. Meanwhile the sound of the clock ticking was getting louder and louder for me, especially if my summer involved relocating to California from Boston.
It was a Friday afternoon and we were having another call when I took the chance. I don’t know what possessed me but about halfway through a conversation that didn’t seem focused on closing the deal I said “You know, I’m going to be in Palo Alto on Monday – could we meet?” Aura thoughtfully consulted her schedule and replied “How about 10 am?”
Of course, I had no plans to be in Palo Alto on Monday. But in that moment, I instinctively knew I had a choice – allow the vagaries of the universe to dictate what happened for me next or take control of the situation. I had decided to trust my gut and take a chance.
I got off the call and immediately called a travel agent to buy a plane ticket (ah yes, in 1996 you could not yet book your own flights either). I showed up at 151 University Avenue in Palo Alto at the prescribed time, and the rest is my professional history. The relationships I established that summer led to my return to IDEO in 1999 and a lengthy tenure that was pivotal to the reinvention of my career.
Years later I shared the story of my small deceit with Aura, and she acknowledged that our in-person meeting established a connection that made it easy for her to make me an offer. However, the purpose of this story is not self-congratulatory. It’s offered as a reminder that anything is possible if you take a chance. If I had thought about it too much, I would have never been able to justify a roundtrip ticket across the country for a single meeting while on a student budget and with a growing pile of debt. But as hockey legend Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” That trip was easily the best $300 I ever spent.
Taking a chance may involve an upfront investment of time and perhaps even money, but it can be a small price to pay for adopting an active, not passive, approach to reaching for your dreams.
What will be the best “$300” you’ve ever spent? If you’d like to explore, I’m here for you.