In 1971, after four years of service in the U. S. Army, I enrolled in the University of West Florida at Pensacola, paying my way with G. I. Bill money. In order to gain some accounting experience and stretch the money a little, I entered a Cooperative Education program sponsored by the University. In this program I studied at the University for a quarter (they used a quarter term, not the semester), and then worked in the accounting department at the Air Force Armaments Testing Lab (AFATL) at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB) for a quarter. A student named Bill worked the same schedule as I did. However, where I had spent an extra semester at Florida State University (learning to shoot pool), and then 4 years in the military, Bill had gone straight from high school into Pensacola Junior College and then to the Unversity of West Florida. I was about five years older than he was. Our first day at Eglin AFB, we met briefly with Mr. Cecil Bray, Deputy Comptroller for AFATL. He was very kind an informative, and after a few minutes of chit-chat, he looked at Bill and told him what his assignment was going to be for that quarter. He then picked up the phone and called someone to come get Bill and take him to the office where he would be working. He continued to chat with us, and in a few minutes, someone showed up and took Bill in tow. So far, Mr. Bray had not said anything to me about my assignment. Now, with Bill gone, he seemed to relax a little bit. He looked at me and explained. He had a department which he thought would be of great value to both of us to work in. It was a new Job-Order Cost Accounting section which was developing a program for tracking project costs at the lab. However, he went on, the crew of accountants developing the program had been hand picked for the project because they were the kind of people who would seek new solutions to new problems. Free thinkers, in a way. I gathered that they were a bit unorthodox in their outlooks, and had been given a bit of a free hand to create this new program. As Mr. Bray prepared me for this assignment, he made a comment that I have remembered for over 30 years. He looked at me and said, "Young Bill, there, is a good kid, and I want him to have a chance to work with the Job Order Cost Accounting section eventually, but I think he would be scandalized at the way things are done down there. You, on the other hand, have had the corners knocked off." Having "the corners knocked off" can be a virtue, it seems. When we are young and idealistic, whether in age, or in experience in a new project, we have a lot of sharp corners. As we come in contact with ideas, particularly those that may not be in total agreement with our preconceived notions, contact between these strange ideas and our sharp corners can tend to spin us off course. Once we've had "the corners knocked off", we are a little better able to stay on target. In time, as we gain experience in life, or in our special project, having had the corners knocked off allows us to proceed forward without being directed away from our path. When someone joins a network marketing program or an internet business, there will be a lot of what some people call "negative feedback" and something the sales people call "rejection". When we are new and prickly with all our corners, chance encounters with things that we see as failure can divert us. However, once we have learned a little, usually from these negative encounters, we lose some of those corners, and the successes we encounter help polish us. In network or internet marketing, as in life, the things that seem to hurt us at first, can often actually be seen to be, as the philosopher Nietzche said, "make us stronger." We will fail. We will receive negative feedback from relatives, from well-meaning friends, and from the public at large. Those who suceed, however, will be those who simply see all this as nature's way of streamlining us for success. |
