PART III: Chapter 15 - New Business

Coincidence Speaks

Jun 05, 2024

Happy Wednesday friends! Welcome to Part III of Coincidence Speaks. Chapters are crafted so they can be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️

Part III finds Paul in the wake of a mind-blowing sequence of events pertaining to his career direction. Here’s a quick jumpstart from the conclusion of Part II:

Paul stared up at the ceiling that night in bed, heart pounding, waves of electric awe keeping him awake.

“How is this even possible? Could it really just be pure chance?”

He pulled out his journal and wrote a single sentence:

Maybe coincidence isn’t as random as everyone thinks it is.

Then he closed his eyes.

PART III

Chapter 15

New Business

Coincidence or no, Paul couldn’t ignore the palpable warmth pouring into his heart area when he’d contemplated making the change, let alone the statistical improbability of “❤️NWCSTLE” appearing right in front of his mailbox the exact moment he’d asked for clarity about joining the Bank of Newcastle—so as far as he was concerned, the decision was made.

As spring began melting into the summer of his 34th year, he joined the Bank of Newcastle as its newest Senior Vice President.

Paul went all in, fully committed to this new license plate sanctioned career adventure. His enthusiasm was contagious, and just months after being hired, he found himself promoted to the executive leadership role in his hometown market.

Grateful and a little stunned that the leap of faith had resulted in such an immediate opportunity to take on an executive role, he was suddenly concerned about the larger ramifications within his life.

“What about Clara and the kids? All the extra responsibility is sure to undercut my time with them…

And is this something I can even do? I have zero experience leading and building out a local market.”

“Give yourself some credit. You’ve been doing this for fifteen years,” Clara affirmed when he shared his apprehension with her. “You’ve earned this. Now get out there and kick some ass!”

It felt like Rocky, when Adrian finally gave her husband the green light to go toe to toe with Apollo Creed.

Apparently that well-placed license plate had known what it was talking about. With the acceptance of the executive position, Paul’s first order of business was to design and present a strategic plan to his new Board of Directors.

In a major twist of serendipity, he’d just completed a three year leadership program earlier that spring before joining the bank, and its capstone project just so happened to be the presentation of a strategic plan to a fictitious Board of Directors—

—in the exact situation in which he now found himself.

It was as if he’d already been provided a practice run, and life had placed him in the perfect position to apply it. From that point on, all the right people and opportunities seemed to pop up out of thin air with impeccable timing. All he had to do was show up committed and ready for action, and the next step materialized like magic.

Putting freshly energized attention into the executive role, every day came jam-packed with new places, new faces, and new business activity. Many long nights, weekends, and holidays were now spent beavering away at his new home away from home—the office of his 6th floor suite.

When the dust settled another sixty million seconds or so later—two years give or take—Paul’s hometown banking center had gone from a fledgling startup operation deep in the bleeding red, and into the profitable black.

Then the inevitable happened.

The success of Paul’s team had given the Bank of Newcastle added viability in their local market, and in the expansionary growth model of the business world, that additional viability was soon taken and leveraged into more expansion. In this case, the acquisition of another financial institution.

Pending regulatory approval, the Bank of Newcastle would double in size, bring its headquarters to his hometown, increase shareholder value, and wipe the slate clean for a brand new round of growth. A true success by any business measure.

While it hadn’t been perfect by any stretch, he’d followed the unorthodox guidance given to make a leap of faith, and with the support of some key mentors and a close-knit team of coworkers, had delivered as well as he could with what career experience he’d garnered to that point.

And it put him squarely in the driver’s seat. A golden path to the future lay out before him—his superiors assured him that if he played his cards right through the next growth phase, he had a real shot at making CEO within the decade.

But the moment the merger was announced, a switch flipped inside of Paul. He was well-satisfied with his sustained commitment and effort, but mentally weary—in fact he didn’t even know how exhausted he was until he realized that this particular career phase was over.

He missed his family. He missed his kids. With the unwavering focus on building market presence and delivering results for his Board of Directors, he hadn’t been nearly as engaged with Luke, who was fast sprouting from toddler to little boy, and Noel, who was already in kindergarten. And then… there was something else missing too, something still patiently spiraling around the edges of a busy mind…

In a complete about-face, the golden pathway towards the corner office lost its glittering sheen. He realized it wasn’t the leadership or the status that lit him up, but the energy and camaraderie of building something new, something he believed in.

“I might make CEO in my early 40’s, but at what cost?”

With little desire to continue to serve in an executive role in the newly merged bank, behind the scenes he quietly encouraged and helped facilitate the hiring of several new key individuals to fill that position. Even so, he was surprised to notice how painful relinquishing the leadership role was to his ego, which had quite enjoyed the autonomy—and perhaps the sense of self worth—that came along with it.

In any case, beyond any lingering sense of wounded ego, the Bank of Newcastle was now well-positioned for its next phase of growth, with a great team of people poised to make it happen. A team he was proud to be a part of.

And with that, Paul finally allowed himself a sense of completion. Of Mission Accomplished.

On the other side of that sense of completion lay something quite unexpected.

While Paul had certainly worked his executive arse off, now that he’d accomplished what he’d set out to, life felt surprisingly anticlimactic and unfulfilling. Heck—almost empty. And now that the full-bore action phase of the past several years was over, there was finally time to penetrate more deeply into that unexpected sense of emptiness.

One frosted winter’s morning as Paul picked his way through the parking lot towards the office, something froze him in place. “Why does everything feel so empty now?” he asked aloud to no one in particular, his spoken words fleeting white wisps fading into the crisp air.

Before the winter even had a chance to reclaim the warmth of his breath, an unexpected answer burst into his awareness, an answer so powerful and so compelling that Paul scrambled 180 degrees back to his car, following an odd urge to get in the front passenger side. He’d been stricken by a memory so vivid that it stunned him into silence—and he found himself immersed in a lucid scene from back in his childhood.

Way, way back in early elementary school.

On a similar early winter morning decades ago, little Paul had managed to miss the bus, and his father had to step in and drive him to school on his way to work. As he rode shotgun in the passenger seat, he kept noticing how his dad’s elbows were restrained by the awkward suit jacket he wore, forcing him to grasp and turn the steering wheel in a strange, restrictive underhanded fashion.

“Like a strait jacket,” he thought.

With the expanded awareness of his current vantagepoint now permeating the childhood memory, he could feel the conflict in his father—the satisfaction and pride of providing for his family, diluted by the constant Groundhog Day drudgery of doing work he had little passion for. His father went day in and day out to a job that didn’t really stir his soul, working for a revolving door of bosses he often didn’t see eye to eye with.

But he could hear him even now:

“Put in your time, son—get a degree from a good college, work for thirty or forty years and save as much money as possible, so that you can retire and enjoy life.”

As a child Paul had ingrained that well-meaning parental advice so much that it had become an instinctive part of him. It had been a formative driving influence behind getting good grades, so he could get into a good college, so he could have a good career, so he could marry a good woman and be a good father for his kids—and then, one day in the faraway future, once everything was secure and he had earned it, finally enjoy a good retirement.

But no longer.

He couldn’t imagine working and waiting for some far-fetched concept of “retirement” to truly enjoy life. Paul knew firsthand—firstfoot in fact—how quickly the world could change beyond all recognition within the blink of an eye.

He delved into the unexpected intensity of the old memory further, wondering how and why his current sense of emptiness might be connected to it. Oof… the answer landed like an Apollo Creed punch to the gut:

“I just wanted to show my father, my family, my teachers, and my peers that I can be successful based on their definition of what that means. But here I am—36 years old—and I really don’t even know what my definition of success is, because I’ve never been able to explore it. Hell it’s just been one thing after another to fit into the life I thought was expected of me—there really hasn’t been any time to explore what I really want…”

In doing what he’d thought was the right thing, the responsible thing, the culturally sanctioned thing, Paul had unwittingly buried himself under two decades of nonstop busy-ness, well into a demanding career without ever really taking a break, barring a few weeks of paid vacation every year and a token smattering of long weekends. His only true break had been compelled by the mortal specter of an incurable neurological disease—Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy itself. In fact, his own body breaking down had been the one thing that slowed him down enough to reconsider his life path in the first place.

Crushing disillusionment intensified, and an ancient sense of aching grief suddenly burst through the walls of his heart like water ripping through a dam, breaking him down in a torrent of tears. He let it all come up and through, windshield fogging up so no one could see him. In the spontaneous deluge that followed, many more long forgotten memories flooded back into him, one after the other, like he was retrieving and reclaiming lost pieces of childhood.

All at once the swirling images and memories coalesced into one vivid, crystallizing moment—the moment, the real capital A Answer he was seeking.

He saw and now he was that little Boy again, clear as day. And that Boy had made himself a promise, a promise locked safely away for a faraway future, like a hermetically sealed time capsule. A promise not just to himself, but to his own future children, if he ever had them –

“I’m NEVER going to forget what it’s like to be a kid. If I am ever a dad with my own kids, I am going to do things MY way. I’m going to make time to be with them, no matter how important ‘work’ is.”

The prodigal child had returned, and magic would come with him.

End Chapter 15

Coincidence Speaks

PART III: Chapter 15 - New Business

Coincidence Speaks

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