A Cookie Well Deserved

A Cookie Well Deserved
By David Stoddard

Many would call sitting in a room at a table with 60 others in the area, watching the clock for your turn to talk, waiting for the unknown to arrive and pat you on the back and give you a cookie, a waste of a day.

Actually, I decided to get up and get my own cookie from one of the vendors. After 6 hours, I learned it wasn’t just going to hop off the plate and come to me by itself.

My main reason for being there was to give a presentation on the personal side of working from home. That tied in well with the conference theme, as well as with the motivational end of what I hoped to continue to do.

I’m glad my friend Terry agreed to take part in the conference with me. We believed that if nothing else, it would be a bit of exposure for the two of us. And the presentations we were giving would certainly mean something to those in attendance. At least that was our main thought at breakfast.

To make a long story short, 270 people attended the event. There were about 50 vendors set up in the main room. We had maybe 20 people visit our table, 10 who filled out entries for the drawings we had, and a grand total of three attended our presentations throughout the entire day.

Needless to say, that part was pretty depressing. But I should mention that my presentations had twice as many attendees as any of the other presentations. I had 2 people come to see me. (Oooooh!)

On the other hand, I think of it this way. Just maybe my advice or suggestions during the presentation got the two of them started in a whole new direction. Maybe they discovered new working opportunities they might not have previously thought of. Maybe one is writing an article about the conference right now and sending it out to a newspaper.

The person in Terry’s audience bought one of his e-book CDs. It turned out to be the only sale Terry made that day. But it meant something to him. That one sale gave him the push to keep going, to keep striving, and has kept him believing in what the two of us talked about earlier in the year with this being the year we get things moving forward, could truly happen.

You see, for years the two of us had been doing a lot of talking and thinking of doing different things. Eventually we got deeper into it. We began to actually plan things. We planned to think about thinking about what we could do or become. Still, we never quite got to the point of getting off the ground.

When we met for breakfast earlier in the year, we talked about a lot of things. We made the decision that this was going to be the year. We knew we could not just keep waiting for the perfect moment, or for the planets to align, or for that winning $220 million lottery ticket to be drawn.

Little did we know, that one decision, along with a lot of little things we had done, would bring us to playing a central role in a conference.

As mentioned, things did not work out as well as we had hoped. But in the end, we got out there and did something different. So what if it seemed “out of character” for either of us? We made the commitment not only with the conference organizer, but with each other and ourselves. We learned a lot of different things, not only about the conference or what it takes to get prepared for one, but also about ourselves.

We learned that you have to take chances at times. We learned that just because things don’t work out as you may have hoped, it isn’t fatal. We learned that saying things like “But there is so much to do, why even bother,” is just an excuse. We learned when you make the effort, no matter how small, great things can begin to happen. And we learned that we can do more than we ever thought in the past.

And for that, I think we deserve a cookie.

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(c) David Stoddard - All Rights Reserved
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