As the sun set on Wednesday, December 5, I found myself sitting in a hotel room in a small town just outside of Pittsburgh, PA. I had been here for about two hours, just arriving from a meeting I was in that morning in Elkhart, IN. My laptop was up, and I had been actively making phone calls to existing clients and potential prospects since I had arrived, only stopping occasionally to look at the TV, which I had tuned to Fox News, catching the replayed scenes of George H. W. Bush’s funeral from earlier that day.

When I stood up to take a break and looked out as the last shades of orange were showing over the top of the hills in front of me, the feeling of being isolated and alone hit me hard. It was a Wednesday night, which no different from many other Wednesday nights is one that I was spending on the road out traveling to see dealers and work on growing the company. But today was hard to look out over those hills and not feel the sadness of missing my kids. Tonight was my 3-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter’s choir program at church, and there was just no physical way that I would have been able to make it. It was one of those moments in life where you know where you should be, but the stress and demand of being successful and relentless in your pursuit of excellence causes you to miss something yet again.

As the sun sank and those hilltops got darker I wondered, “Would my kids remember this when they get older – that I wasn’t there, or will they even know?” I then thought, “How much more stuff like this Christmas choir program am I going to have to miss in my life, and will they ever understand the price I paid to build a successful business and provide for my family?”

To me, this is the price tag of success.

There are four children and one amazing wife who understand (or will hopefully grow up to understand) just how much I paid along the toll road to success. It usually is easy to self-justify that I am not home for a couple of nights or gone for a couple of days, but December 5 was a really hard day for me to do it.

As the phone started to ring and I re-engaged myself from these thoughts back into my work and preparation for the next day, the thoughts never really vanished, but they did subside a little bit. I was moving myself toward the end of my day and found the last couple of phone calls were with clients who have also become really close friends. I shared with them the situation about being away while such an event was going on for my children, and they both said something along the lines of, “Oh man, that’s tough– but what you do is very important to a lot of people, so don’t let it get you down.”

I was down. But after brushing it off and pulling myself back up, I remind myself of the price tag and the cost required to create success and chase excellence.

When I was growing up, I would get so tired of always hearing from my dad phrases like, “attitude is everything” and “you can accomplish anything with a positive attitude.”

Mike started telling me these things as far back as I can remember, and it didn’t even make sense at the time what he was talking about because I was so young. But, from very early on, the word “attitude” was firmly planted in my mind. Then as I started growing up through my late teens and early twenties, when things wouldn’t quite go my way, he reminded me of how having a positive attitude can overpower any negative situation.

Next came the beginning of my career. Then, a few years later, he and I started working together for the first time. As we were just getting the company “re-started” back in 2004–2006, some days seemed so bad and painful you literally wanted to drop your head on your desk and cry. But, by this point, we were reminding each other that “you can accomplish anything with a positive attitude” and once again that “attitude is everything.”

Some people see things today and may think, How could things have been so bad at one point that you felt such despair? But, when you know where you want to go, know you have the ability to get there, yet have no traction and no momentum behind you, it can be extremely frustrating when nothing is going your way.

While doing an interview about a month ago, somebody who had studied the company asked the two of us, “Why do you do the things that you do?”  This was in reference to things like the Big Oak Ranch Christmas, the “Holiday Haul” and other things they had seen online and read we do at SAM, and especially with a focus around the holidays.

Our answer was very simple. It is “An Attitude of Gratitude.”

Over the years, and thanks to so many people who have made this a fun and successful place to work, Mike and I have continued to encourage each other not just for us each to have a positive attitude but have an attitude of gratitude. (Yes, and we planned our phrase to have alliteration).

That is why we work so hard to make sure that everyone feels special during the holidays and at the end of the year can look back on not just doing great work – but doing something great for somebody else, like the children of the Big Oak Ranch.

I hope everyone enjoys their December, and maybe by reading this will help everyone understand a little more about our beliefs toward what attitude can truly do to a person and a company. And also why we feel such a need to have “An Attitude of Gratitude.”

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and this picture will totally sum up the week I have had and serve as a good reminder of what everyone should remember.

So many people cheer for “the underdog” to win against bigger and better opponents. They cheer for the underdog generally unless they are someone who has something to lose, i.e., a position, award, status or championship – because nobody likes to be outdone and see somebody else take their glory. For Alabama football fans, it has been a very long time since being called or even considered an underdog. But going back not too long ago, things were quite different and there was not such a position of dominance. I love how you can correlate just about anything in life and business to football, even though my underdog story for this week has nothing to do with football.

In an organization, especially one like mine with a lot of “high need for achievement people,” you have egos larger than Alaska, and you will meet a lot of people who have never been wrong about anything… ever. But, every so often, someone or something comes along that knocks the “top dogs” off their positions high above the podium of “how great thou art” and steals a little bit of the glam.

I cannot go into specifics because then there would be no secrets to protect the innocent “high need for achievement people” with this story, but I will cover it in broad strokes. Take a person who has never been the same as the others and may have even caught a little flack for being a little different and working at their own speed. This person came in and did something that few of the top team (you know who – the “high need for achievement people”) have been able to do. It absolutely mortified everyone and left people in awe over what had just happened.

One of my favorite quotes in the world is this: “There are three types of people in the world; those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who stand around and wonder what just happened. Which one are you going to be?”  This quote is evident in “the underdog” who went out and made something happen, and even though I wasn’t in the office, I am willing to bet there was quite a bit of wondering what had just happened.

There are a lot of times where people tell me, “I don’t envy being in your position.” But this is one time where I love being in my position because getting to sit back and watch this all go down just makes me grin. It makes me grin because I see an underdog who just had a big win and it makes me grin because I know everyone is about to work a little bit harder to get themselves and their “high need for achievement” personalities back on track.

Everybody has lots of traits that make up who they are and how they act. Some traits are passive in your life and some are dominant. Different situations in your life will cause you to demonstrate actions that are generated because of the traits that make up your inner self.

As I myself am a highly-functioning, need-for-achievement kind of person, there are many different traits that make up who I am and how I act, and they can vary on a daily basis. But, every time something bad or unfair happens to me, which usually does now about on a monthly basis, there is one trait that I look for and am always waiting to come out. That is the trait of resilience. If there is only one trait that my kids grow up to get from me, I just want it to be the trait of resilience. That ability to pick yourself up when something knocks you down, bursts your bubble and breaks your spirit. The ability to bounce back and not do so with a false persona or a game face but a real inner ability to push yourself quickly beyond the bad and get back to the good.

Usually, each month – and sometimes each week – present me with some type of crisis. A great employee decides to quit for another job. But rather than just turn in a notice of resignation they throw you under the bus, poison other people and create animosity and adversity within the organization. Or, when a client who you have repeatedly over-delivered for and totally over-serviced by your efforts sends you a termination notice; just as you finally have your organization where you want it, you are now thrust into survival time. Maybe beyond work, when something happens to a friend or family member like them telling you they have a very serious illness and have a low chance to survive or that their marriage is coming to an end. Regardless of the situation, the bigger it seems you get the more of these issues you have hitting you in the face all the time.

That is why over the last year I have developed such an admiration for the trait of resilience that is very strong in my body and mind. It’s not always the most pleasant thing in life to get to deal with all this controversy, but you sure learn to respect and appreciate your ability to come back from it.

It must have been nice to be a cowboy back in the 1800s. Sure, there were things like shorter life expectancy, illnesses that couldn’t be cured and every now and then a pack of wild Indians would come and try to kill you and steal your horse.  But it had to be a much simpler way of life and thought process than we deal with today. Sometimes when you are going wide open, 90-to-nothing, you don’t have time to recover when you get “shot” while you are traveling down the trail.

What is the trail?  Today in my world, the trail is what I like to call the journey through a week and through life. Some people call it a journey, the road, a mission, a voyage but to me when I’m out and about I like to refer to it as being on the trail. And no, in case you were wondering I am not a golfer and am not talking about a golf trail. To me, the trail is encompassing of all the places that I get to go to day in and day out, along with all the people that I get to meet while out working and traveling.

So what does it mean to get “shot on the trail”? This is when something bad happens and it happens while you are living your life on the trail. One day it may be a call from the office saying that a great employee has turned in a two week’s notice, or an email from a client saying that they respectfully no longer want to use your company’s services. Also included are when you get some really bad news about something or a client is madder than hell about something that you did or didn’t do. The list can go on, but you get the idea of things that I consider to be getting “shot on the trail.” We use to employ a company motto that said, “No Bad News on the Road.”But with the increasing power of communication devices and also how often I am out on the road (or in my case trail), we have done away with that motto because there simply isn’t enough time in the office to deal with all the bad news. Nowadays, the bad news and mishaps just hit you when they want to hit you.

The bad part about getting shot on the trail is you generally have more time to think about what just happened and sit there and ponder why it all just happened to you. It’s easy for bad things to happen, but you are moving so fast that you can easily forget them. It’s not always that easy when you have days to think it over or long hours in the plane or in a hotel room with nothing to do is think about it. So occasionally you have moments of weakness, moments of emptiness, moments of elevated anger and sinking moments when the news is so bad you just sink into your chair and wonder if you will have the power to get yourself up.

There is no moral to the story or easy way to recover from getting shot while on the trail. The best advice I have for myself is to keep on moving and try to move at a higher rate of speed after being shot than you were before you were shot.