What happens when the “ring in the rubble” is still on your finger?
Sometimes we find ourselves buried in the rubble of catastrophe before we can start digging. A crushing defeat will leave anyone reeling and all the more so when it takes you down with it.
Brian Bordainick felt like he’d been shot when he learned the crushing news about his ‘9th Ward Field of Dreams’ project.
–CNN.com
Bordainick is the high school athletic director in New Orleans who last year had pursued a crucial $200,000 grant from the National Football League to build a $2 million sports complex for young athletes in the Katrina-ravaged 9th Ward of New Orleans. Bordainick’s school, GW Carver High, is now mostly FEMA trailers, so the proposed facility was an amazing boost of opportunity for a community that hasn’t had much good news since the 2005 storm.
Then came the “shot.” The architect firm designing the facility had to pull out. And they had to pull out on the weekend before a Monday deadline to submit plans in order to qualify for the NFL grant.
Certainly we all have weekend deadlines and all-nighters, but few are $2 million make-or-break showdowns the likes of which Bordainick faced.
But this public school educator must have some serious resolve and entrepreneurial spirit, because he managed to dust himself off, bandage his battered spirit and do one of the hardest jobs in any business endeavor: cold call…on the weekend. Mind you, he was calling some of the most busy and sought-after architects in the area. But he got through to one who immediately demanded the best 30-second pitch he ever gave.
Bordainick’s goal line stand found the receiver—Steve Dumez, design director for Eskew+Dumez+Ripple—who agreed to take on the audacious task of delivering a design plan in a matter of hours.
It’s an incredible story in its simplicity and heroism and pluck. I’ll probably refer to Brian Bordainick in my keynote speeches because he demonstrated the ardor it takes to “keep digging” as described in The Ring in the Rubble.
Why not start digging on more manageable day-to-day rubble?
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