One of my clients came to see me under orders from his employer. His
last position in sales hadn't worked out too well, and a recent string
of development meetings had failed to produce any successful results.
His boss was concerned and asked would I connect with him, lest he
somehow be sending out the "wrong signals." On the surface at least,
this young man was well-qualified and well-dressed. When I asked how
things were going, he slouched back on the couch in my office and said,
"I'm bored." And how is your boss to work for, I inquired. "My boss?
She's an ass." What about the company, what is the work environment
like? "It sucks." Every question was met with a similar monosyllabic
response: lame, awful, nightmare, and so on. 
I have a client who recently stepped back into the dating pool after enduring a painful 
breakup. She’s smart, witty and attractive – a real “catch” by anyone’s standards. She tried online dating for a while with less than stellar results. She confessed that she found the first few dates awkward and stressful, probably because she attached a lot of weight to their successful outcome. “It’s exhausting,” she said. “It just feels like I’m on a really hard job interview, trying not to step on any landmines.” When we met again before the holidays, I asked how things were going and she seemed more optimistic. “I’m letting go of all my expectations,” she said. “I’ve decided I don’t want to carry all my old worries forward. From now on, I just want to have fun.”
Neil sat opposite me in my office. The hollowed-out stare and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails told me this was a man who probably hadn't 
slept or eaten much in days. As the 29-year-old CEO of a highly successful tech firm, he was at his wits end. The company he helped to create was undergoing explosive growth that had caught him by surprise, requiring a new infusion of venture capital, dozens of new hires and a major company restructuring. He missed the good old days, he told me, when it was just him and his partner working from his Brooklyn apartment. "I don't get it," he confessed. "This is what I always wanted. I just wish I knew what the hell I was doing!"
There’s a story I once heard on the radio and it haunted me for
years. A reporter for The New Yorker went to San Francisco to interview
the very small group of people who have jumped off the Golden Gate
Bridge – and survived. The circumstances that led each of them to hurl
their lives away were different, but what they shared afterward was
strikingly similar. Each of the jumpers described a moment of clarity,
right after jumping, where all they felt was regret. One survivor said
that as soon as his hand left the railing, he realized in that moment
that everything in his life that he thought was not fixable, was utterly
fixable. “As soon as I jumped,” he said. “I realized that my life
before was perfect.”
Back in 1985, the Coca-Cola drinks company introduced a new twist on their popula
r
soft drink, the much ballyhooed "new taste of Coca-Cola." But when the
coke-drinking public wasn't buying it, the new formula was soon dumped
and the old one re-introduced, re-branded as Coca-Cola "Classic." The
marketing executives learned very quickly that when Coke tried to be
something it was not, it failed miserably.
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