Tibetan Buddhist Saying.
And yes, sometimes it is. For me it was 1997, when I didn’t get the top job in Austrade, Australia’s trade promotion body. I was a favourite. But fell at the final hurdle. Not that I knew it at the time. I thought I’d done well. It was crushing to me not to get the job.
But what it led to was buying the Master Franchise for Wall Street Institute English training system, for Hong Kong and later for Japan. The timing for a new English learning system was just right and we grew rapidly. We sold it in 2007, just before the Global Financial Crisis. We kept the cash we made from the sale, waiting out the stock market downturn and bought in when it bottomed out. (That did great...until... last year...) .
All that was much better than if I’d got the job as MD of Austrade. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out best in the end.
I have to recognise how much luck there was in that. Very many people suffer when they’re retrenched. We were lucky. With our choice of the business, with out timing of entering the education market, with the timing on buying into the stock market. Hard work, for sure, but also lots of luck.
So yes, not getting that job turned out to be a “wonderful stroke of luck”.
