"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

That's what I heard earlier today from an operations leader I respect, and have known through this decade.

He spent the past 12 months losing a job for the first time in his life, looking for a job for the first time in his life, going into a great new role, making excellent impact fast - and then having an even more phenomenal opportunity come to him. He did a lot of soul-searching and moved into that role, his third job in under six months.

So a lot happened to him, and he had a lot of opportunity to react, and he played those cards well.

Two of the most critical things in my career happened that way.

Early in my professional life, I wanted to move closer to where I grew up.

I was hired in a software role - that's how I started my career - by a company near "home," and they paid for my wife and me to relocate.

I was happy until I went to work. Even in the first week, I knew it was a bad fit. But the chance to be around family and friends was what was most important to me, so I suffered in silence.

Less than a month into the job, the company announced internal openings in a career-making opportunity that sounded thrilling. Of course, next to what I was doing, emptying the wastebaskets would have seemed thrilling. But these new openings weren't just a ticket out of work I didn't like. They were a springboard to the future.

Still, a month into a new job - where my relocation had been paid, plus a recruiter fee - I couldn't just announce I wanted to do something else.

So I kept suffering in silence, and dreaming of what I'd rather do.

Then something happened to me.

My relocation included an allowance for meals. "Just save your receipts," I was told, and up to a certain total, I'd get reimbursed for food and groceries.

My wife and I moved into our new house, and I turned in my expenses.

A few days later, the same human resources manager who hired me called me into his office.

Shaking his head and smiling, he had my receipts in his hand and said "we can't do this."

My wife and I had kept within the dollar limit. But a sizable portion of what we submitted was a celebratory single meal at the most expensive restaurant in the city the night we closed on our house. And I turned in the full register receipt from our first supermarket trip after we moved in - which included beer, personal care items, several things not related to meals.

Honest mistake, and the manager found it amusing.

So, seizing on the opportunity - I was face-to-face with the HR manager who was handling the internal openings - I gently inquired as to what was involved with applying for them. I'd never have been so audacious, if not for the very chance knuckle-rap I got for my expense report.

Days later I was being interviewed for one of the new roles, and soon after I found I'd been accepted. I got a new lease on my career, and a ticket out of a job I didn't like. All because I unknowingly broke the rules for my relocation expenses.

Years after that, something else happened to me.

I'd long been interested in a career in recruiting, but had no idea how one started in that field.

One Friday afternoon, I happened to be at an appointment in a building where there was a recruiting firm owned by people who had a mutual common connection with me.

I walked into their office. I mentioned our common connection and said "My name is Dave George and I've always wanted to do this."

That was probably 12 of the most-poorly-executed seconds I've ever lived in my life.

First, most recruiting firms don't like people walking in without an appointment.

Second - wow. Try to come up with a worse elevator speech.

Third, and the capper, was that these guys HATED the common connection whose name I dropped.

But I was lucky in other regards, that mattered.

The one guy in the office that afternoon was the most aggressive and growth-focused of the three partners.

He found out that I started my career writing real-time embedded software. And that my current job had me making 100 cold calls a day.

And their biggest client, most fueling their growth, couldn't hire enough real-time embedded software engineers.

So, several weeks later, there I was, kicking off my recruiting career, and making an immediate impact, by making 100 cold calls a day and talking turkey with real-time embedded software engineers.

Fast forward to today. In three months, I'll celebrate a quarter century of recruiting. Feeding my family better than I could have before, opening my eyes and teaching my kids things I never knew before - all because I saw a window of opportunity open for a second and stepped through it before it closed.

One of my favorite teachers of all time - now working in business - was and is fond of saying "winners play the hand they're dealt; losers [gripe] about the guy dealing the cards."

Or, as the my longtime contact put it to me today, "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."