A tale of knights and kingdoms

If, by any chance, you came across a little story I wrote a while ago,?“A tale of beginnings ”, you might know that I owe part of whom I am today, as a professional in the Software industry, to three people and a rainy day.

Finding your rainy day and some people to kick start your career would be useful but, as you might expect, it might be insufficient.

Today, as I’m celebrating 26 years from that rainy day, I am looking over everything I accomplished, every decision I made, every failure and heartbreak I had, every connection I made, every emotion I felt and every lesson I learned that ultimately led to the way I am today. All those are part of my kingdom, part of my story. Let me tell you what I mean by that.

Either we like it or not, every experience we have is like a ferocious encounter on the battlefield. We either win or loose. If we loose, we’re either dead, taken prisoner or turned into a slave or something along those lines.?

On the other hand, kingdoms can only be built through battles (the kind of battles that you win) and alliances (which end in battle more often than not). Therefore, it’s a no brainer that we cannot expand our kingdoms if we don’t fight any battle or if we loose. Still with me so far? Great.

So the obvious question is: how do we avoid loosing?

The trivial answer is “you don’t”. I wish it was that easy, but you cannot count on that all the time.

“You cheat” might someone say, but that would break the “Chivalry code” and sooner or later your kingdom will fall.?

“You keep on fighting” I hear from others. That would work, but some of the battles should be lost, just so that the war can be won. Last but not least, we sometimes need to recharge before we charge.?

What then? How do we avoid loosing even when we cannot win?

Unlike a bloody battle on the real battlefield, the ones we go through in our professional lives are, with some really bizare and unfortunate exceptions, not life threatening.

We can still die, inside, as professionals, when we loose passion for what we do.

We can still become prisoners of the Status Quo our jobs might push onto us.

We can still become slaves of false values and principles.

But we get to live another day. We get to fight another battle.

Ultimately, winning is just a perspective, it’s not the only perspective. To avoid loosing, we just have to change the perspective. We might not be able to change a huge loss into a huge win, but an average loss could be, most likely, turned into a small win, which still counts as a win, no matter how small it is.

A simple way to change perspective is to look at any loss as a learning opportunity.?

It is dead simple in theory, but when we’re faced with the actual loss, bursting emotions will most likely be preventing us from being optimistic and accepting the situation as just something we can learn from. However, we can learn to control these emotions. We can learn to be prepared, we can learn to accept loss by fighting smaller battles at first and by being better prepared later. We can learn to better assess the risks of the battle and foresee the outcome. We can learn to understand how much we could actually lose and wether or not, in case of an actual loss, we will have the capacity of getting back on the battlefield once we “licked our wounds”. But we need those small battles otherwise, sooner than later, other kingdoms will force us into surrender.?

Our kingdoms can be as vast as we can imagine them. It’s up to us to take on the battles that help us get where we want.

Remember though, that through any battle a true King (or Queen) must be, first and foremost, a true Knight and must follow the Knights Code, the Chivalry Code. Otherwise, all you are is a mercenary turned warlord.?

If you prefer that, it’s also your choice, but in all great stories, the true Knights/Kings are winning the battles against the mercenaries and warlords.?If this is true or not, it’s also a matter of perspective.

Write your own story in any way you want to. Just start fighting for your kingdom, and write your story now.?