I was nineteen, walking through our church with a friend, when a pretty girl came up to us. My friend introduced me. She said hello, then turned her smile and her attention back to him.
I was invisible.
Most of us know that moment. You put yourself out there, and the world looks right past you. The question is what you do next.
Brushed off, then married
I didn’t do anything dramatic. I just kept showing up. I got involved at church and became part of the group, and eventually she noticed me. We started talking.
Then the group went rappelling, and later white water rafting, and we were on both trips. She was shy and quiet, but a lot of fun once you got past that. Little by little we spent more time together.
We started dating in June. We got engaged in September. Two hundred seventy-five days after she brushed me off, she became my wife.
None of it was a grand gesture. It was one small step after another, each one taken because it was the step in front of me.
The smoke office
Years later I learned the same lesson in a much less pleasant place.
Picture a room so full of cigar smoke it was hard to breathe. In the back sat a man with a cigar clamped in his teeth like a mob boss. This wasn’t a New York club. It was an insurance office in Oklahoma City.
I came home smelling so bad that my wife made me shower and change before she’d kiss me. I dreaded every morning. I felt stuck, and I couldn’t see a way out.
What I could see was the next step. So I took those. I learned how to carry myself professionally. I picked up skills that had nothing to do with insurance. I visited my first Toastmasters meeting. None of it looked like an escape plan at the time.
Then one day a friend asked for my resume. I sent it. Those small steps are what got me the interview, and then the offer.
I didn’t make that opportunity happen. I just made sure I was ready when it came. And what I found wasn’t just a job. It was the career I’d been searching for. Most mornings, I still walk into work excited about what I get to do.
The diagnosis
In 2004, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. By the middle of 2005, I was cancer free.
More than a decade later, I heard the news again. What I thought was gone had come back.
I felt more helpless than I had almost any time before. The smoke office was bad, but this was a different kind of stuck. There was no resume to send.
There was still a next step, though. Pray. Believe. Show up for every treatment. Exercise. Eat well. Pray more.
I’ve been cancer free for eight and a half years.
I can’t tell you that all the steps made a huge difference. Some very much did. What I do know is that they were the steps in front of me, and I took every one of them.
You rarely know which step matters
Looking back, the steps that changed my life didn’t feel important when I took them. Showing up to one more church event. Learning to carry myself like a professional. Walking into a room of strangers who gave speeches for fun. Sitting down for one more treatment.
You almost never know in advance which step is the one that matters. That’s exactly why you take the one in front of you, and then the next one.
So what are you facing right now? You probably can’t see the whole path. You don’t need to. You only need to see the next step, and take it.
