Good or Bad? Who knows!

From Printing to Re-Editing Everything

Yesterday I just wanted to print around 50 samples of a new personalized newspaper I was working on. Well, this five-minute job became, in the end, a five-hour task and my whole day was literally over. Good or Bad?

If you really want to know why: some printers were too shitty to print my stuff, a Word document was broken, and in my InDesign project, I probably forgot to download the picture files. So I literally tried out all printers in three different buildings to finally find out that additionally to some broken printers also my files were broken. This, of course, needed some time to fix – it felt like one million hours passed just for this simple task of printing. In the end, I was first of all pretty depresses and fucked up that I was not able to achieve more in my five hours then to print those (important) documents.

But as I am writing this I finally changed my mind. Right now I am working on an edited version of my customer sample and it already looks way better than yesterday’s version.

There is a Buddhist saying that says something like “Good or Bad? Who knows!”.

And I once again understood this Buddhist saying. Was it really better to just print the fifty samples and send them to potential customers just to be “done” with the task? Maybe my fate has decided that I am not ready to send my documents. Right now I think that if I would have sent all fifty samples yesterday it would have probably not have been a huge success. Right now, as I am editing the whole InDesign file I am much more confident that I will get some positive feedback and I honestly think that the response rate will be well above 10 percent. Tomorrow I will print and send the final and the well-improved version and then I can really say: I tried my best!

Good or Bad, Who knows?

The next time you are upset because something didn’t work out the way you planned don’t get angry and depressed. Just think about it and say: “Good or Bad, Who knows?”. If you just arrived at a meeting and it is cancelled at the last minute don’t say “F*** I drove all the way to the office and now my meeting is cancelled!”. Think about it and then conclude: “Well, good or bad, who knows? I wasn’t that prepared anyway, now I have some more time to prepare for it and the next time I will make the deal happen!”.

Don’t judge circumstances based on how you planned them. Make the best out of it and the next time something gets out of control to think about it twice and say to yourself: “Good or Bad, Who knows?

Credits

If you really like this saying have a look at the following book from Ajahn Brahm, of whom I got this saying from. I highly recommend reading this book to everyone! Here you can find the U.S. version and the German version.