The era of COVID 19 has turned our world upside down. I recently gave a Zoom talk to 500 plus sales people. This hyper successful company sold innovative home energy saving products with the door to door sales approach; A sales approach that was shut down almost immediately with the introduction of this pandemic. In the blink of an eye, they now had to completely redesign how they sell their products.
In the midst of these changes, I joined their sales force on Zoom. Part of my message included the following story, from a different era, but one with some similar fears people face today:
It was the early 1950’s. The country was still recovering from the second World War, and John Vidmar felt he was a fortunate man. He had a good job and was rising through the ranks as a sales rep with a large pump company in Los Angeles. He had two college degrees, a wonderful wife and a young, growing family.
But then one day, my dad stopped for lunch between appointments. He noticed he was having trouble swallowing his food. After lunch, he stopped by the doctor’s office on the way to a business appointment scheduled for later that afternoon.
The doctor, who spotted the polio symptoms immediately, told my dad he had to get to the hospital, to which he replied that he couldn’t possibly do that, he had an appointment he couldn’t afford to miss. He had a job.
“John,” the doctor said, “you don’t understand.”
Forty-eight hours later he lay in the hospital-paralyzed in a hospital ward with forty other people, all but two of them young children-polio’s usual victims. A man who only days earlier had been a picture of healthy perpetual motion was now confined to dining every night through a straw. Polio-a disease so cruel that it doesn’t let you move but still lets you feel-demands patience of you. All you can do is wait. Day after day, week after week, my dad lay there, his life in the balance, hoping the virus poliomyelitis would run its course and somehow spare him the kind of destruction you can’t repair.
As he lay there his main thought was about what this was doing to his young family. It was that concern, he said later, more than any other, that heightened his determination to see this thing through. He needed to get back out on the road and make sales and provide for his family.
And that’s exactly what he did. The doctors came close to putting him in an iron lung when his breathing got so labored that it appeared he would no longer be able to get enough oxygen on his own. At one point a doctor actually sent out a call for the dreaded machine that would make the body so dependent that it could never be removed. But then bad fortune turned to good. His breathing got better, and the virus disappeared, its exit every bit as abrupt as its entrance.
It left him with a permanently atrophied left leg that never would get much bigger than a No. 2 pencil. It also left him without the use of a number of other muscles throughout his body. But it left him, that was the main thing, and when he got out of the hospital he hit the sidewalk-figuratively, at least-running. There were months of rehabilitation at home to come. Hundreds of baths using a crane and pulley system. Thousands of hours re-training all the muscles that could still be re-trained. But as soon as it was humanly possible, John Vidmar was back making his rounds, back climbing the corporate ladder. He eventually progressed from sales rep to senior vice president in charge of all international operations for what became the largest pump company in the world.
One day, when I was 10 years old, my father came home from work with a bloodied face and broken glasses. My mother gasped, thinking he had been mugged. Dad explained that he had tripped while walking across the street. Apparently, his good leg had landed in a pothole and his “bum” leg couldn’t support his weight in the following step. He went down, hard, hitting the pavement face first. He talked of the embarrassment of getting picked up off the street by a gathering of strangers. I will never forget what followed. With a big smile on his face, my father chuckled and said, “I’ve got to be more careful next time.” That was it. I never heard him complain about what everyone else called a handicap.
My father’s example helped me become an Olympic champion. Whatever my coach seemed to inflict on me, I accepted, without complaint. How could I complain when every night I came home to a father who never quit?
People face tough times. You don’t need to tell Olympians that some things don’t always go according to plan. We all face setbacks and changing conditions. But organizations and individuals can still thrive in difficult environments, even when adjusting to the reality of life with the fear of Coronavirus. They will need to take more calculated risks; they will need to innovate, and look for ways to take their products or services through a different paradigm. Or, like John Vidmar, they may need to dig deeply within, to find strength they never knew they had, until circumstances gave them no other choice.
This post was updated on May 29, 2020.
Peter Vidmar, Olympic Gymnastics Champion, is a speaker on personal achievement, risk taking, and innovation. He is a member of the US Olympic Hall of Fame and Speaker Hall of Fame. Peter served on the President’s and Governor’s Councils of Physical Fitness and Sports. He is the author of “Risk, Originality and Virtuosity: The Keys to a Perfect 10”.
