Yesterday, I explained how I learned about the opportunity to showcase a Renovo Bike in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Today, I’ll talk a bit about the gauntlet of fear to make this happen. Notably, it takes balls … brass balls!

Now first, I should set the stage with the fact that even before Covid, I had been in a quandary about the meaning of life. That’s a good place to check out for maybe a day 3, 4 times over the course of a lifetime. But, it definitely is not the place to stay for 3 – 4 years of ones life or longer.

I have had more times than I care to recollect in which I have wandered off course, but when I realized not too long after I turned 5o that this had become somewhat of a habit and that though I had run the 50th Seattle Marathon in the same year that I turned over to the “the better side of the mid-century mark,” my professional goal had become unfulfilling and appeared increasingly unrealizable.

That’s a bad thing. First, Earl Nightingale summed up in a clean phrase the definition of success:

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.

Therefore, added Earl, “anyone who is not pursuing a goal is a failure … at least temporarily.”

When the definition of temporary is the same length of time as most people take to get through college, there is a problem.

And the inue of not doing much of anything other than surviving on a few scraps that yet came my way as a result of my legal practice was certainly neither generating enough pride nor money to break free.

Financially, I was deep in debt. But more importantly spiritually I was “less than zero.”

Renovo Bikes was a spark. One I wasn’t going to let someone else puff out. I didn’t know how it was all going to work out, to be honest I still don’t. I just know that I am going to find a way to continue to make enough of a contribution that opportunity flows my way through it.

So, first I checked in with the owner of Renovo and told him that there was an event in Jackson Hole and that I thought it would be a great place to show his bikes. He liked the idea.

However, as fate would have it, that same weekend he was already going to be showing bikes at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, WA.

Ok, well would he be willing for me to take a bike to show over in Jackson Hole, WY that same weekend?

I don’t know how long he thought about it, but he said yes … as long as I fronted the entry costs.

Ultimately, I also arranged that if we won any prize money, I would get half of it and he gave me a price point at which he would be willing to release the bike and I could pocket any excess. Neither came to pass, but at least the impetus was there.

Now again, one must realize that I didn’t have a “pot to piss in.”

What does that mean exactly? What’s the etymology of that phrase.

Well, I recollect having looking it up to find that during the early years of the industrial revolution, while seeking to take care of their middle of the night “bio breaks” people would use “chamber pots” and then sell their piss to the tanneries for making leather works.

So, quite literally to not have a “pot to piss in” means that someone is so poor that they can’t even make money recycling their own piss. Yuck!

I’ve never been that poor. In fact, this level of poverty simply does not happen anymore in the US … unless its a condition created by poor choices.

Nevertheless, I didn’t have the money and I was just about completely maxed out on my credit card, but nevertheless I booked both a stand at the Western Design Show and a room at nearby SnowKing Lodge.

That took balls! But, that’s not the half of it. The real guts play came in September when I had to actually move forward. So, pretty soon I will do an installment titled: “Have the Brass Balls to Act Redux.”

Before that though, I think I want to write about adding more “petrol to the fire” … the cultivation of my why.

Until tomorrow, have a phenomenal day.

Cheers! BZ/JUSTICE SMILES, pllc