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(Image Credit: Rich Strike with Sonny Leon wins the 148th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, KY 5.7.2022 from theknockturnal.com)
A horse like Rich Strike isn’t supposed to win the Kentucky Derby. He wasn’t even supposed to be there. Neither were his trainer, his jockey, or his owner. It was a last-minute thing when Ethereal Road, trained by a Hall of Fame trainer, was scratched from the roster 34 hours before post time. Rich Strike was the first alternate.
Owner Rick Dawson entered his horse into the Kentucky Derby 30 seconds before the deadline. Let that sink in –30 seconds. Rich Strike, #21, was the biggest longshot in the field since 1913. The odds were 80-1.
Only one percent of bettors bet on him. That 30 seconds had a $1.86 M payoff. No, he wasn’t supposed to race, and he wasn’t supposed to win. But he was, and he did.
Let’s bring this around to you and me.
How often have we failed to enter the race because we didn’t think we could win? How often have we pre-decided the outcome? Maybe it was the time we didn’t submit the proposal because we thought another company was better positioned than we were. Perhaps we didn’t go for the promotion because someone else had better proximity to the decision-makers. Maybe we didn’t speak up in the stakeholder meeting when we knew we had the solution to a costly problem because someone had cautioned us against being too big for our britches.
Or maybe, just maybe, we thought we missed the deadline and later discovered we hadn’t.
Every time we didn’t enter the race, our mindset, and our fear of losing precluded us from ever winning. You and me—we should rethink why we enter the races we do and sit out the ones we don’t.
See you at the finish line.
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