Peter Sorgenfrei describes a client who took a lucrative contract despite feeling it was wrong, then regretted it. His point: trust your gut over money. Most people ignore that instinct anyway, chasing short-term gain until they wish they hadn't.
So I have a client who some months ago we were discussing, he's in the services business, we were discussing whether or not he should take on a client of his. And one of the things that we covered was this client seems to become a pain in the butt, but they were going to pay him decent money to do what it is that he does. And so my argument was you should never ever take business for the money. Whoops, there we go. But that's obviously easy to say and hard to do if you need to make income, which everybody does. And so he took the client and lo and behold, yesterday he let me know that I was right. This is not about me being right. This is about the feeling that we have in our gut when we have to make choices. And in his case, he kind of knew that he shouldn't have taken on this client, but he goes ahead and does it anyway because he obviously would like to make the money. So my point, trust your gut. If something feels off, if something doesn't feel right, almost no matter, or no matter what's at the end of that decision in terms of money or activity or anything else, trust what it is that you're feeling. Because in my experience, more often than not, you're actually right. It's just a question of when it turns out that you are right.
