What If I’d Said No?

I've been thinking lately about how much of a life can turn on a very small decision.

We tend to remember the big moments: the day we got married, the birth of a child, buying the house, getting the promotion, starting the business, retiring from the job. Those are the milestones we put on the calendar and remember years later. But when I look back over my own life, I realize some of the decisions that changed everything didn't feel particularly monumental when I made them.

Sometimes, somebody simply asked me a question and I said yes.

What if I hadn't?

My entire career started because, as a kid, I went to work at a Ford dealership after school. I certainly didn't walk through those doors thinking I was beginning a career that would consume most of my life. I was a kid doing the kinds of jobs kids did around dealerships back then, installing mirrors and hubcaps, washing cars, cleaning service bays, and doing whatever else somebody told me needed doing. I was grateful for the $2 per hour wage I earned.

What if I'd hated it? What if I'd decided there had to be an easier way to make a living and never gone back?

I have no idea.

Years later, after working my way up through the business, I became the youngest Buick dealer in America at 29. I was convinced I was on my way, and then that dealership failed. A few years later, after some additional hard knocks personally and professionally, I found myself needing a job.

I'd already been a dealer. I'd been a general manager. I had held the titles and sat in the offices that told everybody I had made it, but none of that was paying the bills. I went to see a friend who was running Lone Star Cadillac in Dallas and asked for a job selling cars.

Think about that decision for a minute.

Pride could very easily have made me say no. I could have convinced myself that going back to the sales floor was beneath me after I'd owned a dealership. I could have worried about what people would think when they saw the former dealer standing by the front door waiting for an "up." I could have waited for another management position that I thought better suited my résumé.

Instead, I swallowed my pride and sold cars.

That yes changed my life.

I enjoyed Lone Star Cadillac and thought I might stay there a long time, but then another opportunity came along. A man had bought a struggling Ford dealership in Garland, TX and some people who had worked for me previously were now working for him. They told him he needed to talk to me.

He did.

In fact, he talked to me several times because I kept saying no.

Eventually, he offered me a sales manager position and I finally said yes. The dealership was dead last in Dallas-Fort Worth Ford sales when I arrived in the summer of 1990, and I knew I was walking into a challenge. A little more than two years later, we passed the longtime No. 1 Ford dealer in DFW. Eventually we became No. 1 in Texas, and years later, for one month in 2002, we even outsold Galpin Ford in California and became the No. 1 Ford dealership in America.

What if I'd kept saying no?

That question fascinates me because the decision didn't just affect my career. Think about all the people who entered my life because I eventually accepted that job. Employees who became lifelong friends. Customers I would never have met. Opportunities that could never have existed. Experiences that shaped the way I thought about business, leadership, customer service, and people.

Change that one answer and you change thousands of things that came afterward.

Then there's radio.

When I first started doing radio, I certainly wasn't sitting there thinking, "This will be my next 25-year career." I was a car dealer who knew the automobile business and had an opportunity to talk about it. I enjoyed helping people, the show grew, and somewhere along the way radio stopped being something I did and became an enormous part of who I am.

Imagine if I'd said no to that.

No Car Pro Show. No Saturday mornings talking with people across America. No listeners calling because they're scared about buying a car or facing a repair they don't understand. No newsletter like this one. No opportunity to take everything the automobile business taught me and use it to help people I will probably never meet. Where would Kevin McCarthy have ended up? Todd? Amy? The rest of the staff? Who knows?

There are literally millions of people today who can hear my voice on radio stations across the country. That sentence still sounds strange to me when I stop and think about it. Yet all of it traces backward through a series of decisions, opportunities, failures, relationships, and conversations that could have gone another way if I'd simply said no.

That's what makes me wonder about all the other decisions we make without realizing their importance.

Maybe somebody once invited you to dinner and sitting across the table was the person you eventually married. Maybe a friend mentioned a job opening you almost didn't pursue. Maybe you moved to a city where you knew nobody, took a chance on a business, went on the blind date, hired the person whose résumé wasn't perfect, or answered a phone call you almost let go to voicemail.

At the time, it was just another day. Years later, you realize it changed everything.

Of course, saying yes isn't always the right answer. I've said yes to things I wish I'd declined and no to things I probably should have accepted. Experience teaches you that every opportunity isn't a good opportunity, and age hopefully gives you enough judgment to recognize the difference.

But I've also learned that fear can disguise itself as good judgment.

"I'm comfortable where I am."

"I'm too old to start over."

"What if I fail?"

"What will people think?"

Those all sound like perfectly reasonable arguments until you realize they're sometimes just different ways of saying you're afraid.

If I could go back and talk to the younger Jerry at some of those crossroads, I don't think I'd tell him which decisions to make. Knowing the outcome would take something important away from the journey. I might simply tell him not to let pride or fear make the decision for him.

The Buick dealership failed, and that failure ultimately put me back on a showroom floor. Going back to the showroom eventually helped put me in Garland. Garland helped create opportunities I could never have imagined, and decades in the car business gave me the knowledge and stories that eventually found their way onto the radio.

One door didn't necessarily open another. Sometimes one door slammed shut so hard that it pushed me toward the next one.

Looking back, I'm grateful for many of the things I said yes to, but I'm also grateful life didn't always accept no for an answer the first time.

Somewhere today, somebody is going to offer you an opportunity that doesn't look particularly important. You may not recognize it as a fork in the road because most forks in the road don't come with signs telling us where they lead.

Maybe you'll say no.

Maybe you'll say yes.

You won't know for years whether it mattered.

That's the amazing part.

I can look backward today and connect the dots pretty easily. At the time, there were no dots. There were just decisions.

And every once in a while I find myself wondering:

What if I had said no?

I'm awfully glad I didn't.

Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.

-Jerry