Post by Jared Burden

We drove up and down that stretch of the Taos-Santa Fe Rd. two times, three times. Google Maps’ good-natured efforts to guide us had led us all the way around it but not to it.  When we were about to give up, sitting in the parking lot of the modern-era restaurant that had been built to evoke its features, we looked up and there it was. Boom. What I saw sent a jolt through me. I had never in my life seen something in person that looked so much like the picture I’d had in my mind. For 15 years the poster of the painting of “Ranchos Church” with the cone-shaped buttresses and flat tan adobe wall against blue New Mexico had hung in an honored visible wall in our downstairs bathroom, and I took it in pretty much every single day. Under the painting were the words of the artist, Georgia O’Keeffe: “I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.” The words had always made me feel something -- something good and hopeful and optimistic. Every day it issued a challenge to me to bring some originality to what I did, no matter how mundane the thing. And now here it was. We parked and stood on the same dusty ground and in the same exact spot from which O’Keeffe had painted it.  The same adobe, the same buttresses, the same sky. The words were already in my mind: “I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.” In a career, in the life of a business, there are a few moments when you turn a corner and there it is, the opportunity you’d always wished for, the obstacle that you’d always feared. Sometimes it looks exactly how you’d pictured it, and sometimes it looks nothing like it. But you know that you are standing in front of it. In my observation of clients staring down the moments they’ve long wished for or long wanted to avoid –staring at a Term Sheet for the sale of the company, or trying to decide first steps after receiving a troubling letter sent by Registered Mail – I have been sure of one thing: Whatever the challenge looks like compared to what was in her mind, the client will not do what has already been done. Done by her, done by anyone. The earth and the wall and the sky may look the same she thought it would, or nothing like it at all, but from that moment forward the painting she paints will look different from what’s ever been painted before. Facts are always different, industries are different, pressures are different. People are different. And would you want it any other way?