In the business world, we keep score a lot. Did we win or lose the sale? Is our company financially successful? Did we make money today? Are we rich or poor? To be a small business owner, you have to want to look at the numbers to see  how you are doing. The financial statements are one of our score cards.

But I am tested every day in another way. In 1995, I woke up and I had blurry vision. At 35 years old, this was the beginning of my journey of living with diabetes. Having diabetes means that every day when I wake up (and probably 3 other times during the day) I prick my finger. I then take a small amount of blood on to a test strip to see the level of my blood sugar. The target number is between 80 and 120. The success in reaching this type of score is how well I have balanced my eating, exercise and stress with the amount of insulin I injected.

Some days I am successful, and most other days I fail. I wake up and my blood sugar is 225. At these times,  I start off the day even before breakfast as a failure. I immediately think about what I could have done differently to lower my blood sugar, but then its time to take the insulin shot and move on.  I will get another chance to test myself right before lunch to see if I can score this time between 80 and 120. I continue to test before dinner and bed as well.

And so it goes every day for the last 15 years. Some days, I succeed and have winning scores. Most days, I fail and vow to do better to the next day, or resign myself to the fact that today was not a “diabetes success story” but tomorrow can be.

This is the way it is in business. There are good days and bad days. Sometimes the numbers say we won and many times they say when we have lost. But more importantly, you always get another chance to succeed the next day. In the end, it’s this resilience that is going to make us successful in the long run.

It is what allows me to survive with diabetes for the rest of my life.