Last Thursday night, the unstoppable freight train known as the “PittsKreig Express” came, at least temporarily, to a halt.

The reason? A pretty banged-up team of young men known as the Philadelphia Flyers (just what is a Flyer, anyway?) had decided that if the Eastern Conference was to be handed to their cross-state rivals, the PittsKreig Penguins, that hand-off was at least not going to take place in their city.

“You have to give them credit,” Penguins forward Max Talbot said. “They came at us hard. They played really, really, desperate. When they play like that, they’re not an easy team to play against.”

Grammar aside, you get the point … “They played really, really desperate.”

And so should we all.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve spend virtually my entire lifetime studying people. I’ve studied their strengths, their weaknesses, and their motivations. And if there is one thing that clearly stands out, it is the simple fact that human beings are capable of achieving almost anything so long as they are willing to pay the price tag attached to that accomplishment.

Which translates into, “doing whatever it takes.”

Which is also known as being desperate.

Desperate behavior is that behavior which enables us to achieve things we may have previously only thought to be possible. Think of times in your life when you were truly backed up against the wall with no hope of achieving your goal. What was your reaction at that point? Did you perform superhuman feats? Or, did you just throw in the towel?

I remember once having a payroll due in less than twenty-four hours. My company employed about two dozen people, and the monthly payroll was in the $50,000 range, not counting me. (I never take a paycheck from any company I own until such time as that company has been profitable for at least one full quarter.)

As I sat behind my desk the morning before this payroll (and taxes) was due, I contemplated my options:

1. Do I borrow the money? (Answer: I couldn’t, no one would loan me any more money.)
2. Should I just tell the people the truth - that we simply can’t pay them? (To me, this was akin to just giving up … and besides, these people had families and they had put their trust in me. How, then, could I ever ask them to trust me in the future?
3. Do I break my right hand, so that I simply could not sign checks? (Joking aside, this thought did cross my mind!)

“No,” I thought to myself, “I’m going to just have to find a way to get these folks paid.”

And I did. And less than two+ years later, I sold that company for more than three million dollars.

So, how did we do it? Well, we did it by acting desperately each and every day. For many of the employees of that company, it was the ‘ride of their lives.’ To this day, they will tell me just how much they loved that particular time of their business careers. (“Ron, I never felt so alive as I did when we were building XYZ Corp. I came to work each day thinking that anything was possible … and, because we thought that way, it was.”)

Desperate means never saying never, solving problems in ways that have never before even been considered, and requires leaders who truly lead … by word, by deed, and by example.

There always is a way. It reminds me of the movie, Platoon. This movie came out during a very tough time in my life … I was coming out of bankruptcy, both personal and business, and I was humiliated, beaten down, and tired, tired, tired!

To take my mind off of my problems (One of which was the fact that I simply had no place to live since the government had taken my home and my car), a friend invited me to go and see this Vietnam War classic.

In the film, there is a scene where the young PFC played by Charlie Sheen is about to go into battle just a couple of months after arriving “in-country.” As any vet will tell you, it is these “short-timers” that the true vets avoid altogether, the thought being, “Why get to know them? They’ll probably get themselves killed any day now anyway?”

Sheen finds himself talking with a grizzled veteran who is about to board a helicopter back to the base camp en route to his final destination … home! You can hear the chopper in the background, coming to pick him up.

So Sheen says to this vet, “Look at you, you’re going home. Look at me, I’m about to get killed in this battle … isn’t there some way out of this mess?”

To which the vet replies, “There is a way out of everything, man. Just keep your ______ hard and your powder dry and the world will turn. It always does.”

Those words, along with a million others from both doubters and friends steeled me for my trip through bankruptcy hell to my present state of comfortable retirement. (By the way, I eventually went back and paid off each and every single company and person whom I had discharged in bankruptcy.) I owe all of this success to keeping my wits about me, finding great people to work with, and, most of all (when circumstances called for it) acting desperately!

So can you. Starting right now!