Choosing Happiness Over One More Deal
About this Video:
In this deeply personal story, Josh reflects on decades spent chasing the next deal and the cost that came with it. From running an honest vending business in a dishonest industry to realizing that success built only on profit can leave your life empty, this video is a wake-up call about what really matters. It’s about integrity, family, and redefining happiness beyond the numbers. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, leader, or someone caught in the endless pursuit of “just one more deal,” this story will make you pause, reflect, and rethink what success truly means.
Transcription:
If I only get this next deal, then I’ll be happy. That’s what I told myself for years while running my vending business. Let me tell you about the day that we fell apart. We’ve even chasing this contract for months, snack bars for our ferry company in town, a prestigious account, the kind that would make other vendors jealous, the kind that proved we made it.
We got it. I remember this standing there with the signed contract in my hand, feeling that familiar rush. The dopamine hit the wind. It lasted maybe two days because when I actually looked at the numbers, this prestigious account, it didn’t make any money, and that’s when something started nagging at me.
A question I’ve been avoiding for years, what am I actually chasing here? See, we ran an honest business in a dishonest industry. All our competitors were using what we call the R factor — software that let them claim they were paying property owners 20% commission while secretly reducing reported sales by 75% — pure fraud.
But from the client’s perspective, everything looked legitimate. We refused to cheat. Which meant we kept losing bids. Property owners would see our honest 8% proposal next to a competitor’s fraudulent 20% and choose the bigger number. They had no idea they were being scammed. For years I watched this happen, kept thinking maybe we could compete on service.
Maybe we could find the right niche where honesty still mattered, but the industry had a different answer. If you want to stay in this business, you have to play by its rules. Standing there with that worthless ferry contract, I finally admitted what I’d known for years. If I wanted to stay in the vending business, I would have to start cheating.
I would have to adopt the R factor like everybody else. Keep my business, maintain my success, continue down the path I’ve been on, or I could leave. That’s when I started asking myself a different question. What have I been sacrificing for this? I missed my kids’ basketball games, their concerts, ski meets. I sat at dinner tables thinking about vending routes.
Instead of listening to my children, I gave my family maybe 5% of my actual attention. The other 95% went to chasing deals that didn’t make any money in an industry that required me to become someone I didn’t respect. Here’s what I finally understood. I spent decades optimizing for the wrong thing.
Success measured only in one dimension — how much money did we make — while never asking, does this work make me happy? Am I becoming someone I respect? Am I present for the people and moments that actually matter? Leaving vending wasn’t dramatic. It was just a slow realization I couldn’t ignore anymore.
I had two real choices —become someone I didn’t want to be, or walk away from the only identity I’d known for over 20 years. When you frame it that way, the choice became obvious. You know, I’m 73 years old now, and I can tell you when you look back at your life, you won’t wish you closed a few more deals.
You’ll wish you’d been there for the moments that really mattered. So let me ask you, how much longer are you going to tell yourself the happiness can wait? Just one more deal. Just get through this quarter. Just land this account. Then you’ll focus on what really matters. That moment never comes. There’s always another deal, always another reason to defer the things that might actually make you happy.
You know, I don’t have a perfect answer. I’m still figuring out what happiness actually means, but I know this. Real success isn’t just about the money. It’s whether you’re building a life you actually wanna live, whether you can respect your choices, whether you’re present for the people you love.
It is what it is. But what we do with that — that’s where our choice lives. What’s your relationship with just one more deal? Let me know in the comments. I’m really curious about that. Oh, and thanks a lot for stopping by and watching this video. I hope to see you back here really soon.
