The other night, and just after having completed a radio show; Brian McMahon, Andrew Rossi, and I stood outside of the Renda Broadcasting building.

It was a balmy night and so we had plenty of time to converse. Plus (and this very, very rarely happens) no one had to be anywhere else at that particular time.

We all walked Andrew to his car and as we reached it, we noticed that the front right fender had been seriously “assaulted.” It was badly dented and scratched.

“What the hell happened to you, Drew?” Brian questioned, “Did you clip somebody in a parking lot or something?”

To which Andrew replied, “No, this actually happened while I was asleep in my apartment (he lives on the Southside). Somebody actually threw a garbage can at the front of my car.”

“Somebody threw a garbage can?” I said with some degree of incredulity, “Andrew, I have to ask --- how do you know that? How do you know that it wasn’t just a garbage truck that backed up into your car?”

“Because I went to every store in that immediate area and asked to look at their security camera tapes. Eventually, I found a CVS that captured a garbage can flying into the front of my car. The best I could see, though, was just a pair of human hands. I could make no further identifications.”

Brian and I looked at each other. We always thought that Andrew was smart --- especially street smart --- but neither he nor I gave him the kind of credit for taking that sort of initiative. “Why did you go to all the trouble of visiting those stores?” asked Brian. “Why was this so all-fired important to you?”

Andrew responded to this question by saying how absolutely furious he was (not exactly the word he used) to find that his car, a car he actually cherished, had been so assaulted.

“I just wanted to find the bastard that did this to me so I could ring his neck or at least have it paid for.”

Again, Brian and I looked at each other. “Desperate–think,” I barely muttered, “Thinking driven by desperation.”

And it was just that.

You see, there’s an “overdrive” that we all “own.” It’s a deeper level of thinking that is the by-product of desperation. It’s what entrepreneurs rely upon to get their “impossible” deals done. It’s the same thing that drives so many extraordinary feats.

It got me to thinking. I thought about the mid-1970’s. If you were around then, you know that this was the first time that the OPEC nations really put it to us here in the U.S. They formed a cartel, used it to manipulate the price of oil, and then damn near squeezed us to the point where we, and for the first time in our nation’s history, started talking about things like “energy policy.”

Moreover, and also for the first time that I can personally recall, inventors started coming up with things like gas additives: for example, special carburetors that burned fuel twice. And other contraptions of that nature.

To an entrepreneur, “desperate-think” is absolutely de riguer. It is an essential part of every entrepreneur’s basic make-up.

I often say, “I really don’t even start thinking until my back is up against the wall.” For this is when the special “juices” kick in. This is when ideas that are way outside of the white lines begin to coalesce in my mind.

I can remember having a fifty-thousand-dollar payroll due in just seventy-two hours with just a couple thousand dollars in my combined checking and savings accounts.

Obviously, that math doesn’t work.

I also knew that if I missed that payroll, I would probably lose two or three of my top people. This was due to the fact that we had come very close to missing a payroll earlier in that same quarter and I could just tell that my guys were extremely jumpy.

Through a combination of factoring receivables and pre-selling contracts at a discount, we made our payroll number with minutes to spare. And I mean minutes (in those days, you could set up your primary bank in California and then work the “float” coming back --- this was probably the ultimate savior) for we had to deposit a few of the payroll dollars into that account just to buy the time.

But just like Andrew and his desire to “get to the bottom” of who messed with his car, I have many times in my business career found ways to solve theretofore “unsolvable” business problems by using “desperate-think.”

Again, I can’t explain it. It just is.

They say that you should never try to fight with a cornered animal. Maybe there’s some of that in this. Or, maybe your brain just won’t go at top speed until it absolutely has to.

I don’t know. But what I do know is that I very seldom see this kind of thinking in big corporations where personal pain (for example, the outright denial of a personal paycheck) is knocking directly on the desperate thinker’s door!