Chris Allison
Every tech entrepreneur needs a purpose for starting his or her business. Often, what motivates executives involves writing some wrong or responding to a significant event by rising from the ashes to create something great life the legendary mythical creature called the phoenix.
The phoenix is one of humanity’s oldest symbols of renewal. Long before it became a modern motivational cliché, it emerged from ancient attempts to explain a universal truth: endings are often beginnings in disguise. The legend traces back to ancient Egypt and the sacred Bennu bird, associated with the sun, creation, and renewal. Greek and Roman writers later transformed the story into the familiar phoenix—a bird that lives for centuries, builds its own funeral pyre, burns, and rises anew from its ashes.
The essential lesson of the phoenix is not that hardship can be avoided. The bird does not escape the fire; it passes through it. The flames are not an accident but the mechanism of transformation. The story endures because it reflects a pattern found throughout human life. Most people can identify moments of loss, crisis, pressure, or exhaustion that destroyed an old version of themselves and forced them to become someone new.
Looking back, I have come to believe that life is shaped by five defining moments. We may have some control over one or two of them, but many arrive unexpectedly. Rarely do these moments revolve around money. More often, they involve our humanity, our relationships, and our mortality. The five moments that shaped my life were not highlights. They were fires.
Moment One: The Day I Almost Died
As a teenager, I worked for my father’s construction company in Erie, Pennsylvania. On the day before the Fourth of July in 1978, while refueling an air compressor that powered a jackhammer, the machine exploded. Flames engulfed my legs. A nearby store clerk grabbed a fire extinguisher and saved my life. After a month in the hospital, I survived, but the experience changed me forever. It left me with a deep appreciation for preparation, gratitude, and the fragility of life.
Moment Two: 0 for 19
Years later, after joining my father’s technology startup, Tollgrade, I attended a Christmas party at my father’s urging and met Jane, the woman who would become my wife. Shortly after our honeymoon, Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer. Surgeons removed nineteen lymph nodes to determine whether the disease had spread. None contained cancer. Jane was “0 for 19.” More than thirty years later, that result remains one of the greatest blessings of our lives and a reminder that life-changing gifts often arrive unexpectedly.
Moment Three: The Day I Lost My Dad
My father was my mentor, business partner, and hero. Despite surviving multiple heart surgeries, he suffered a fatal heart attack. In an instant, the man whose approval I had spent my life seeking was gone. His death taught me that success and achievement are secondary to relationships. Even today, I sometimes reach for my phone after leaving the airport, instinctively wanting to call him as I once did after every business trip.
Moment Four: Turning Down the Deal
A year after my father’s death, Tollgrade received a lucrative acquisition offer worth approximately $170 million. Although the deal promised financial security, I believed our company was worth more and disliked how the acquiring firm treated my management team. Our board entrusted the decision to me, and I declined the offer. Six months later, Tollgrade’s market capitalization reached $2 billion. The experience reinforced a lesson about leadership: protecting people and doing what is right often matters more than choosing the safest path.
Moment Five: Running into Nej
By the early 2000s, Tollgrade had survived the dot-com crash and remained successful, but I was exhausted. At a Pittsburgh Pirates game, I unexpectedly encountered my former Allegheny College classmate Brian Nejmeh. During our conversation, he described selling his technology company and moving into entrepreneurship education. His story planted a seed. Six months later, I retired from Tollgrade and began teaching and writing. A chance encounter ultimately redirected the course of my life.
The Quarterly Phoenix
Throughout my business career, I experienced another recurring form of rebirth. As CEO of a public company, every quarterly earnings report felt like starting over. Past success guaranteed nothing. Our team exceeded analysts’ expectations in forty of forty-one quarters, yet each reporting cycle demanded renewed discipline and focus. Public markets taught me that transformation is not a one-time event but a continuous process of renewal.
Viewed individually, these experiences appear to be isolated events. Viewed together, they reveal a pattern. One involved literal fire; the others involved illness, grief, leadership, exhaustion, and reinvention. Each took something from me and returned something else—gratitude, love, resilience, purpose, and perspective.
That is the lesson of the phoenix. Life will bring fires. Some we choose; many we do not. Yet the moments that challenge us most often become the moments that define us. The question is not whether we will face the flames. The question is what we will become when we rise from them.
Chris Allison is entrepreneur-in-residence at Allegheny College. He was one of the founders of Tollgrade Communications, Inc., whose story was told in Hit It: A Tech Startup Story and Seven Rules For Entrepreneurs. His new book, now available on Amazon, is Forged In Fire: 12 Stories of Fantastic Transformation.