Last year I accepted an invitation to speak at a conference at a professional organization. It wasn't for the money. They weren't offering any. In fact, after travel, the hotel, and a few sociable rounds of drinks and nachos, a four-figure bill would be my "reward" for sharing whatever it was they thought I had to offer. But there was another incentive, namely a session of pre-set appointments with potential clients, a kind of professional speed-dating. Altogether, speaking for a couple of hours didn't seem excessively altruistic, and I could make up my costs with leads and contacts.

A couple of days before the conference began, already committed to costs and to other panelists and participants, I learned that demand for appointments had outstripped supply, so a lot of people didn't get all the meetings they wanted. Fortune singled me out for special treatment. I didn't get any.

"I'm sorry," the organizer said. "You were the only one who got shut out."

"Out of how many hundred people? Boy, that doesn't seem quite fair."

"The matches and schedules were done on a random basis, and that was just the luck of the draw. We're really sorry, but at this point there's nothing we can do."

"But you didn't let me know until it was too late to change my mind."

"You're right. It's completely wrong. I wish there was something I could do!"

The one-two combination of heartfelt apologies and unhelpfulness was like some psychological jujitsu move that put me on the mat. I managed to put the whole thing aside for an hour during my next meeting, but later returned to my sour thoughts, touching the nerve, as it were, to see if it was still sensitive. It was.

Big pictures and small ones
I am, I confess, prone to obsessing over slights, snubs, and spite. A psychologist working through an exercise in how to understand your approach to the world once did an exercise in which the audience got to finish the sentence "life is…" The irrepressible six-year-old who still lives inside me folded his arms over his chest, blew air through his lower lip, and said, "No fair!" The trouble with people who worry about fairness is that they can't rest until justice is done.

But something funny happened on the way to the conference. No fair morphed into so what? "Win some, lose some," I thought. "Not everything works out." At first I felt as if I was spooning myself bromides, but soon they kicked in. Accepting the loss relieved me of it.

Mind and money, profits and loss
Not surprisingly, psychologists endorse the idea of letting go.

"It's a key attitude that is taught in a variety of ways using a variety of specific means, including releasing physical tension, as well as letting go of thoughts and emotions," says Paul Larson, a psychology professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. "The technique comes from the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. You're trying to develop the simple skill of observing something without reacting to it. You are trying to suspend the problem-solving mode of operation, to be still and quiet and non-reactive to what you observe. That's the skill. It's difficult to learn but with continuing practice--you can do it in five- and 10-minute stretches--you get closer to the ideal of letting it come, and letting it go. Training the mind is neither quick nor easy, but it's satisfying."

Larson, who endorses the wisdom of the serenity prayer, says it has broad application--accepting a chronic medical condition, say, or the fact that a child has grown up differently than we envisioned. Or that you paid your conference and travel costs and didn't get your appointments.

Of course, there are times when letting go isn't the right thing to do, and people are temperamentally split between those who flee from every conflict and those who engage in every last battle. Larson's mindfulness explanation is partly about helping people find their way to a balanced center.

"It's like that Kenny Rogers' song," he says. "You gotta learn when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em."

Win two, lose eight
Mind and money move in lockstep, and the wisdom of accepting losses is embraced by investment managers, too, who warn that people who can't accept their losses wind up getting hurt worse. A good loser either puts the loss aside or, even better, figures out how to turn the loss to an advantage, i.e., take the capital loss for tax purposes and move on, investing the remaining capital elsewhere.

Some people intuit the benefits. A friend of mine is an Emmy-award winning producer who despite his devotion to his primary career has somehow managed to build up a number of successful companies. I asked how he manages to keep so much going on at one time.

"You have to accept that only 80 percent of what you do will work out," he said. "Twenty percent of the time you're going to lose, or you're not going to do as well as you hoped."

I was resigned to my loss by the time I arrived at the conference, where, lo and behold, I managed to get an appointment after all. When I sat down, I had one of those Malcolm Gladwell "blink" moments when I knew instantly that nothing would come of the meeting. I'd drawn a dud. Alas, another loss.

No worries, though. The conference was worthwhile. Not for the money. Nothing materialized. But I saw friends and colleagues, my own panel session went well, and attending other sessions reminded me that this had always been about sharing, which was more energizing and gave me more reason to feel optimistic than mere leads.

Indeed, once I'd accepted the loss it had almost ceased to be one.

Todd Pitock , a longtime Juggle contributor, focuses on the big picture at his home in Pennsylvania.