Struggle goes hand in hand with success. Seinfeld makes the joke that life sucks no matter how much money you have (him being loaded): “Your life sucks. My life sucks… maybe not as much as yours, but still…” It’s funny because it’s true.
Problems, challenges, struggles, drama; it’s all inevitable. No matter what stage your business is at, no matter how far along you are, you will always have to deal with that stuff if you want to grow. The trick is to get busy solving problems rather than being paralysed by them. Success in any walk of life comes with a price tag. If you want it, you just have to be prepared to pay the price. You have to put in the hours. You have to read the books. You have to invest in yourself. You have to pick yourself up again when life knocks you down, even if you don’t feel like it. You have to keep your eye on the goal, and you have to persist. That is how you pay the price. The submissions for the Better Your Best contest are all shining examples of people who are happy to pay the price—and doing it with a healthy perspective and a smile on their face.
Problems are neither good nor bad. They just are. What is most important to your success and your happiness is how you choose to react and respond to the problems.
My team and some members of my family accuse me of being devoid of all emotion when I fail to get all hot and bothered about some perceived wrongdoing or injustice that they have been subjected to. This is unfair and hurtful. ☹ I am in tune with my emotions. I silently weep at sad movies. But I do not get surprised or shocked by the inevitable.
Most people over-react to everything—even when it’s something they should have expected. This is like running around in the evening screaming and waving your arms because the sun is going down. It happens. Every day. Don’t worry about it. To be surprised and caught off guard and knocked sideways by predictable things like the weather or human nature is not going to get you where you want to get to. It’s far better to breathe deeply, suck it up, and think logically about the solution and move forward. Ever forwards.
One useful mindset tool I learned from adventurer and entrepreneur Debra Searle is “the scale.” A simple one-to-ten method where you weigh whatever problem you’re facing against a ‘ten on the scale’ problem. For Debra, a ten would be something truly devastating—like losing a loved one. Losing a business or a house might be a seven or eight. But most of what we deal with day-to-day? Probably a four or five. And it’s much easier to keep your head straight when you treat a four like a four—not a ten in disguise. Here in Optical Success Academy, we eat four and five scale problems for breakfast. No problemo.
The smartest business owners don’t let problems hold such power over them. They do not think “oh my god, how could this happen?” They are fully aware of how life works, how businesses work, how people behave, and they invest all their energy in shaping things to their liking rather than wasting energy being shocked. They take certainty from their belief in themselves, their ability to solve problems and they maintain a healthy ability to detach from whatever is the issue of the day.