No Pain, No Gain

I love reading the magazine Success. There is always something that I learn from it. The newest edition is all about people who have persevered and succeeded despite many obstacles. The publisher, Darren Hardy, talks about how he learned early in life that in order to truly succeed you must always be pushing yourself forward. I love what his dad told him one day when he came home excited that he’d been on the ski slopes all day but hadn’t fallen once: “If you are going to get better, you have to push yourself. If you push yourself, you are going to fall.”

I think, especially in today’s economic environment, it’s very easy for business owners to take the path of least resistance. “I’m going to just sit tight and clap when I get through the day without falling.” When we see obstacles in our path, we automatically seem to generate a fear of failure, and that stops us before we ever get started.

There are two ways to look at this fear of failure: one, is to see it as a way to better yourself. Just because something happened this time, if you learn from your mistakes, you won’t make the same one again – thus a movement ahead. The other way to look at it is as though this failure was personal and permanent. No way to get around it. This second way of looking at things is the death of a business.

There are several people in this issue of Success that could have easily taken the second option: Ben Hogan, for one, was in a head-on collision with a bus. Being told he’d never walk again, he has gone on to become a great golfer. And what about Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame? His story is used in business schools to teach the art of perseverance. He started selling his chicken to people in his living room behind the gas station he ran. Then, moving to a motel and small restaurant, he made even more sales, until the Interstate came in and his customer market dried up.

He then went on the road trying to franchise his operations, but after 99 refusals was just about to give up, when – lo and behold – there was his first yes!!! Then, in 1964, he sold the company to a Kentucky conglomerate for $2 million dollars – not a bad sale in those days! How many times, however, during the course of that business development, could he have said, “I’m never going to make a success of this. I’m just going to give up.” He didn’t, and his falls made him a better person and a better business.

I know how scary it can be. After almost losing my eyesight from glaucoma, and being out of my business for over two years, while my operations manager poorly managed the company (to the tune of losing my best three customers), I was scared to death to try and go it again. I thought I’m never going to recover from this. I’m sick, and I’m tired, and I just want to go to bed. I’ll never have the energy to get this going again. Yet, five years later, here I am – and doing well, thank you.

There are several others in the magazine that talk about their life situations and how it has affected them in the business world. They all have very interesting stories and I highly recommend that you read them.

To go along with these “falls” comes this thought. I was listening to my radio station on the way to work this morning, and a question was asked … “If you could choose to sit at a table with anyone alive today, who would that be?” Now, since I was listening to country radio, the first answer to come in was from a woman who said she wanted to sit with the guy in the new Billy Currington song, “People are Crazy.” In that song, two strangers (one an older gentleman) get together in a bar and are talking about life in general. That’s the one and only time they meet, yet at a later time, it is found that the older man is a millionaire and has left his entire fortune to the young man who had talked with him that night. Sure, I’d love to have talked with him as well, but – that ain’t happening anytime soon, right?

However, it got me thinking. There are so many people out there that I would love to talk with; people who have all kinds of life experiences to share – many of them business success stories. Everyone has something to share with others – things from the little and mundane to the major breakthroughs. That’s why I think it is so important for us to take the time to talk with each other; to share and to ask for advice. We’re not all in the same place in our businesses, but I can guarantee that we’ve never had a situation that no one else has ever had. There is someone out there that can tell you how they managed when faced with a similar problem or issue. Why reinvent the wheel? Let others guide us through the dark passages that we sometimes find ourselves in. And, we, too can help those that are where we were in the past. Life is so much better when we talk with each other and help each other without a price tag attached.

My advice today, then, is something that I’m doing for myself. I’m going to take my falls and pick myself back up and move ahead – I’m going to talk to others and get an idea of where they’ve been and how they’ve made it – and I’m going to become that success I’m looking for. What are you going to do with your business?

The Times They Are A'Changing

The lyrics of a song by Chris Rea go something like this:

Changing times cold hard rain/Everything's a changing/Nothing's gonna be the same
You'd better look out/'Cos you can't stop these changing times/Nothing going ever to be the same
You'd better look out/Look out for these changing times

Change is probably the scariest thing that can happen to people – and even the thought of change makes many stop, dig in their heels and state “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” We like living in our worlds – all neat and tidy, where we know what to expect and have our routines down pat. But, unfortunately, part of the world that we all live in is the inevitability of change. We can’t stop it, no matter how hard we try.

Recently, as many of you know, I moved back to small town USA after being away for many years. To me, home for the past 30 years has been Washington, DC – where everyone is bustling and the business world is ever changing. It’s hard to keep up and in order to succeed, you need to be ready for change at any given moment. It’s a rough existence at times, but people learn to adapt and to move forward – or sideways – when the need arises. But even there, we find ourselves in ruts and old routines that are hard to give up.

Risk and change are often synonymous in many people’s thoughts. “Things are going ok now. What’s going to happen if I do something different? Will I hurt my business?” They are afraid of what the future might hold if they change the least little thing – yet, without that change, business stagnates.

Perhaps your business seems to be running fine. You’re making money: you have satisfied customers, and you feel like you’re ahead of the game with your marketing. But are there things that you’d like to do that you never seem to have time for? Do you have goals but never seem to move forward with any of them? Is there a type of other business that you’d like to network with, but maybe you’re afraid that they might make it harder for you to succeed in your company? What’s stopping you from completing any of these items? Is it that you’re afraid of change? Maybe it’s time for you to say, “Oh what the heck. Let’s give it a shot. Change is happening anyway.”