Bessie Braddock, a Member of Parliament, was said to have chastised Winston Churchill publicly at a political function: “Winston, you are disgustingly DRUNK!” His reply was classic: “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”
As Winston’s quick-witted remark implies, some unfavorable conditions we find ourselves in ARE temporary and can be righted in short order; others, not so much. Piles of debt, poor health, failing businesses, low profit margins, an unproductive team, cheap clients who don’t appreciate you… ALL of this is the result of our own doing, our own choices. The good news is that ALL of this CAN be made right and completely turned around at ANY moment if you are truly determined to change it. Your circumstances do not need to remain “disgustingly ugly.”
Richard Branson was a horrible student, saddled with dyslexia at a time when learning disabilities weren’t understood, much less properly dealt with. He was labeled “slow” and stupid by his teachers – yet he went on to be a billionaire business magnate and commercial astronaut who was knighted at Buckingham Palace for “services to entrepreneurship.”
As a child growing up, Oprah Winfrey was so poor her grandmother often made her dresses out of potato sacks. She was repeatedly molested by her cousin, uncle and a friend of their family. She eventually ran away from home and, at age 14, gave birth to a baby boy who died shortly after being born. You would hardly think someone with that background would go on to become one of the wealthiest, most influential people of our time, but she did.
Beethoven started losing his hearing at age 26 and was completely deaf by 44. In a letter to his doctor, he wrote, “If I belonged to any other profession, it would be easier, but in my profession it is a frightful state.” Depending entirely on memory and the vibrations of the piano, he composed his best compositions without being able to hear the notes.
Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS at 21 and given only 2 years to live – yet he fought the disease and went on to become one of the most accomplished physicists and cosmologists of our time. J. K. Rowling was a single mother living in poverty. Her manuscript about Harry Potter was rejected over and over again. Colonel Harland Sanders’s father died when the Colonel was 5 years old, and he was forced to cook and to look after his siblings while his mother worked, often away for days trying provide for the family. He struggled with various jobs and businesses, failing over and over again, barely scraping by, before getting the idea to franchise his fried chicken recipe at 62 years old, never achieving true success until he sold the company 13 years later at 75.
Stories like this are abundant: people with all sorts of “reasons” not to succeed, in horribly difficult circumstances, who find a way to overcome. To persist. To achieve. The common threads?
1) They don’t “accept” that their circumstances are out of their control. There is always something you can do to improve your situation. Conversely, there is always something you can do to make them way worse. If you believe the former, you get up every morning and go to WORK on changing the situation, or at least making the most of it. NOT tomorrow, NOT next month, next year. NOW. Today. Every day. With urgency.
2) They don’t make or buy into excuses about why it “can’t be done.” They accept the fact that overcoming their difficult situations will be hard, but do it anyway. They get up and try again, with a different approach, when they’ve failed. What they DON’T do is sit in a pool of their own misery, lamenting about how “unfair” it all is. I’m sure they sit in quiet desperation from time to time, angry and frustrated, ready to quit…but they don’t. They press on. Remember, any moron can come up with reasons why something can’t be done, why something won’t work. The profit is in figuring out how to get something to work, how to overcome a bad situation.
3) They feel ashamed and deeply frustrated if they don’t make progress, never allowing themselves to shrug off their shortcomings and failures, particularly when others wouldn’t blame them for not amounting to anything or expect them to achieve what they did.
I think it’s important to take stock of our lives from time to time and determine what’s NOT working, what NEEDS changing and what MUST NOT continue. We’re still early in the year – why not do this now? Make a list.
If you can’t figure out what you want, at least make a list of things you DON’T want, then set about changing them. Get yourself in success environments and invest heavily, both time and money, in success materials. Gain access to wealthy, successful people – their books, their interviews, their seminars. More time learning, LESS time tweeting and surfing. More time with books, less time with TV. Don’t settle for low standards or resign yourself to your situation. There is always something you can do, always something that can be done.
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