Business

All of us want to win. It may be in different ways, and different things, but we want to win. Hell, even people who work hard at being miserable are doing it so they can win some attention, or some help, or whatever it is they’re after. That’s cool – we wanna win.

But have you noticed in movies where someone wants to win (it’s usually a comeback after some catastrophic failure) that they head into the “training montage?” It’s awesome. After going through total hell, loss, humiliation, loss of faith, betrayal or whatever it is, they steel themselves and set themselves to the task of retraining to become a winner.

Now, the montage is actually pretty cool. They struggle at first, learn some new techniques and can’t do it. They spend a ton of time (about 40 seconds) and start to improve. There’s a coach – somebody in their corner. They sweat a lot. There’s inspiring theme music. People start cheering them on. They pick up momentum. Holy shit, they’re looking badass. And bam! It’s time to fight. Whew!

The problem is that it’s bullshit. Life doesn’t work quite like that.

Setbacks come – I get that. After two marriages, having been an entrepreneur, and a close protection specialist before that, I have an angle or two on loss, setbacks, heartbreaks, financial pressures, broken bones and lost knife fights – not all of them ;)

Here’s the thing: there’s no damn training montage in life that will save your ass.

If you want to get “better” at anything, it’s gonna look more like this:

• You’ll get disgusted at yourself for something
• You’ll bitch about it to yourself and others – either skilfully or not – until you (or they) can’t take it any more
• At some point you’ll decide to “try to change things”
• You’ll start making changes and wuss out as soon as it doesn’t go right
• You’ll bitch about it again (your friends will probably stop listening by this point)
• You’ll end up looking in the mirror with your disgust, your failed shot at changing, and no one to commiserate with (sorry about leaving that preposition stranded there)

This is when it gets good. This is the moment when you decide if you’ll live with your disgust, or actually fix shit. If you live with your disgust, strap in because this is for you…

If you’re gonna fix it, you have to be all in. “Oh, but I AM all in Chris, I AM.” I doubt it because people don’t push hard, I mean really hard. You see, the odds of changing any materially important thing in your life are stacked against you. The odds of you change are 1 in 9. So you have to be ALL IN to some sort of biblical proportion if you want to make things move. If you do, you become something new.

So what happens from here, is you start changing a thing, one thing, without exception – no excuses, no variables, no wimping out, no crap.

You likely won’t have a coach to give you clever new approaches/ideas (hat’s off to you if you were smart enough to get one). The work will happen early in the morning when you don’t want to get up, or later at night when you just want to drag your ass to your bed.

You’ll think you’re making crap progress and no perceptible advancement – but you’ll stay at it because you balled-up and said you were “ALL IN” – remember that part? There will be struggle, and you’ll fail some more (but won’t quit). You will be alone, there will be no one cheering you on, and there will be no fucking theme music.

And when you get here and don’t quit, things will start to change. They’ll change for two reasons. The first is because of the compounding effects of your effort. The other reason they’ll change is because, by staying at it, you’ve changed. And because you’ve changed, you’ll have earned the right to be better than your problem.

You supersede your problems – whatever they are – when you have put more energy into you becoming better, than they have energy to mess you up. If you have a big problem, it has a lot of charge to it. You have to overwhelm it with more of your own. You have to become the problem to the problem! If you’re afraid of the storm, you have to become a storm that’s so strong that the other storm takes one look and says, “I’m outta here.”

It is hard – I mean really hard. And you have to do the work. If you won’t do the work, then quietly accept your shit and try not to bug the rest of us. We’re working.

The last week has been in Las Vegas. Yep, it’s over the top here, but people are focused. They are focused on getting your attention, getting your time, getting your money; they’re focused. And as I sit at McCarran Airport waiting for my flight, I’m looking at the tower and thinking about the Air Traffic Controllers in there. They’re focused.

Their priority is clear: instruct aircraft so they can take off and land safely. That’s it. Schedules are nice and they need to keep everything moving, but this is about safe take offs and landings.

Did you know the tower doesn’t deal with taxiing? There’s a different tower for that. As a matter of fact, there’s a completely different radio frequency for that. They do one thing: safe movement of aircraft. They’re focused (and when they’re not, it becomes quickly un-safe for everyone involved).

“FOCUS” is an acronym:

Follow

One

Course

Until

Successful

It’s not 2 courses, or 10 courses – one course. Until you’re done. More accurately, until it’s done.

If you’re like me (and most people I know) you struggle with focus. The good news is there are two really useful things you can do about it. The first is work out. Yep, you heard me: work out. When you get to the gym regularly, you start to cultivate an ability to narrow your focus, perform a specific task that takes a lot of effort, and stay with it for a short but intense period of time. The same is true if you’re running, on the bike, whatever. Work out.

The other is meditate. Stop, breathe, stay with it and it’s incredible training for your brain.

Let’s face it, under pressure our minds tend to either scatter (we flail around and do all kinds of things to try to make something work) or we lock up. In either case, if you’ve trained your brain to hold focus, even just a little longer than those around you, suddenly you become the person who has their shit together when everyone else is losing theirs.

Focus. And stop losing your shit.

We can be really certain about things, and really wrong – all at the same time. Why?

You probably see this in business, maybe at home, sometimes in your own thinking, certainly in politics, and all over the media – people are “certain” about things. But when you track the story, follow the conversation, or wait it out a bit, you often find that what they were so certain about was simply wrong. It wasn’t grounded in the truth, it wasn’t thought though, it didn’t have the permanence they believed. They were wrong.

I’ve had some people be insistent about things, about how I should live and decisions I should make and I bet you have that happen sometimes too. But a person’s insistence isn’t an argument. Because “I’m certain” isn’t an enduring reason. It doesn’t point to the truth.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably found yourself being pushy about an idea, or really believing in something, and also found yourself to be wrong. That sucks. I’ve had two loves in my life, real ones I mean, and each time I knew it would last forever and could end only with death, but each time it ended, and I wasn’t dead and neither were they. I was certain, but I was wrong – or at least not accurate.

It worries me. It worries me when people push an idea using certainty, rather than good logic, or good thinking, or at least come at it as an experiment. It worries me more when that person is me, and it’s my own thinking about my own life. And I’m sure. And I’m wrong. 

This post isn’t because I think I’ve fucked something up recently (although I’ve definitely botched my fair share of things through the years), but it’s because of all the small ways that we’re certain about things that just aren’t quite right. The cumulation of them can be annoying at best, and devastating at the boundary. 

It’s hard to say how to avoid this entirely, but there is a fundamental that can help. It’s this: Certainty is a feeling, and feelings are transient. The truth, I mean the real truth (not “your truth” and “my truth”) is not always easy to approach, and not always friendly, but it is unyielding and always finds its way. 

Don’t defend your certainty, pursue the truth.

If you were to gather half a dozen business owners together and ask them what their job is, after they finished giving you a list of everything from union negotiator to janitor, invariably someone will say that their job is to solve problems. Clients have problems. Staff have problems. There are problems to be handled with suppliers and manufacturers. There are problems to be handled with operations. There are problems to be solved with lenders, and the list goes on. Most business owners see themselves as problem-solvers.

However, if you ask that same group to tell you what it is they love to do, it’s pretty rare that someone will enthusiastically volunteer that they love solving problems. Some people do, but often they aren’t entrepreneurs.

Now, not only do many business owners not like having to solve problems, many of them aren’t really that good at it. There is a special kind of person with a special kind of thinking that is powerful and gets energized about solving problems. If you don’t end up absolutely juiced from solving problems, it’s probably not your forté. And that’s not a problem. As a matter of fact, as a business owner, that’s an advantage.

Usually, as entrepreneurs, we started our businesses because we thought we could create something better or different than someone else, so off we went to create our company. We were likely excited (perhaps a bit nervous), but, we’re still here creating new opportunities and growing something we care about.

Here’s the key in all of this: we created a business – we didn’t solve a problem. Creating the business may have addressed a need in the market, but it was most definitely an act of creation rather than problem solving.

Most business owners are good at, and are energized by creating opportunities – not solving problems. If that’s true, then stop solving problems. Start creating opportunities that make your problems irrelevant.

>Whenever you, as a business leader, start to put your efforts into solving a problem, you are investing in your past – putting energy into something that has already happened. When you create an opportunity, it’s an investment in your future and the growth of your business.

This doesn’t let you off the hook from solving problems. Things still have to be handled in your business. But if you start to look at a problem  and, instead of going into the problem to solve it, look beyond it to what could be done to make the problem completely irrelevant in the future, that’s likely where you’ll find that your real genius shows up (you’ll likely have lower blood pressure too).

Great businesses look beyond what’s in front of them today, while still handling the needs of the client. Stop solving problems, and create opportunities that will make them irrelevant.

You’ve undoubtedly seen it, heard it, experienced it, been told to do it, and probably have told other people to do it: set clear goals and go for it. Push. Drive. Succeed. Get your “Type-A” on.

And it’s not necessarily a bad idea, except for when it is.

There are times to pursue things very directly. The straight-line approach is powerful and useful, when it’s appropriate. The challenge is that it’s not always appropriate, but most of the advice, self-help, coaching approaches and advice from your well-intended friends seem to use it as a default.

Here’s the deal: you have to read the terrain.

Straight lines are tempting. We use some simple math and remember that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and so we’re, “Damn, I want to get this handled so I’ll take the shortest route please!” But the shortest route isn’t always the shortest route. Sometimes you have to meander a little, perhaps even seemingly “drift” in the eyes of others.

I’ve done my fair share of straight lines, and there are some that I’m following right now. But in a broader sense, I’m in more of a nomad phase these days, and there are definitely people who think I’m lost, aimless, and off-track. I’m not. And if the terrain you’re facing requires a lot of turns on your part too, don’t confuse that with being off-track. You may be moving forward perfectly.

It’s tempting to encourage everyone to get on the “straight and narrow,” but life is rarely that convenient. Meander if you have to, and don’t take any straight-line advice B.S. from anyone unless they really understand the terrain you’re facing.