By the Ocean
Sunny 70 Degrees
8:01 a.m.
When you realize that most of the misery we experience in business is a result of the story we tell ourselves about how things should be going vs. how they are actually going, we get a little bit closer to the truth about what (who) is really the problem.
We create the misery.
The funny part is that, when you get behind the scenes of “successful” businesses, businesses making many millions of dollars a year, as I’ve been fortunate to do, you realize something startling:
They all have this same story!
Things should be going better than they’re going.
Some people find this extremely motivating. I find the story extremely tiring. And if the story never changes, then maybe it’s not a story worth telling in the first place.
The facts seem pretty clear:
- Almost no business succeeds overnight.
- Almost no business succeeds without huge doses of perseverance.
- Almost no business succeeds without being patient enough to endure seemingly endless periods of struggle, confusion and frustration.
- Almost no business succeeds faster, easier, or bigger than any business owner wants it to.
The STORY we tell about all of that is different though. It’s not supposed to happen, even though it almost always does.
Is this experience we all have in business a problem? Or is it just normal?
What happens if you just stop telling yourself stories and refocus on trying to help people as best you can?
Without the story, your relationship to reality can shift.
In this new and more accurate reality, “it” SHOULDN’T be going better. If it was supposed to be going better than it is, it WOULD be going better!
It’s that friction between how it’s going and how we THINK it should be going that wastes our energy on things that don’t matter.
It’s going how it’s going. That’s all we know. The rest is just our mind’s attempt to rationalize why where we’re at is not the best place for us to be.
When you realize that’s insane, the door opens to stop making yourself miserable.