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Edgy Conversations: Episode 4
“Sometimes, bad things just happen to good people…”
Ever hear that phrase before?
At the most basic (unbiased) interpretation of that phrase, it is true. Right?
Good, hard-working people can wake up to a world of pain they never asked for. A life they certainly didn’t deserve.
It happens. (And it never feels fair…)
But.
How realistic is that really?
How likely is it that we make a legacy of great personal decisions and end up with random, life-crushing business-case awfulness?
Think about it.
Maybe losing is more than the “bad luck” that we situationally bemoan. Maybe we are creating a destiny of losing by making bad personal decisions.
And the more you start looking at past failures, you start to see a tiny trail of bad personal decisions that you could have corrected all along the way.
At the time.
These bad decisions seem innocent. In fact, you might find yourself defending them as a matter of “perspective”.
But they end up costly.
Here are a few of those bad personal decision areas to consider:
1. Not controlling your thoughts.
This is key.
What you think about is what you eventually become.
- If you think that you “never get a break”, then you’ll rarely ever find one…
- If you think you just can’t make it, you probably won’t…
- If you think that cheating is OK if you don’t get caught, you’re in for a huge public embarrassment.
You can recover from just about anything that ever happens to you. You’re a pretty strong person at the core.
What you can’t recover from is the wild, maniacal things that you allow your mind to create as reality.
Fear is natural. It can keep you alive. But allowing fear to make bad decisions for you is a choice for which you have to take ownership.
You have to stop it. You have to talk yourself out of the panic and hysteria that comes so easily.
And it’s not just fear.
It’s pain, loss, pride, embarrassment, jealousy, anger, and the other nasty mental demons we host in our brains.
2. Not putting in enough effort today.
Ever find yourself saying: “Shucks, I’ll just do it tomorrow”?
You just made a decision.
It might not be the wrong decision. But you just set in motion a series of possible outcomes based on your decision to wait to start executing.
No one else did that to you or for you.
No one.
That was all “you”…
And strangely that is wonderfully motivating.
The effort you put into life is exactly what you get out it.
You NEVER put in massive amount of mind-blowing commitment to a goal and walk away with nothing to show for it. The achievement of effort itself makes you a winner.
What’s deceiving about effort is that we rarely openly quit on our goals. We just keep making the decision to NOT put in enough effort to get to those goals.
Effort is earned each day. The decision to give up even one day is the first step toward losing next week. Next month. Next year.
And that’s easy to do, because it’s not today.
3. Not staying financially disciplined.
Discipline is a series of decisions. The worst business failures can usually be linked back to bad personal finance decisions in this area.
Let’s be frank:
- You can’t be focused on building a profitable enterprise, when you have horrible credit card spending habits.
- You can’t leverage better long term business opportunities when you pile up mounds of minimum monthly payments.
- You can’t be patient and giving when all you think about are the creditors who have you on speed dial.
Discipline. You denying yourself immediate gratification is the key to positioning yourself for the the business success that you really want to see happen.
And you can’t even get close, if you are saddled with the baggage of bad personal financial decisions.
Staying disciplined sucks (in the short term), but it means you have the best possible chance for ending up a business loser.
The beauty of life.
What you do, who you are, really matters.
You create your success each day by the decisions that you make.
The hard decisions to keep trying. The sad decisions to let go. The powerful decisions to rise above your weaknesses.
Life is a series of decisions.
The bad personal decisions you are making might be costing you the business success you always dreamed about. ~ Dan Waldshmidt
