Wondering where I’m going with this? I’m talking about how important it is to see life with the joy and wonder of a child and the attitude of not giving up. When you run into a problem or when life smacks you upside the head, you may want to curl up and give up. For example, the global pandemic is a huge problem for some, but maybe you can find a way to flip the situation by changing your business model or pursuing a different job. Think about it. What changes have you made in your lifestyle, your business, or your relationship because of this pandemic?
Maybe some of you have figured out that right now is probably a good time to take your health seriously. Maybe you’ve decided to take off the extra weight you’ve talked about shedding for decades, but every time you tried to make a change and dropped five or ten pounds, you became frustrated because the scale stopped moving. Maybe you’ve even put on a couple of pounds, so you’ve pulled out a bag of Doritos or potato chips and self-medicated because you thought that would help make you feel better. Maybe you were quick to give up, saying you hate exercising anyway, and you’re not giving up your mornings for a run anymore. You don’t like eating fresh vegetables and salads and fruit, so you’re going to eat whatever you want, when you want.
Maybe your job hunt has been unsuccessful, or you just can’t get your new business idea off the ground because you’re restricted now in what you can do and how you can operate a business safely. Again, ask yourself, when faced with a problem or something not working, have you ever said, “I’m giving up, cutting my losses, and moving on”?
I want you to think about something: How many of you have seen a baby start to walk? How many times does that baby fall, then get up again? Fifty times, a hundred times? Imagine if you applied what most people do in life and said to that baby, “Hey, you’re just not a walker, so stop doing that to yourself. Seriously, it’s painful watching you fall over and over again. Just give up, already.” If you heard people saying that to a baby, you’d look at them as if they were crazy, right? So why is it that when we fail in whatever we do as adults, we’re so quick to give up instead of trying again and again and again? I don’t even know who I heard this from, but I recall the story of a father who asked his daughter every day, “Did you fail at something today?” and when she said she had, he celebrated it, because she had learned something and would try again the next day. What an outlook!
Honestly, and I’ve said this in other blog posts, publishing is likely the hardest industry to get into. I was rejected four or five hundred times by agents and publishers. You might ask, are there even four hundred agents out there? No! I went back to some of them two or three times, and I never gave up. When the door was slammed, I just found another way in. I never saw this as a failure. Nor did I share what I was doing with friends and people I knew, because I expected a lack of support. After laughter at hearing what I was trying to do, to accomplish, I expected to be told to just give up already and move on and do something realistic.
But who has ever said that successful people have it easy? If you really listen to people’s stories, and I mean their whole stories, what it took for them to get where they are and the doors that were closed in their faces, the struggles, the hardships, the endless mistakes, you know that success is not something that is handed to people or easy to come by. It comes with so much rejection that the average person quits and gives up long before achieving it. What sets successful people apart from the average person is that they just keep coming at their goals from a different direction over and over and over. To anyone else, it would seem painful or masochistic, but when you truly believe something and want it bad enough that you can feel it, taste it, believe it, you can’t give up.
Right now, because of the times we’re in, you can choose to see this pandemic as ruining your life, or you can realize you have to think outside the box and become creative. Take your health seriously right now—and I’m not kidding about this. Everyone should be taking a serious look at how unhealthy we’ve become, from our lifestyles, to our food choices. We need to stop searching for pills that will fix problems we created because we didn’t take care of ourselves. What does this have to do with business, having a job, and getting by? Everything! You need to have energy to be creative and curious and to see things with childlike joy instead of being so exhausted from doing nothing that you need to lie on the sofa for the rest of the night with a tray of brownies, a glass of wine, and a bag of potato chips.
Get up and start moving, just like a child. Start seeing failing as trying. If you fail something or mess up, you’ve just learned something, and tomorrow you get to fix it and try again and again and again. Walk that mile uphill, lift those weights, and commit to eating a salad and fresh fruit every day, staying away from sugar and refined food. Stop drinking those sodas, and start drinking fresh water. Then come up with an idea for a business model in this world, and above all, see it with childlike wonder.
Think about this: When a child sees a puddle of water on a path or a sidewalk, what does the child do? She jumps in it and has a blast and laughs. Children aren’t worried about their clothes and shoes getting wet, because they’ll dry. But what do most adults do when they see that puddle? They might walk around it—or they might bitch and complain about the fact that the puddle is right in front of the door of the building they need to get to, so they need to get their shoes wet or muddy. Sometimes, if they have kids, they yell at their kids for even thinking about jumping into that puddle.
Think about the mood, the emotion, of the adult who is pissed off about a puddle. Maybe he’s walking into a restaurant, and when the hostess greets him, he’s still furious, so he comes at the hostess with accusations, angry, as if the hostess should be responsible for taking care of the puddle and cleaning it up. Not only that, but he is left with no energy, so he goes from being angry to feeling nothing. Now ask yourself this: Who would you want to spend time with, the person who found so much joy in the puddle and even jumped in it, so much so that her state of joy and energy was absolutely infectious and put a smile on your face, or the person who was filled with anger and rage, furious because of the puddle? I don’t know about you, but that angry, pissed-off, complaining adult would leave me wanting to be anywhere else.
Think of both these people and their states of mind: old and cranky or childlike and wondering. Who do you want to do business with, talk to, and be around? Childlike wonder, energy, and joy are infectious, so I want to go through life with that and some laughter. Whoever said becoming an adult means you have to lose that childlike wonder? Try it. Seriously, next time you see a puddle, no matter how ridiculous you think it is, jump in it. Better yet, take some of that attitude of not giving up, exactly like a baby just learning to walk, and apply it to whatever you’re doing right now—your health, your lifestyle, your business, the way you see the world. If it doesn’t work or you think you messed up something, just know you didn’t fail, because tomorrow you get to try again.
