Bruce Poon Tip, the founder of G Adventures was quoted as saying, “I learned in 2016 that greatness can always be found in the most challenging times. In fact, it’s when things don’t’ go according to plan that you are given the golden opportunity to rise from the ashes and show people what you’re truly capable of.”
Simply put…I love this quote. It doesn’t matter who you are, life is full of challenges and thank goodness it is. It often makes me laugh, when one of my clients tells me how challenging it is to run a business. On the one hand, they are right and on the other, they asked for it. No one told them they had to take on the challenge of starting or running a business, but it is he or she who did and it is he or she that still does. What makes it even funnier, is that knowing them, if it wasn’t a business, they would have done something equally as challenging, because they are simply built that way.
Challenge is a relative thing. What is challenging to you, might not be to me. On the other hand, something that seems almost insurmountable to me, could be a walk in the park for you. While it is difficult to measure someone on the “challenge scale”, what isn’t difficult to measure is a person’s willingness to do what it takes to find the answer.
Any time you face a challenge, there is a choice you make whether consciously or unconsciously. You either decide that the challenge is too big and you fall victim to it, or you decide to figure it out. I believe people get use to doing it one way or the other and the more they do it one way, the easier it gets.
There are times when some people look at others who have done amazing things and somehow think it must have been easy for them. They say things like, “that person was just lucky”, or “they must have been given a break”, or “it must be because they knew someone”. In reality, those people created amazing because they weren’t willing to give up. “Amazing” requires you to make a choice not to give up.
From time to time, every one hits a wall.When it happens, you can choose to try and explain why you hit the wall and figure out who to blame. You can spend your time explaining that it is in fact a wall and describing how big and thick it really is. However, at the end of the day, with this approach…you will still have a wall.
If you want to get past the wall, it requires you to do something different; find new tools, look in a different place, listen to what people are trying to tell you, research a different approach, gather different information or simply be open to fact that if you want to get past the wall, it is going to require you to make a change in you.