A wise and resilient old gentleman who used to dine every month in his club downtown–sitting at a long table covered with a white linen tablecloth and sporting silver candlesticks, and served by tuxedoed waiters–loved to regale companions with the fruits of his many years of experience. After dessert and coffee were served, he would push back from the table and light an enormous imported cigar. “This cigar is the only indulgence of an old man,” he would say with a chuckle as he struck the wooden match against his thumbnail–and then he’d launch into one of his stories.
They usually began with a question, such as, “Did I ever tell you about the time when I was setting up factories for the Giant XYZ Corporation in the backwoods of Georgia and was compelled to teach them a little lesson in business and good manners?”
Although the stories always started out the same, no two stories were ever alike, and there would always be a wealth of wisdom through example, a veritable mother lode of remarkable instruction. And this man who was so old, so wise, and so flexible has one ironclad rule for dealing with other people. This rule involved learning and growing from every experience, so the negative ones need never happen again.
He said, “If a man fools me once, I think ‘That’s not nice,’ and I remember it. If the same man fools me a second time, I think ‘Shame on you.’ If the same fellow tricks me a third time, well, I have been warned and should have changed my ways and didn’t, so I think ‘Shame on me.'”
If you’re not changing your responses to the situations and circumstances that make up your life, you’re not being flexible, and you’re throwing away your greatest asset as an individual human being. None of us can completely control external events, but we can always control and adapt our responses. None of us can know which cards fate is going to deal out, but we can always control how we play them.
* Source: Leading an Inspired Life by Jim Rohn