We’re not born with courage, but neither are we born with fear. Have you ever heard of a baby who’s afraid of the dark? Of course not. She grew in the dark for nine months. She should be afraid of the light! Have you ever heard of a three- or four-year-old afraid of the dark? All the time. Where did she learn that fear? Who taught her that the dark outside is any different than the dark inside? It was probably her parents who decided she needed a night light. She probably thinks that she should be afraid of the dark if her parents insist that a light be kept on.
What about the other fears in life? Maybe some of your fears are brought on by your own experiences, by what someone has told you, by what you’ve read in the papers. Some fears are valid, like walking alone in a bad part of town at two o’clock in the morning. But once you learn to avoid that situation, you won’t need to live in fear of it.
Resilience is the ability an object has to return to its original form after being bent, stretched, or compressed. That’s the dictionary’s definition. In people, it’s the ability to readily recover from illness, depression, or adversity.
In our lives, resilience specifically means being able to withstand setbacks, broken hearts and broken dreams, financial crisis, loss of loved ones, loss of enterprise, and loss of health. How would you ever handle it if you lost everything you had today? What would your next step be? How long would you be depressed and upset and angry? What would it take for you to pull yourself up and start all over again? How resilient are you? Could you handle it? Could you learn from all of your disappointments and start all over again? What would it take?
Sometimes defeat is the best beginning. Why? Well for one thing, if you’re at the very bottom, there’s only one way to go–up. But more importantly, if you’re flat on your back, mentally and financially, you’ll usually become sufficiently disgusted with yourself to reach inside and pull out miracles. If you’re flat broke or flat miserable, you’ll eventually become so disgusted that you’ll pull out the basic essentials required to make everything better.
It’s in the face of adversity that change begins. With enough disgust, desire, and determination to change your life, you’ll start saying, “I’ve had it. Enough of this. No more. Never again!”
Here is a familiar scenario for all of us: you have an exciting goal in mind, you’ve done your homework, you think you’re amply prepared… and things just don’t work out. You’ve probably had times when you thought you were doing what you were supposed to do, but you were misinformed. You thought you had it all laid out, and it just didn’t work. You burned the midnight oil day after day, and it didn’t help. You couldn’t seem to change the end result.
There are the times when you have to be your own best cheerleader. And there are two ways to keep yourself encouraged.
If success is the steady progress toward your own personal goals, what is failure? Is failure working on a project that ends with poor results? No, of course not. Is failure launching a new product that fails miserably in the marketplace? No, of course not. Is failure doing the best you possibly can with your kids and then having them disappoint you in a very personal way? No, of course not.
There’s no failure in pouring your heart, soul, and energy into something that doesn’t work. Rather, failure is not trying at all. If success is the steady progress toward your own personal goals, then failure is no progress at all.
Success and failure are always linked together. Success is doing. Failure is not doing. It’s that simple.
There are two phrases I (Jim Rohn) would like you to ponder for a moment. The first is that life and business are like the changing seasons. That’s one of the best ways to illustrate life: it’s like the seasons that change. Here’s the second phrase: you cannot change the seasons, but you can change yourself.
Now with those two key phrases in mind, let’s turn to what I consider to be the four major lessons in life to learn.
The first lesson is this: learn how to handle the winters. They come regularly, right after autumn. Some are long, some are short, some are difficult, some are easy, but they always come right after autumn. That is never going to change.
There wouldn’t be positive without negative. It’s part of the life scenario. Ancient scripture says it best: “There’s a time to laugh and a time to cry.” You’ve got to become so sophisticated and well-educated that you don’t laugh when it’s time to cry. You’ve also got to learn to cry well. How are you going to identify with others if you don’t cry with them? The negative side is very important, so don’t ignore it. You need to let it be a part of the scenario.
In fact, you need to learn to master it. Negativity is not to be ignored, it’s to be mastered. It makes us better than we are to wrestle with it. It makes us better than we are to acknowledge and fight tyranny that moves into vulnerable countries, ignorance that moves into your life, procrastination that robs you of your fortune, or poor health that’s the legacy of neglecting your health disciplines. You’ve got to do battle with the enemies–those outside of you as well as those within. So learn how to handle the negative.
Honesty is an aspect of integrity that’s often sorely neglected. There are many examples of how the lack of honesty is tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, today. It used to be that you either had money or you didn’t. When you bought something and the bill came, you had to pay it or there was an immediate problem. There were only two alternatives: you took care of your debts, or you were a thief. Some people would literally take their own lives if they couldn’t honor their debts.
I (Jim Rohn) am sure we can all agree that’s not exactly true any longer. Many people don’t feel the same kind of personal responsibility about paying debts promptly. And today, of course, we can put off paying for our purchases as long as we can make the minimum payment on our credit cards.
