Motivation Articles, Essays, Tips and Advice

When you set off toward a new destination or goal, like taking off in an airplane, you will have an idea of both your departure time and your arrival time. You will set a schedule for yourself and expect to arrive pretty much on schedule. But as soon as you take off, you will experience what pilots call “unexpected headwinds.”

The situation in your life is similar. As soon as you embark on a new journey, you will experience headwinds as well: everything will cost twice as much and take three times longer than you anticipated. You should estimate how long you will take to achieve certain milestones and then triple that time to get the actual time period required.

Types of Headwinds

Headwinds in your business and personal life will come from several sources. Your primary source of headwinds will be other people. They will disappoint you, cheat you, betray you, and fail to live up to your expectations, and turn out to be incompetent or indifferent.

Your customers will be a major source of headwinds. When you start a new venture, you will be amazed at how difficult it is to get customers to buy your product or service for the first time.

Your customers will disappoint you in that they will buy less than you expected, take longer to buy than you expected, pay slower than you expected, and complain more than expected. Remember that the customer is always right. It is not what you produce but what people buy that counts.

Financial Headwinds

Another form of headwinds that you will face has to do with money. Some people will tell you that it is easy to make all the money you want just by thinking positively and visualizing yourself as wealthy.

Everyone wants to believe that this is true, and many people embrace the idea of effortless wealth with their whole hearts. But that doesn’t include those people who have actually achieved financial success.

People who have made a lot of money have learned through bitter experience that the only thing easy about money is losing it. As the Japanese proverb says, “Making money is like digging with a pin; losing money is like pouring water on the sand.”

Personal Headwinds

You will experience headwinds personally in that you will discover, much to your surprise that you lack specific talents, skills, and knowledge that you need to succeed.

You may find that you are a poor time manager or that you lack self-discipline. You cannot seem to focus, concentrate, and apply yourself single-mindedly to your most important tasks. You waste time and feel overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time in which to do it.

You may lack financial, analytic, marketing, or selling skills. You may not know how to plan and organize your business, advertise effectively and attract customers, or persuade your prospects to buy from you.

Fortunately these are all learnable skills. But the starting point of mastering these essential skills is for you to admit that you need them. After that, the education can begin.

Action Exercise:

Because of your incredible mind, you can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. You must never allow yourself to be held back because you lack a particular skill. Figure out what skill you need to increase the quality of your life, and then set out to learn it.
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Brian Tracy is one of the world’s leading authorities on personal and business success. His fast-moving talks and seminars are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that you can apply immediately to get better results in every area. Be sure to visit the Brian Tracy web site.

-What are your thoughts on the ideas above? Join the conversation by leaving a comment below.

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Bad things happen to good people. It’s not fair, but it’s true. Other than the fact that it was beautifully written, I think the reason Harold Kushner’s book struck such a chord (and was such a huge international bestseller) is that we can all relate to the title.

We’ve all seen it happen – to ourselves or to others (or all of the above). If life is a journey, then we all at some point pass through the valley of the shadow of death.

I’d like to share with you ten principles that I consider to be the Laws of Adversity. I hope that adversity doesn’t strike you this week, but if it does I hope that someday you’ll be able to look back and say that it was the best thing that every could have happened.

Law #1: Adversity is not optional; bad things do happen to good people. Fortunately, as Harold Kushner writes in his book of that title, “The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to live fully, bravely, and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world.”

Law #2: You might not be able to choose whether or not you pass through the valley of the shadow, but you do choose whether or not to take up permanent residence down there in the darkness.

Law #3: We learn and grow more from our setbacks than we do from our successes. Adversity prepares you for bigger challenges and accomplishments in the future.

Law #4: Surviving adversity is a great way to build self-confidence, and to give you a more positive perspective on future adversity (if we survived that we can survive anything!).

Law #5: Adversity helps prevent hubris, arrogance, and complacency.

Law #6: When things aren’t working, it forces you to look at more creative solutions. There is opportunity hidden in every single adversity if you have the strength and courage to search for it and to pursue it when you’ve found it.

Law #7: What you’ve fought to gain you’ll fight to keep and vice versa – easy come, easy go – but what you had to fight to gain you will fight doubly hard to retain.

Law #8: Without the valleys, you won’t appreciate the mountains.

Law #9: Adversity keeps teaching – it provides great stories for the grandchildren! Your setbacks can, if you’re committed to learning from them and teaching about them, be the source of great learning for others.

Law #10: Adversity is a quiet teacher; you have to probe carefully for its lessons.
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Joe Tye is America’s Values Coach. He is also the author of several books and audio programs on personal, career, and business success, and a popular motivational speaker. Visit www.JoeTye.com

-I’m a big believer that adversity and challenges don’t occur simply to try and keep us from the good things in life. My own experiences have shown me that life’s challenges are in many cases opportunities through which we can grow and gain the skills necessary to attain a higher level of success then would likely have been possible without the skill set acquired from having overcome the given adversity.

The key is we have to be willing to work through whatever adversities come our way (and keep in mind the basic understanding that there’s a lesson in every challenge we’re faced with).

What’s your opinion? Do you have any experiences you would like to share where by overcoming or working through a challenge you found yourself better prepared as a result?