Adversity, Fun and Focus on Your Why

Written by on January 22, 2019 / Tuesday Talk

Today’s Tuesday Talk was live on Facebook at 8:15AM and the replay is now on YouTube.  The video is posted below along with the transcript.

We started off the show with a a discussion about diversity. I told a story about how I made a mistake and lost a client. This loss focused my efforts on replacing the revenue I would be missing.  I took a negative and used it to fuel me.

The second topic in this weeks Tuesday Talk was “Fun.”  When you enjoy what you are doing you put a greater effort into it and it is effortless to invest long hours and work with the intensity necessary to be successful.  If your work isn’t fun you need to examine why and see if you can adjust it. If you can’t, you might be in the wrong business.

The final topic for discussion today was “You Why.” This refers to your mission and purpose for doing things. If your purpose drives you, you will be motivated to do it regardless of the time it takes or the circumstances under wick you must operate.

Here is the transcript for this show. Please note that this is an “as spoken” transcript and was written as such. I’ve included it here so you can follow along with the video and so those of you who prefer to read can enjoy it.

This is the Tuesday Talk, and we do this every Tuesday at 08:15 on Facebook. Find me on my Facebook page @ The Dave Lorenzo.

We post the replay on YouTube. Go to YouTube, and my channel is my name, Dave Lorenzo.

Adversity

I want to start off with the topic of adversity and how you should handle adversity.

When it comes to things that go wrong, most people lament, they sit around and think about what happened and they wonder what they could have done to prevent this particular thing from happening. And it is helpful for you to figure out, for you to reverse engineer, or for you to do an after-action review about what went wrong, it’s helpful, and the reason it’s helpful is so that you can prevent things from happening again. But while you’re going through a difficult situation, while you’re experiencing the difficult situation, I don’t want you to be concerned with why the thing happened. What I want you to think about while you’re going through some adversity is I want you to think about what good is going to come from this? And I know it can be difficult. And I want you to reflect on that for a moment, because I know it can be difficult, but think about the last adversity that you experienced, think about the last bad thing that happened to you, and think about why it could be good, or what good could come from it.

Here’s why I want you to do that.

Everything that happens to us in life is a learning experience. We all go through bad things. Some of them are worse than others. But everything we go through in life is a learning experience, so when you look at adversity and you think to yourself, wow, this is really bad, but what can I learn from it? You’re taking something negative and you’re turning it into a positive.

I’ll give you an example… From my own personal life, and it’s not the prettiest picture but it’s something that is very, it’s something that’s instructive. I was working with a client, a longterm client, and we were getting great results, and something happened, I made a mistake. I screwed up with a client, I screwed up in my client relationship, and the client decided he didn’t want to work with me anymore. I got fired. I was, devastated is the right way to put it, because I’d been working with this client a long time. It wasn’t just the financial compensation that I was going to miss, I was going to miss the interaction with this client, who was a fantastic, still is a fantastic person. They were a great client to work with and I enjoyed working with them on a regular basis, I knew we were making progress, it was personally fulfilling for me to work with them. I made a mistake, I got fired.

That’s adversity.

I decided to look at that and say what good could possibly come from this? It would have been very easy for me to sit around and think to myself, ugh, what a schmuck I am, I can’t believe I screwed this up. It would have been very easy for me to sit around and say, oh my gosh, I just lost this client that’s worth this much money to me, what am I going to do? Would’ve been very easy for me to say, this is exactly the kind of client I want and I blew it, I’m a loser. That would have been easy. But what I decided to do instead was I decided to focus on what good could potentially come from this.

Instead, I pivoted and I said, I need to go out and I need to find more clients just like this person so that if this happens again, and look, I’m going to get fired again, clients stop working with me for various reasons, I will prevent that particular screw-up from every happening again with another client, but clients stop working with you for a number of reasons that tend to be out of your control, so I’m going to find myself other clients who are just like this client, so that I never have to worry about only having one client relationship or, you know, one particular client relationship that is this rewarding and this fulfilling.

I took that adversity and I turned it into fuel for something good that was going to come from it. The reason this is important is because it gets you off of focusing on the negatives, gets you away from the negatives that are involved in the adversity. There’s going to be, if the negatives are at the front of your mind, if the negatives are top of mind for you when it comes to adversity, it’s going to be a huge problem, you’re not going to be able to break through that. So you need to focus on what’s happening and how to fix it if you can, and then you need to focus on why this is good for you.

Now, it’s going to be difficult in many instances. Like the instance I gave you is a business matter, right? So with business matters, it sucks when adversity strikes, but it’s easier to pivot. In your personal life, when adversity strikes, it’s awful, and it can draw you into a rabbit hole of doom, the cycle of doom, I call it. You don’t want that. So, you know, think about an illness, to yourself or to a family member. What good could possibly come from this? There’s no good that can come from it. You know, the death of a close friend. There’s no good that can come from that. Well, there is no good that can come from that from your, from the perspective of the things that you’re going through in the immediate, you know, in the immediate future, in the immediate present. In the future though, what good could come from that? You really feel like you can see how strong you are to get through those things, and when it comes to, you know, something as horrible as death, if you connect with other people in your family and your relationship with other people grows stronger because you have to help them get through this terrible situation, or they have to help you get through this terrible situation, so your relationship with the other members of your family is strengthened as a result, that’s good that has come from horrible, horrible adversity.

An example I can give you from my own personal life is two years ago, my family, we experienced the death of someone who was a close family member, and people from all over the United States and even all over the world came together to celebrate the life of this person. We did a wake, a two-day wake and then a funeral, and the whole family came together because of this. It’s unfortunate that it took a terrible incident like that, a death of someone, for everyone to come together, but members of my family who came into town to be a part of this celebration of life, as the person’s funeral took place, I’ve remained close with over the last two years and I had not been as close to them as I would have liked. This forced me to get close to them and it rekindled our relationship, so something good did come even from that horrible, terrible, tragic situation.

Fun

Alright, second thing I want to talk about today, is fun.

If your work isn’t fun, you must be done, and that is a phrase that I use over and over and over again with my clients. If your work isn’t fun, you must be done. Think about that for a second.

I recently worked with a client who was in his early 50s, and a very, very successful client. We were talking about his business, we were talking about all he’s got going on in his business, and one of the things he said to me is, look, if I can just make enough money, I can go off and do this other thing, I can go off and do these projects that are so important to me. And I just looked at him and I said, why are you waiting to make the money in order to do what you really want to do? And he sat back in his chair, again, this gentleman’s very successful, sat back in his chair and he said, “well, what do you mean?” He said, “I’m really good at…” his business, his day job, and I said, yeah, but you’re miserable, you’re unhappy, you’re working too much at something that seems too much like work.

So my message to you, my friends, about fun is you have to enjoy what you’re doing on a regular basis. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it. If it’s not fun, you must be done. Things that are fun for you, things that you’re passionate about will have constant motivation for you to keep doing it.

I work with a lot of people who are litigators, who are trial lawyers, and they really enjoy litigation, but they don’t get to do the actual litigating part 90% of the time. And they’re miserable when they have to do anything other than litigation, they’re miserable with the administrative aspects of running their firm, they’re miserable with the paperwork associated with payroll and everything else that goes along with it. And my counsel to them is, look, you like to litigate, so here’s what you need to do. You need to go to a firm that litigates a lot, that litigates all the time, and you need to tell them, listen, I’m your guy, send me the crappiest cases, I’ll go to court all day long and I’m the guy that goes to court, you be the person that runs the firm. These are marriages not only of convenience, but they help improve your life. Any business, any business can be modified to make it so that you enjoy it, and if you can’t modify it so that you enjoy it, you got into the wrong business in the first place.

Your passion will fuel your motivation if you’re capable of developing a business, if you’re capable of selling, so remember the adage, if it’s not fun, it must be done, and think about ways to make your current business as much fun as it was when you started it, and if it wasn’t fun right from the beginning, figure out how to get out of it and start a new business that will be fun and that you’ll be passionate about, so that when you put in the 18, 20, 25 hours in a 24 hour day, you’re actually enjoying putting in the time.

There’s nothing worse than a success you can’t stand, so you have to enjoy what you’re doing, at least enjoy the aspect of the business that you’re in that has fueled your passion, that’s the reason that you started it. If it’s not fun, you must be done, and that’s point two in today’s Tuesday Talk.

#AskDaveLorenzo

Now we’re going to finish today’s Tuesday Talk with your why. Your why, the reason why you do things. And before we get to that, I want to remind you to use the hashtag #AskDaveLorenzo. Hashtag is the number sign, for those of you who don’t know, for the five of you who don’t know what a hashtag is. Hashtag #AskDaveLorenzo, #AskDaveLorenzo. If I’ve said it the wrong way before, I’m going to say it the right way now. #AskDaveLorenzo is the hashtag, and I want you to put that hashtag in with your question down in the comments, and I will answer your questions here on Tuesday Talk, I’ll answer them on Twitter, I’ll answer them on YouTube, I’ll answer them on Instagram, I’ll answer them on all the different forms of social media, hashtag #AskDaveLorenzo. #AskDaveLorenzo is the hashtag. Use that for your questions, I’ll answer them here on this form of media and all the other social media outlets.

Your Why

Final point in today’s Tuesday Talk is your why. You need to be focused on why you’re doing something.

I’ve found that my clients do a lot of things that they think they should be doing because it’s the way they’ve always been done. You need to ask why you’re doing something before you do it, you need to ask why you’re doing something during the process of doing it, and you need to ask why at the end. And here’s the reason. Sometimes we get off-mission. We get off-focus, we get off-topic.

If you’re making videos like these, you need to ask yourself why you’re making the videos. I’m making these videos to be helpful and to add value to people in my community, that’s why we do Tuesday Talk, that’s why I do a video every day separate and apart from Tuesday Talk that goes on my YouTube channel, that’s why I do a video every day that goes up on Instagram. That’s why I post videos on Twitter. I want to be helpful, I want to add value to people in my community. That’s why I’m doing it.

If I started doing these videos and I didn’t remember the reason why, I would have to stop, because the reason why wasn’t important enough to me. I have people all the time come to me and they tell me, listen, Dave, I’m doing these, I’m doing these talks at Rotary Clubs all over my local area, and you said I have to go out and speak in order to develop business, you said I have to go out and speak in order to sell. I don’t know why I continue to do these talks at the Rotary Clubs. I never get business from them, I hate them, they’re not productive for me and they cut into my day, they’re really kind of wasting my time. I’m not sure why I’m doing these talks at the Rotary Clubs.

And what do I tell them, what’s my advice to them? Stop doing it! Stop doing the talks at the Rotary Clubs. If you don’t know why you’re doing it, if it’s not productive for you, if you’re not enjoying it, stop doing it! There’s no reason why to continue to do something if it’s not producing a result or you’re not enjoying it. Here’s the bottom line. Your reason why governs everything. In the first two segments of today’s Tuesday Talk, we talked about adversity, we talked about fun. The reason why is the common thread that ties everything together.

You got into your business for a specific reason. Now those reasons that you stay in business may change over time, but you must always have a purpose. You must always have a reason why you’re doing it. And that reason why must be fun for you, or it must be compelling enough for you to keep you coming back, or there must be an aspect of it that’s fun. The reason why is what drives you. When your reason why is not strong enough, you lose interest in your business and your business will start to die.

Action Items 

So here are your action items from today’s Tuesday Talk.

The first thing I want you to do is I want you to think about the last two or three bad things that have happened, the last two or three things, events that are adverse. Last two elements of adversity that you’ve experienced in your business or in your life. And I want you to think about what you learned from each of them.

Second thing I want you to do is I want you to write down everything that’s fun about your business right now. Write down everything you enjoy about your business, and then I want you to figure out how you can spend more time having fun and who, or to whom, you can offer opportunities to help you with the things that aren’t fun. So invite complementary partners into your business to handle the things that aren’t fun.

You don’t have to make them your actual partners, you can hire people to do things that aren’t fun.

And then the third thing I want you to do is I want you to write down your reason why. Why are you in this business? Why are you doing what you do every day? And make sure the reason why still fires you up.

So you have some assignments as a result of this Tuesday Talk.

Remember, use the hashtag #AskDaveLorenzo in the comments, hashtag #AskDaveLorenzo in the comments to make sure you ask me a question and I will answer your question.

The Tuesday Talk is here every Tuesday on my Facebook page @ The Dave Lorenzo, on Facebook Live every Tuesday at 08:15 or as close as I can get. And we go for about 15, maybe 20 minutes sometimes, and we talk about three things that are relevant to you, and your life, and your business.

You can find the replay for the Tuesday Talk on my YouTube channel, go to YouTube and search up Dave Lorenzo, that’s my name, search up Dave Lorenzo on YouTube, look for the playlist Tuesday Talk. There’s also a whole host of videos, I post at least one video a day, sometimes three or four videos, lots of good stuff on YouTube.

My website is my name, Dave Lorenzo, as well. You can find these videos, all other videos on my website in the video section, also really good articles and all kinds of other stuff.  More than you ever care to know about me and what I’m doing, what I have going on.

I thank you for joining me today on Tuesday Talk. Remember, send me your questions, #AskDaveLorenzo, and I look forward to seeing you right back here next Tuesday for another edition of the Tuesday Talk, where we help you, do this and sell more.

Have a great Tuesday, everyone.