Table of contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Question Everything and
Find a Better Way
To Do Anything
Chapter Two
What Do You Want Most?
Chapter Three
Be Nice No Matter What
Chapter Four
It’s The Tough
Things That Teach You
Chapter Five
If You Don’t Like
What You’re Doing, So What?
Chapter Six
Seek Improvement Everywhere
and In All Things
Chapter Seven
Stand Out From The Crowd
Chapter Eight
Take People With
You On Your Journey
Chapter Nine
Work-Life Balance
Chapter Ten
If You’re Going To Do Anything,
Do It All The Way
Chapter Eleven
Give Back To Everyone You Can
Chapter Twelve
Heal Yourself With Your Mind
Conclusion
Chapter Four
It’s The Tough Things That Teach You
I don’t know exactly when I figured this out. Because when you’re young, everything seems hard. I remember being in elementary school, thinking it was hard, but when I got to middle school, I realized that elementary school was easy. I remember thinking high school was difficult, but then I went to college and realized high school was easy. Someone once told me about a brain surgeon coming out of surgery and saying it was easy. But that was because he had performed the same surgery many times and knew what he was doing, so it was easy for him. Repetition makes things easy.
You learn more about yourself when you’re doing something difficult. At the age of forty, I knew I could run a marathon. I wasn’t trying to win it, but I knew I could run it. I could, as I say, lean forward for 26.2 miles or four and a half hours. But it is difficult to train for that marathon and to plan every run and every meal for several months in preparation to put your body through the rigors of what would typically be between four to four and a half hours to run five miles, then eight miles, then three miles in preparation for a weekend where maybe you had to run sixteen or eighteen or twenty-two miles. That means your training runs now are three hours of stress on the body.
But when you get done with one of those long training runs, put in all the work you knew you needed to, brought food and water with you, and were able to replenish along the run, and when you got done with that training run, and you didn’t hurt, you knew you’d be ready to in a few days. For me, three miles was very easy. I could lean forward for thirty minutes or so and be done. But when you’re looking at the pavement, and you’ve been jogging for three or four hours, you learn a lot because it does hurt when you’re running for that long. And when you’re between eighteen and twenty-two miles, your body starts to shut down a little. You depend more on your will to continue. It’s that will to succeed that I hope and desire for my children, grandchildren, and their children.
Willpower. You are working through tough times and seeing them through. Hurting—sometimes physically and sometimes emotionally—but not giving up. Instead, stay in it by thinking and using your heart and mind to continue past whatever it is.
When I lost my marriage, there was no time to say, “Poor me.” I had three kids. You look at what matters the most in those times, and it helps you find perspective. From there, you find the willpower to look at what you need to do today instead of complaining about what happened to you yesterday. I don’t know whether running a marathon helped me manage the loss of my family or just gave me the willpower to keep going. But there was happiness at the end of this part of my life when I found Kim.
I think I’ve always had a certain amount of willpower. But as I’ve aged, I have found that I no longer want to do things if they’re easy. I lost interest. When I start doing something hard, it keeps me focused, and once I’ve done it enough, I get better at it. Then I get bored again and want to do something else. This often served me poorly until I learned to understand when to apply it and when to stick with something to achieve a higher goal.
Running my company for thirty-three years, chasing after those things that I thought were hard or interesting to me, and allowing myself to get bored, as I say, with other projects, wasn’t conducive to running a strong company. I had to learn to manage what that meant. As I get older and lean into retirement, I hope to get back to doing more of those difficult things that challenge me. Growing up, I was never comfortable on the dance floor. Oh, I wanted to be out there because I never wanted to be stuck on the sidelines—I still don’t—but I never felt like I was a good dancer. So, in my forties, I started taking dance lessons and realized I had to give myself some grace. I had to give myself permission to be bad at dancing until I could get good at it. I just needed somebody to show me where to put my feet. Turns out I was never bad at dancing at all. I just had someone telling me I was.
I hope that as you choose the things you will be doing with your life, you won’t simply select the easiest things. There are a lot of other people doing that. I know that only a small percentage of people on the planet have ever run a marathon, let alone two, and in my case, eight. I was interested in doing marathons because I felt like most people wouldn’t do it. But when you set out to do a marathon, and you see 30,000 other people standing in the cold with you, getting ready for the race to start, you start to think, Well, maybe this isn’t as unique as I thought.
Of course, that’s not true. It is, in fact, unique to run a marathon. But you can get swept away by the thought of 30,000 people running one somewhere in the country every weekend, and that’s just in this country alone. So, I lost some interest in running marathons because it was now easy for me. And that is when I learned about a different kind of marathon called a “destination marathon.” I didn’t give it any thought at all—I knew I wanted to run a destination marathon called the Antarctic Ice Marathon.
The prospect of running a marathon in the freezing cold only a few miles from the bottom of the earth sounded difficult. It was hard enough to pique my interest. I signed up quickly, paid the sizable entry fee, and then waited to find out when I would get to go. I emailed the race organizer, who is from Galway, Ireland, and an “extreme athlete.” I sent that email and waited a considerable number of days for a reply. I thought he might be busy or disorganized or simply didn’t care, but when I did get that reply, he said, “Sorry for the delay in responding. I have been running across South America.” He had literally been running thirty to forty miles every day from one side of South America at the Atlantic Ocean to the other side at the Pacific Ocean. He is one of the most unique people I have met.
As it turns out, my trip to Antarctica had little to do with the run itself, which was, in fact, the most challenging physical test I have endured. It was more about the location, the people I met, and the relationships I would find worldwide. From Minnesota and various parts of the US to the UK, Belgium, Poland, Russia, Australia, Mumbai, Japan, China, and Sri Lanka, we all lifted each other to get to the finish line. When it was time to leave the next morning on a Russian cargo plane, we were told we would be stuck there for several days due to bad weather in South America. We would spend the next three extra days growing together and bonding as a group. Our families back home were all worried, but we were more than fine.
Getting to this event was difficult, and running the race was incredibly hard, but it did show me just how much willpower I have. It’s a reminder that marathoning, dancing, training runs, and doing the difficult things are what teach us the most. These are opportunities to learn something about yourself. I didn’t want to be on the sidelines watching. I wanted to be in the game. I hope you’ll want to be in the game, as I did. Keep learning to dance, or play piano, or strum the guitar.
Only eighteen months ago, I found out my company was in debt of nearly 2.5 million dollars. It got me focused, got me in the game of running my company every day, lifting up the people around me, and letting my vendors know of our financial challenges. When I called those vendors, they were not nice, and I understood why. I stayed nice no matter what when talking to them and promised that we would certainly get our bills paid. It took willpower and consistency, but the company did it. We did it, and we made it through. Everyone learned more about themselves in that time. Several times, I got up in front of everyone at the company and explained where we were, why we were there, and how we were going to get out of debt.
During this time, I realized I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be at speaking in front of people. So I started doing it every chance I got, getting up in front of people to speak. I wasn’t great at it when I started, but I think I am now. I’m comfort able. I enjoy it. I would get very nervous before getting on stage to do my public speaking. Sometimes I want to change my message and tell people something easier to say, rather than something new, different, positive, or uplifting. More than once, I almost didn’t get on stage, but I made myself do it and gave myself permission to be bad. I wasn’t bad, but I didn’t know if I would be good. If you’re intentional about what you do in life, you don’t always have to pick the toughest path. I’m just hoping you won’t always choose the easiest path.
Maybe Pop’s only attempted poem will help you understand.
Fear
Fear is real, but doers do
Fear is real, but logic pushes it aside
Failure is required to live life full
Doers do, knowing failure lingers inside
When fear prevents action, life is null
Fear will not dull my light
My light must shine bright
The assumption of yes I require
To create action that one day will inspire
Fear is real, but I set it aside
I will grow without fear to fail
I grab every chance to reach outside
To grow is my true grail
My only limit is put on myself
Fear of failure is tough to resist
The assumption of NO exists
The only option to push it off itself
Fear is real
Logic must prevail
Or it will prevent my next inhale
Fear is real, but doers do
Your Pop is a confident person, but adding this to my story was very difficult to do as I don’t think it’s very good. I do think it says what I want you to hear, though. You can be afraid—that’s normal—but when you apply logical thought to it, you will see you have no choice but to push past the fear and do it anyway.
Table of contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Question Everything and
Find a Better Way
To Do Anything
Chapter Two
What Do You Want Most?
Chapter Three
Be Nice No Matter What
Chapter Four
It’s The Tough
Things That Teach You
Chapter Five
If You Don’t Like
What You’re Doing, So What?
Chapter Six
Seek Improvement Everywhere
and In All Things
Chapter Seven
Stand Out From The Crowd
Chapter Eight
Take People With
You On Your Journey
Chapter Nine
Work-Life Balance
Chapter Ten
If You’re Going To Do Anything,
Do It All The Way
Chapter Eleven
Give Back To Everyone You Can
Chapter Twelve
Heal Yourself With Your Mind
Conclusion