“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” – Harry Golden
This week on Wednesday I wrote about having a dream, seeing what is needed to accomplish that dream and doing what is necessary to get to that goal. On Thursday, I wrote about “the burn of success” – that good feeling you get when you’ve made progress towards your goal , no matter how small that progress was.
Today, let’s deal with hard luck. Sometimes you will suffer setbacks in life and sometimes that will involve just plain old hard luck – something that didn’t work out through no fault of your own. Maybe an event that would have marked a milestone for you got rained out. Maybe a promotion that you thought was in hand got pushed out due to factors that are out of your control. Maybe an accident or some other act of happenstance prevented you from completing a task this week. Whatever the hard luck circumstance was that set you back a bit, there is only one real solution – work harder to overcome that setback.
Anytime you attribute something to luck – good or bad – you are allowing yourself to believe that things were totally out of your control; that there was no way to see the event or incident coming and certainly no way that you could have prevented or changed it. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Successful people who become high achievers usually also are good planners. A part of their planning is dealing with the things that may be out of their control – like the weather or traffic tie-ups. At least a small part of their plan is having some idea ahead of time of the possibilities of those things impacting their plans and giving some thought to what the alternatives are or what steps might be taken to recover, should the worst happen. That’s part of the hard work that overcomes hard luck.
It’s much easier for us all to say, “I just wasn’t lucky today” than it is to admit, “I just didn’t plan for what happened today.” Many times when things happen there really wasn’t anything that we could have done to prevent them; but, perhaps we could have been better prepared to deal with them. In some cases being prepared may just mean being able to accept the setback as a temporary blip on the road to our goals. Being mentally prepared to say “Oh, well that didn’t work, let’s try something else or let’s try again”, is so much better than allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by feelings of defeat due to a little hard luck. Hard luck will just bounce off a strong positive mental attitude.
So here we are and it’s Friday. Maybe you jumped with both feet on your dream on Wednesday and started to make some progress. Celebrate that progress. Maybe you’ve already hit a snag or some hard luck. Don’t give up. Rest up, if you can, on the weekend. Think about your goal and the things that went right and the things that didn’t. Figure out a plan to overcome the adversity that you have hit, even if that means starting over along a different path and working even harder.
If thoughts of giving up your goal creep in, due to all of the work that seems to be involved, take some heart from these words from Ann Frank – Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction. The satisfaction that Ann spoke of is the same as “feeling the burn of success” that I wrote about on Thursday. Get that feeling back and recharge for the week ahead. You have lots to do to reach your goal and fortunately you will have a full week next week. Have a great weekend.
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