I’ve been grinding it out for so many months now with so many changes. We are living in difficult times and there are all sorts of issues that we have to deal with. Problems and challenges that we need to solve and the adjustments we need to make as we change and things change around us.
Yesterday morning I suddenly had a flash that I’ve come a long way since last year. There were many things that I needed to change, and looking back, I realised that I had accomplished more than I thought.
A good feeling came over me when I realised this. The position I was in a year ago put a strain on me and I had to go about changing things one at a time. This feeling of having gotten somewhere without even knowing it brought about an inner strength in me that I thought I had lost.
It’s not to say that there won’t be problems, challenges, and difficulties ahead. There certainly will be. It’s just that I have a different perspective now that I realise where I am on the road.
Grinding it out for so long, dealing with problems day in and day out, month in and month out, gave me little joy. Yes, of course, there are times where you feel up, but these are fleeting little lifts.
In these times, under difficult economic and living conditions, having to deal with high prices and putting the squeeze on costs is challenging. On all sorts of costs, is challenging. Then there is the important area of trying to develop sources of income. It’s hard to start from the bottom again and push yourself day after day.
An entrepreneur was saying the other day that many of the top business people slept in their offices while building their businesses. It’s not to glorify hard times but to know that you can put up with a lot while on your journey, whatever that may be.
Resilience, inner strength, and perspective are important qualities when the chips are down, but what are the other options?
As Ray Kroc said in his book “Grinding it Out” when flying back to Chicago in 1954 with a freshly signed contract with the McDonald’s brothers in his briefcase, “I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action.” He was 52 years old, had diabetes, incipient arthritis, lost his gallbladder and most of his thyroid gland. But he was convinced that “the best was ahead of me”.
If we want to live the life that we have always longed for, then we have to simply knuckle down and do what it takes. We know things take three times longer than expected and cost double what we thought.
