Pain and Pleasure, The stuff of life.
There’s a really effective advert running on the telly at the moment for Vodafone business, the advert begins just as the champagne is about to be popped, freezes, and then rewinds throught the whole deal, right back through all the stages, back to the initial phonecall.
The advert is good at showing you all the physical things that happened, all the calls, and the meetings and the contracts and the celebration. What it can’t protray however is all the emotions and feelings that accompanied each step of the process, we never get to sense the trepidation with which the first phone call was made, we never get to see the times when the deal looked hopeless, when it appeared it would never come together, the late nights when it all seemed pointless, and yet without that, without the fears, and the prospect of it all going pearshaped, what would there have been to celebrate? What would it have to do with skill and effort and persistance? Nothing!
This year about 80 people will win the national lottery, will this be due to their expertise and diligence and persistance? of course not, It will be down to pure luck, fortune that will ocaasionally smile down on people but which always has two sides.
We need to accept luck whenever we get it, be thankful for it, but lord knows those who decide to depend on it are in for a unfortunate business life, because sitting around waiting for a lucky break in business is the very same as sitting around with a roll of lottery tickets waiting for a miracle to happen, it won’t!
Luck does not work like that, our achievements in life will be caused by our thoughts and actions, what we think and what we do, and not by some imaginative twist of fate, luck will even itself out, it probably already has, remember around 80 people will win the lottery this year, yet over 400 will be killed on the roads, so you have a 5 times better chance of getting killed in a crash, and still they go, “it could be you” don’t make me laugh. It would be more truthful to say hey, your lucky to be alive.
So if we accept that luck is something that evens itself out over most peoples lives, then we have to look at what makes some people successful and has the champagne corks popping, while some just drift on occassionally getting to celebrate somebody elses success. The answer to this question is our understanding and attitude towards pain and pleasure.
There are those who dream of a painless life, where there is constant peace and pleasure and where we never experience fear or doubt or feel unable to cope with it all, and that’s what they are, dreamers! It’s time to get over it, wake up and smell the coffee, everybody experiences pain, everyone experiences doubt, everyone wonders if they will be able to cope. There is no way a life can be pain free, it’s like trying to have day without the night, to have the light without the dark, you cannot experience pleasure unless you have experienced pain, you would not know what it was. The important thing is not to become paralyzed by the pain, to be able to feel it but still keep moving forward, to not let it stop you from doing what you know you have to do in order to move toward pleasure, to solve that problem, or close that deal or sort out that angry angry customer.
The businesses that inspire me have known struggle, just as the lives that inspire me have, they have achieved not despite but because of their hard times, it is the difficult times that have made them great, when teams win the All Ireland they remember the pain, the running up hill, the scarifices, would an All Ireland have value if you could buy it? If you could experience the Joy without have gone through the pain, what would it be worth?
The world is always looking for quick fixes, to attempt to get the results without the pain, and yet all those ab rollers end up in the attic while those who knuckle down and go to the gym twice a week get results. There is no life without pain, it’s often the struggle that becomes the most valuable part, so please remember when the doubts come, when you are wondering whether to pick up the phone or not, that this is a hugely valuable part of the game, this is a hugely important part of life, and then as the NIKE man says…. Just do it.
