I recently heard a best-selling author on a radio interview telling how he tackles his book projects. For every one of his books, there was an obstacle he had to overcome.
In one case, he wanted to write a novel set in a specific foreign country. Before doing it, he had go live there for a year. That was the obstacle – he couldn’t write the book until he had spent time getting to know the landscape, experiencing the culture, traveling the streets, hearing and speaking the language, eating the food.
He took on the obstacle, he wrote the book, and it was great.
Life is in a way similar for those of us who aren’t novelists. To accomplish almost anything worth doing, we have to surmount some kind of obstacle.
Small scale
This can happen in small ways. When I started a business a dozen years ago, I did all my records – invoices, checks, purchase orders, tax forms – manually. I had a computer. I worked on it all the time. But computerizing the business meant – horror of horrors – setting up and learning an accounting software program.
About a year in, I began to see what a hassle it was to do all that work on a typewriter or in longhand. At tax time, putting my records together for the accountant was an enormous pain. So I bought a popular accounting program and asked my sister, who is a CPA, to help me set it up.
In return for the few hours I had to spend learning the system – beating the obstacle – I freed myself from an untold number of hours of tedium. And I could then devote those hours to money-making activity.
There’s a parallel here in a new technology tool described in this month’s Tech Perspective column. It’s a Web-based system that lets drain-cleaning contractors store, access and share business information all in one convenient online place.
It looks like a great time saver. All it takes to get started is to invest time in learning the system and trying a different way of running the business. Pass that obstacle and business life suddenly gets more convenient.
Bigger scale
Obstacles. If we let them, they become reasons for putting off things we want to do, or know we should do, or would be better off if we did. They help us justify all the ready-made excuses: I don’t have the time. I don’t have enough money. I don’t have the training. My market would never support it. If I tried it, I might fail.
Too much reluctance to face obstacles can keep our worlds from getting bigger, or even cause them to shrink. In my life, I have not been the greatest at staring down and then attacking obstacles. I’ve done it sometimes, and usually have been rewarded. At other times, I have held back, and missed out on who knows what?
How about you? Have you ever shied away from adding another employee and service vehicle? From adopting a new technology that could open up a new line of business? From expanding into a new territory? From upgrading the skills of your people to give them (and your business) an edge in the marketplace?
One thing I know from my own experience is that some of our happiest times come when we take on a challenge – even something it seems we have no business even attempting – with only the goal in mind and without a single thought that we might fail. At those times, it is amazing how straight and enjoyable the path to success can be.
Getting it done
A famous shoe company has a three-word, eight-letter piece of advice for attacking obstacles. A German philosopher and poet named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has a longer and more persuasive way of saying the same thing – and it’s one of my favorite quotations and one we all might do better to heed more often:
“Until there is commitment, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too.
“All manner of things occur to help one that would never otherwise occur. A whole stream of events issue forth from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would come his way.
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now!”
