“When going through hell, keep going” Winston Churchill
As a child growing up in rural Germany there was a swamp on the other side of an electric cow fence that was sometimes interesting to explore. After braving the intense shock of the electric fence, I would slowly sink into this brown firm mud. This muck could suck. Trying to get out took massive effort, and sometimes I would lose my shoe or even rubber boot, I could pull my leg out, but often not the boot or shoe. It would take enormous strength to extricate that stuck footwear from the mud, and sometimes, trying to work out my boot, the rest of me would get stuck again, I would have saved my one boot and lose the other in barely escaping from the suck.
The key is to embrace the lesson around the suck, rather than getting stuck on the suck itself. Being an entrepreneur and having to shell over a large check to the Internal Revenue Service on April 15th can be challenging. Having to write a further series of cumulatively large checks on April 30th to pay for property taxes as a real estate entrepreneur adds further financial pressure. However, after the second or third year of this pattern, the only reasonable conclusion is to stop complaining and start setting aside funds every month. That way the check can be written with ease and grace, and my energy can be focused on generating further revenue, rather than on scrambling, living in a mental state of lack and shortage, and looking for reasons where my tax dollars aren’t being efficiently utilized by their custodians.
Embracing the suck to me means:
- Be ok with being stuck in the suck. It happens. Deal with it.
- Be pragmatic about finding a way out. Don’t wish for the past or present to be better. Start doing what I can do now to make future instances of the suck less sucky. For example, this can mean temporarily increased suck. Like digging myself out of the tax payment hole for this year, and also saving money so that I’m not in the same hole next year. Don’t keep repeating the cycle. Work extra hard for a bit and start filling the hole with something solid.
- Be forgiving and kind to myself. I may be in the Suck, but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with me to have landed here. Celebrate myself for working at getting myself out of the suck. Celebrate again when I do get out.
- Don’t let kind and well meaning people tell me things about me and my business that actually hurt my long term prospects. “Being an entrepreneur is so hard, maybe you should just look at going back and getting a job”. That’s a well meaning comment, but it’s not helpful nor aligned with my dreams, desires, or my destiny.
The Suck happens to all of us. What we do with it is up to us.
First of all, I benefit from looking for ways out, rather than for how to apportion blame for how I got there. Next, I benefit from learning the lesson, rather than creating a negative story about the experience. The lesson will help me avoid getting stuck in a similar swamp of suck. The story just makes me skittish about living my life, and prevents me from moving forward. Lastly, I get to be kind to myself. I celebrate the small and larger wins in terms of getting out suck.
In the end, I do get to be proud of all the swamps of suck I have occasionally lost a shoe in. I’m an entrepreneur, not a lottery winner, and I am proud that I earned what I have, it didn’t just fall in my lap. The suck is part of those earnings and their associated war stories.