As you operate your business, you realize that changes are necessary. You have to adapt in order to survive in an inconsistent world. The thing becomes an issue when everyone wants these radical changes, and people either love them or hate them. The crucial way to survive this is to set up wins along the way.

As a businessman, looking into the future is an absolute must. The long term goal is something that weighs heavily in my mind at any point in time. With people relying on me for my trade and my business with employees and their families, I have no choice but to focus on how to keep my business afloat and sailing. Instant oatmeal businesses go as quickly as instant oatmeal.

Unpredictability and chance are two of mankind’s greatest weaknesses, because there’s very little we can do about it. Science says that we cry out of frustration over any other emotion. When you think about it, that’s pretty accurate.

At the intersection of victory and defeat is opportunity. One opportunity, one chance to seize the moment and suddenly you’re on top. This is where patience comes in. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point your opposition will underestimate you or take their eyes off of you and then you have every chance in the world to take it for your own. Maybe all you need is a little boost, support from people who have been in it with you since the beginning.

Life has a habit of going its own way, not our way. When you turn on the news and see the constant and unrelenting flow of misery and sadness, it’s hard to look around and be grateful for the world as it is. Yet, at the end of the day we still have homes, families, friends, and so much else.

We trade our fresh sense of curiosity for the comfort of the reassurance that comes from seeing the sun rise for the thousandth time. In every person’s life there comes the night they go to sleep fearing that the sun won’t come up the next day, only to wake up and understand that nothing will impede the sun from making its voyage across the sky. It’s a natural part of life, aging and growing old doesn’t have to be a sentencing, it’s something that can be savored and enjoyed.

No matter what profession or situation you find yourself in, one of the hardest things for us to do is tackle something by ourselves. It’s one of the unspoken difficulties of being a leader, in fact it’s something most people gloss over, but a lot of the time you are looking down the barrel of a gun at whatever challenge is coming up all by yourself. You don’t have the luxury of taking it on with a well-assembled team, you’re out there fighting all by yourself. You have to learn to be okay to do it by yourself.

One of the things most people don’t realize, if you’re driving a certain kind of car and you’re entering a hard turn, you have to accelerate into the turn. The car is a rear-engine vehicle, which means it requires more traction. This is a great life lesson because our life is often filled with hard turns and twists, whether we see them coming or not, it takes great amounts of mental stamina and preparation to deal with them, because we have to keep ourselves from steering off the road, colliding with other motorists, and ensuring the safety of yourself and your passengers.

I like to stress the importance of having people around you who support you and elevate you while pushing you to do your best. By surrounding yourself with people to help you maximize your potential, you’re creating a safety net. I’m sure you’ve seen in a movie or heard someone say “I’ve got your six” or “I’ve got your back.”

You’ve been told by coaches, teachers, friends, instructors, generally anyone with a pulse that “winners never quit and quitters never win.” As cliche as it sounds, it’s important to remember that losing and quitting aren’t the same. Losing is a type of situational criticism, as loss can be our greatest teacher. Sage wisdom doesn’t come from a place of overinflated self-importance, it’s a humble understanding and acceptance of your flaws, your weakness, and the revelation about how to do it better.

The wonderful thing about life is the vast potential it has for someone--anyone to tap into. There are endless capabilities and pathways a person can take. This can be daunting for anyone to realize, so, often we try to limit our scope to the easy and the possible.

Hesitation is the most crippling human affliction, it prevents us from taking the chances we need to seize to move forward. Especially in business, people are harmed by their inability to make a decision. For better or worse, the choices you make are more crucial to your business than staying still.

Everyone is looking at how people dress, talk, what they do for a living, and any qualifier you think of. Imagine how hard it would be to force everyone to dress how you’d like, talk how you’d like, and do what you’d like. You’ll find most people would rather keep to their own standards and march to their own beat. This is why you’ll always have hypocrites: everyone thinks that their worldview is the only view that matters.

A true friend will try to challenge you to meet potentials that you can’t always see for yourself. These challenges will come in the form of questions, competition, and sometimes that friend may get a little pushy. That’s what real friends do: they factor in your best interest and know that watching you sit on your couch all day isn’t going to be too good for you in the long run.

We limit ourselves within a certain capacity as we go about doing our work, saving up energy and willpower for whatever tasks come along. Here’s the thing, when we encounter something that challenges us, we are met with a fierce rebuttal if we go in half-cocked. Then what to do we do? Some give up, some get help, and the rare breed comes at it with one hundred and ten percent effort.

The most bitter medicine is often our own. When we judge ourselves we have to be critical, but denial dilutes the effectiveness of our assessment. It’s hard to come to terms with mistakes and external criticisms, because it can be humbling.

You either love it or hate it, but it’s one of the most beneficial things you can do. Reading can open the gateway to seemingly infinite knowledge or it can transport us from the dull monotony of our daily life to another world in an instant. Whether it’s reading an informative work or diving into a solid story, reading is one of the most basic methods of self-improvement.

People love to judge but hate to be judged. Being judged is inherently an uncomfortable process by which are weighed, willingly or not, and found wanting. It’s a subconscious act, to look at someone and measure up their worth. One of the overwhelming problems with that stems from how we use our own criteria. We are not fit, being inherently flawed, to judge the merit of others.

Memories . . . Something more valuable to most people than any other resource is our memory. In this case, I’ll say memories, because really, it boils down to having a plurality. As we get older, we put more and more stock into our memory and memories, as we rely on our memory to show us the memories of the things we cherished for so long in our lives.

Attitude and gratitude are two uniquely human perspectives that, for the most part, result in us having to make strong adjustments to what many consider to be a natural human reaction. When something doesn’t go our way, we tend to lash out in bitterness and blame ourselves, God, the universe, whatever is close at hand.