Episode 02: There is Nothing Like the Luxury of a Crisis

[00:00:00] Seth: So I don't know who first said this, but not too long ago my father told me that there's nothing like the luxury of a crisis. I'm pretty sure he was quoting someone or, or something, so forgive me that I didn't bother to look it up. But at the time we were talking about my business. I think he was trying to get me to make a hard decision that I was avoiding.

Here's the thing about crisis is it brings you to a point where you no longer have any wiggle room. You have to make hard decisions. In a weird way, it can actually be liberating. It can set you free. In the case of my business, one of the discussions was whether or not I should let someone go in an underperforming market.

I ultimately decided that it just made sense to keep them. But, you know, some companies, just as an example, they'll go out of business trying to avoid layoffs. And then everybody loses their job when they should have dropped these people that were no longer contributing forever ago. But instead they opted to hang on and you know, what seemed like a mercy ended up being a curse to everybody because then everyone lost their jobs.

So not too long ago, I got divorced and in a way, a part of my identity, it was ripped away from me. The way I envisioned my future, it really changes everything completely. It really sent me on a journey trying to figure out what to do with myself and how to do it. So even though I have my kids half the nights, I, you know, I suddenly had half of my nights entirely to myself.

And it, it, it has an impact. It makes, it makes you rethink everything. It wasn't a crisis that I wanted, but it happened. And it made me Think hard about pretty much everything that I was doing in my life, you know, and sometimes it takes a disaster or a divorce or a DUI, or maybe somebody almost dying before we wake up and change our lives.

I mean, frankly, I'm, I'm doing this podcast most likely because I got divorced, you know, it ended up being something of a, of a journal experience for me, the dramatic change in my relationship status made me think hard about what I actually wanted for myself and everything in my life was throwing up in the air and When your life is falling apart, you just don't, it just doesn't make sense to worry about appeasing anybody anymore.

The other thing is I also found I was desperate for connections, so I started looking for and continue to look for things that I can do around or with other people. And when everything is up in the air, it really makes it pretty clear what does and does not matter to you. So again, with the business example, When your company is facing bankruptcy, unless you've become more profitable, it gets really easy to lay off those people that aren't contributing.

And it gets really easy to, to get rid of all the distractions and the unimportant projects that you're focusing on. Same thing in life. When your life is falling apart, You can almost compare it to your house burning down. Suddenly, you know those one or two things that you want to save, you grab them, and you get out of there.

It isn't always a bad thing to have to start fresh with just the handful of things that you actually care the most about. If you've ever cleaned out your garage and gotten rid of a bunch of crap, I gotta imagine that you felt some sense of relief being able to let go of all those material possessions.

You know, once you got rid of them, you realize that they're probably more of a burden than a benefit to you. All that time you spent imagining how you would use those things you didn't actually do. And now you're left with the things that you actually do use. And it feels good because things that are, things that you have that you actually use that are actually useful and matter to you, that's what you want more of.

And the same thing goes when you let go of certain ideas, when you let go of certain friends, certain beliefs, and certain distractions that just don't lift you up. So maybe you need a crisis in your life. Maybe keeping the status quo has kept you from making choices you need to make. Maybe that in and of itself is the crisis, the fact that you have so thoroughly avoided any crisis in your life that you have never made any of those hard decisions.

See, facing crisis builds you up to face the next one. The things that would have destroyed me as a child are hardly even an issue today. Sad as it is, the struggle in life is the force that rejuvenates us, and it helps us become better. You know, the, the phoenix that emerges from the fire, it's really, in a way, it's representative of, of us, of people, of humankind.

We go through crises, we, we get, sometimes in a way, we get burned down to the ground. But we come back. And hopefully we come back in a positive direction. Because you can, you can face crisis, you can face problems, and you can take them two directions. I think for a lot of men in particular, there's a desire deep down inside to face your limits.

The minute you feel like you have become the king of the hill in some situation, you immediately want to find a bigger hill. You want to climb a bigger mountain. You want to be king of the mountain now. When I was a kid, 10 was a fortune. When I was a teenager, 1, 000 was a fortune. And now as an adult, if I had a gazillion dollars, I'd want I'd want a million gazillion dollars, probably before I felt wealthy, you know, it just, you always want to push for, for a new boundary, which isn't really a bad thing because it pushes you towards those points that challenge you to grow.

And I think that's why we seek it out. I think deep down inside, many of us have an inherent recognition that we need to find the challenge. If we want to improve, if we want to best our previous self. The important thing here is we just can't let the crisis break us. I've definitely had a few times where I had a crisis and it set me back.

And it did not send me in the positive direction. Which usually that's how it starts. I mean, it's hard to immediately face a crisis and gain the benefits from it. It's usually going to knock you down first. But it gives you the opportunity to get back up again. I attended a lecture one time by this guy.

He had dwarfism.

He couldn't get on to the first step of the bus and I think he went home crying to his mom and who apparently also had dwarfism and I guess she was even missing like a limb or something and she handed him a stool to get on the bus the next day. And so For his, his school days, he carried a stool so he could climb onto the bus.

You know, I just, I love that. Some of the biggest limitations in the world didn't limit this guy. And that was sort of the gist of this guy's story. He had been, he had become pretty successful in, in life. And managed something for some big business. But that little story about the stool was really impactful.

And just, another thing to think about is you will never, ever lose the fight if you just get back up again. Not too long ago, I watched the movie Cool Hand Luke. I don't know, it seemed like it was from like the 60s or 70s. It was, it was old. But in that story, the the main character of the story gets sent to prison for decapitating parking meters.

He was drunk and being, being stupid, whatever, but he goes to prison and there's this scene pretty early on in the movie where he gets singled out by the, The de facto ringleader of the, of the inmates, the biggest, baddest guy that is kind of the boss. Anyways, he doesn't like Cool Hand Luke cause you know, Luke is just, well, he's cool.

He's calm. He's collected. He wants to knock him down a few rungs. And so in the, in the prison, they let guys fight on, on Saturdays or something. It's like, okay, we're going to let you guys box it out on Saturday. Get your wiggles out. And so this ringleader call, ringleader calls him out and they set up the fight and they, they start fighting.

And this guy is twice the size of the main character. And just keeps on hitting him down, just pummeling him. And the thing is, he just gets up again. And by the end, he's so beaten and bloody and exhausted, he can barely swing his arms. And this, this ringleader guy is just, just, just keeps on knocking him down.

And the guys in the crowd start saying, just, just stay down, Luke. He's going to kill you. Stay down. He keeps on doing it. He just gets up again. And he more or less just says, you're going to have to kill me. So he does it again and again and again. And it just. It's painful to watch, and what happens is the end, in the end, it's the guy that's pummeling him, just can't stomach it anymore.

He just can't do it. And you know, this guy's still, he tries to get up one more time, and he tries to, he tries to swing his arm to get him, and the guy just stops him. Picks him up, and carries him, and puts him on his bunk. And, the main character won that fight. He forever had the respect of all the other inmates.

He had the respect of the ringleader, and, More or less, he kind of becomes, he kind of becomes a leader. He just didn't stay down. You will never lose a fight if you just get back up. You know, you may be physically weaker. You may, in a sense, lose the fight because they're, they're besting you. But there is something deeper than physical strength.

When, when you see that guy get up again. When you see that guy that gets it handed to him, but still gets up, even though he knows he's going to lose. That's the way we face crisis. Don't ever let them keep you down. You know, we're in a perpetual fight against life, and it's going to make us better, but only if we get back up again.

I sometimes wonder if all of the rampant depression and anxiety that people have today comes from just a total lack of challenge and difficulty. It's almost as if the depression It's like a deep sadness for the lack of growth and stagnation in a person's life. You know, it really wasn't, as far as history goes, it It wasn't that long ago that less than 50 percent of your children could be expected to survive to adulthood.

The average lifespan, I mean, I think it was around 40 at one point, like 150 years ago or something. You know, crisis brings perspective. When everything is going according to plan, sometimes we forget what things could be like, or sometimes we forget how we got there. I remember going on a camp out with a family friend and And this guy was talking about his, his business.

This is one of my parents, friends. And I don't remember the details of what he said, but there was something he said that was interesting to me. So the problem was he was, it was, I think it was not too long after. The 2008 crisis. And, and anyways, he said his business revenue had like dropped in half they were, let's just, I'm just inventing numbers and I'm going to say he was doing 2 million and now he's doing like a million in revenue every year.

And I remember him telling us he had to lay off like 50 percent of the company. And but the part that surprised me was that he said, you know, I realized that back when we first started, that if we were doing a million, we would have been just out of our minds excited to be doing that. It would have solved all their problems back then.

And he said, well, why don't we just bring the company back to what it was back then so that a million now is making us profitable again. And I thought that was, You know, that took perspective. It's a loss in overall revenue. And yeah, it's not what they were at, but if you just take a few steps back, there was a time that he would have been incredibly happy with significantly less.

And the same thing has happened to me. I mean, just throughout my life, I was talking about the money thing earlier, how, when I was a kid, 10 bucks was a fortune. You know, I, I suffer from the same problem now is every, every time my business gets a little bigger, I'm like, all right, it's not big enough. And I try to make it bigger, but it's just this thing that happens to us.

When we don't have enough problems in our life, we seem to get ahead of ourselves and we seem to forget, we seem to lose that perspective, but, you know, N none of us ever learned to walk without falling a few times. Nobody ever got successful without making some mistakes. Y'know, is something terrible happening in your life right now?

Lean into it. What has to change? How can you turn the problem into an opportunity? You may not always be able to solve the problem that you want to solve, but you almost always can reap some kind of personal benefit from the situation. If you failed at business, let it make you a better businessman tomorrow.

If you made a fool of yourself on a date, forgive yourself. If you messed up your life so thoroughly that no one wants to talk to you, grow from it. Don't stay the same. A crisis is kind of like when, when like a snake grows too big for its skin and it has to shed it. It's a somewhat painful or irritating process for the snake, but it has to do it to get bigger.

And every day you live, you are no longer the same person as you were yesterday. So just keep in mind that there's two directions you can take that life. You can let that crisis keep you down, or you can let that crisis lift you up. And if you have a choice between the two, one of them is a lot more appealing than the other.

So I've got kids, and every once in a while when something happens that they don't like, they'll flop on the floor and cry and, Whoa, it's me and everything's terrible and nothing's good. We don't have to be that person. We don't have to be children. There's always something we can do today. Don't think about tomorrow.

Forget about the past. Just do something now. Or stop doing something. Whichever is going to send you in the right direction. And do what you can. It's okay if whatever that is is small, because everybody needs to start somewhere. Sometimes it's useful to force the crisis in your mind. You may not be under any pressure.

But if you don't make any changes, that pressure will eventually build up at a later date. So instead of waiting for that pressure to build up, try to force that crisis now. Try to make it happen now. Give yourself the luxury of a crisis. One of the saddest stories that I've ever read is Romeo and Juliet, and at the very end of Romeo and Juliet, the Capulets and the Montagues, the two feuding houses, reconcile.

But it didn't happen until after their two children were lying dead. So, that's a more dramatic example, but don't let that be you. Get your priorities straight before it's too late. You don't need to wait for the crisis to happen. Just do it now.