The success and fulfillment of your life is not measured by the events you encounter, but by your responses to them. The secret is not in avoiding life's challenges, but in mastering your response to them.
If you want good outcomes in any endeavor, you must respond well to all events on your path — not just the fun, interesting, and rewarding ones, but the boring, frustrating, and repetitive events. And yes, the complex, uncertain, and unfair events, too.
If you want a career as a surgeon, you must respond well to heavy workloads, minimal sleep, and high stakes scenarios. If you want to win a championship, you must respond well to criticism, bad calls, tough losses, big wins, and competitive pressure. If you want a loving and lasting marriage, you must respond well to repetitive routines, relational frustrations, financial stress, and evolving needs.
Life delivers its own events, and the paths you choose also deliver events.
The events you experience on your life’s journey are, in many ways indifferent to you, as mine are to me. They don’t owe us an bar to clear or relief from difficulty. It is not life’s responsibility to deliver us smoother events. It is our responsibility to engage in better, stronger, more skillful responses to whatever life delivers.
Many events we experience are quite particular to us—the product of the path we’re choosing. If you have kids, they push your buttons. If you coach athletes, they resist feedback. If you fly on airplanes, they get delayed. If you own a business, you lose clients. If you hold high standards, you get criticized.
Don’t choose a path then be surprised or resentful at the events the come with that path.
We don’t get to cherry-pick the events we like and disregard the events we don’t. We get the events our lives deliver, each in our own unique way, and the events that come with the paths we choose.
If you want good outcomes, respond well to the events on your path, whether it is a path you chose or a path that chose you.
Event + Response = Outcome. Do the work.
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