Tornado

Problems, when far away, look terrifying.

They look like they are going to destroy you, your business, your relationships, and everything else.

No matter how often you encounter them, they will always provoke the same reaction. The same pattern you lived over the years before, that is the pattern you will live now. It’s human nature. You can’t stop the reaction. You can only withstand it.

Yesterday I was in Boston doing a new talk at Inbound Marketing Summit. Before I go up, I think, oh boy, might bomb here. Instead, I killed it. Totally surprising. The exact opposite of what I assumed.

Another example: When I was raising money for Breather I had to talk about obtaining space, and how we would do it. I thought we would have to send out sales teams in cities to try and get spaces. Expensive stuff.

That was wrong too. Spaces so far have come to us from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Singapore, Monaco, Toronto, New York, and a dozen other cities. We didn’t even ask. The market just spoke by itself.

Once again, I was totally wrong.

Preparing for a tornado is a good idea. You don’t just ignore it, because doing so would be stupid. You plan and work with best practices. You ask what others have done. This is normal.

If you are ever panicking before something you see as cataclysmic, it’s probably cataclysmic because you haven’t thought it through, or planned, or worked on it enough.

If you have planned enough, you should be significantly calmer.

All things are like this. Remember that.