By Bill Scott, founder of StoreReport LLC & Scott Systems Inc.
I’m a computer programmer, accountant and cloud service specialist. Writing is a hobby that I picked up three decades ago. I don’t consider myself to be an especially good writer, and one of my faults is what makes it my hobby and not my career. I never follow the rules, which means it is highly unlikely that I will ever get paid. Good writers have plans. They produce an outline, write and rewrite before they go to a publisher.
Prior to writing, fishing used to be my hobby. I’ve been out on the water with pros a few times in my life. They had a plan too, and they worked it like their lives depended on it. “Need to be at that spot by 6 a.m., over there by 7:20 a.m.… if the water is high, over there behind that tree before 8 a.m.” That’s not a hobby. That’s a job. When you add sincere discipline to any process it becomes work.
Some people like to boast that their job is their hobby. I guess that’s a good way of explaining their propensity to become a workaholic. Real work can be enjoyable, but it’s not a hobby.
As an amateur writer, I enjoy putting an idea into a story, playing the story out in my mind, writing it down as I go and driving the story to a satisfying conclusion. The fun of writing starts with an interesting idea. Likewise in business. If you’ve ever made the decision to start a business, didn’t you look forward to the challenge? Most people don’t plan for trouble. Then, when the trouble starts, it stops being fun… well, that pretty much starts the slide to failure. In writing, you just chunk out the last chapter and write it again. It’s much more serious in business. In fact, it can be deadly if you do not prepare yourself for the occasional catastrophe.
I had one client that committed suicide back in the 90s. I only had a few meetings with him, as most of my business was conducted through his employees. The guy was doing everything wrong and he refused to change. I am telling you this, because I tried to get him to change and I failed. When something horrific like that happens, we all have some measure of guilt we carry around for the rest of our lives.
Your business (or your career), whether good, bad or indifferent, is a story. There are no rules that state you must go about doing it professionally, but, when your business costs you money and you don’t find a way to support the loss, you won’t be in business for long.
Just like a mystery novel, your business has a beginning and it has an ending, and what you are doing right now at this minute is merely one small sentence in your life. Every chapter does not have to result in victory, but if you want to be successful, you need to plan ahead or your main character may get bumped off in the middle of the book. What’s your plan? Do you have one?
There has been a great deal of scientific study as of late that suggests everything that happens has happened before. That’s preposterous, because it leads people into believing that no matter what they do has already been decided. So why try? But there is one recent idea that has caught my attention. This theory suggests that of the three states: the past, the present and the future, the future does not exist, because it hasn’t happened yet. That leaves the past and the present for you to deal with.
The theory goes on to suggest that we perceive reality as everything that has occurred within the past 15 seconds. Then it is pushed off into storage to make room for more input. However, the data that gets saved are only a tiny fraction of the actual experience. A piece of data that is not accompanied by an emotion is discarded, and you won’t be able to recall it later unless your memory is jogged by something else. So our entire lives are a stream of 15 seconds of awareness, and memories of the past that are peppered with emotions. What we do in the next 15 seconds is determined by those memories. We cannot escape living in the past, because there is only the past, and the present is more of a reaction to events than the result of meticulous planning.
If we allow our futures to come about by accident, we would never know what to expect. I often hear motivational speakers telling us we can write our own future. No we cannot, because the future doesn’t exist. We can only effect our future by altering the present or the past. Altering the present has only an immediate impact on what we do in the next instant. Some say we can’t alter the past because it’s already done. But they’re wrong. We can alter the past by erasing old memories and creating new memories, which will have an effect on the present, thereby changing the way our future plays out.
We have all heard about cases where people have removed painful memories caused by catastrophic events; however, in most of these cases these memories are not removed, they are merely covered up, leaving the possibility that they will show themselves unexpectedly and cause all kinds of trouble later on. Erasing a memory successfully takes work. The strength of the memory determines the amount of work that must be done to eradicate it.
Like most of us, I’ve done some really dumb things in my life. I can’t go back and change the mistakes I have made, but I can change the way I feel about them. By changing the emotion associated with the memory, I can change its effect in my future.
I know this sounds far-fetched, but consider this: If you had a failure in business, it was no doubt a source of embarrassment, and if you let that feeling control your life, you may never try to start a new business, because the feeling of failure is so great it will prevent you from even thinking about it. And if you force yourself to do it anyway, you will probably fail again. But, if you can change the bad emotion of the previous failure into a positive experience, you can turn a failure into something good. For example: ‘I know that I MUST fail in order to succeed, because by failing I learned what didn’t work. So I will never make that particular mistake again.’ The psychology of altering the way we feel about our past, explains why people who have failed can go on to greatness later on in life.
The techniques to erase bad experiences in our past are well documented in books, seminars and lectures. It’s a lifestyle change, and if you have gone through one failure after another, you will have to work harder than someone who is younger and has less experience. But, I will give you a clue. When a writer creates a story, and the story is not going the way he intends it to go, the only answer is to backtrack and rewrite the past. People who have learned to accept failure and go on to win had to rewrite their past. They may not be aware of it, but it is a most effective key to success, and it’s a technique easily mastered.