I want to share this strategy with you this week in hopes it will inspire you, help you, give you the fuel you need to make this month and the finish to this year big. And it is this: Consider your past – maybe your past is as bludgeoned and troubled as mine was, particularly in my younger years it was very difficult. I had a lot of losses in my family. A lot of things happened to me like have happened to so many people and maybe your beginnings were humble like mine. Maybe you had difficulties, maybe there is something really really bad that happened recently in your past and I think this message will help you. I know that it helped me in my own life. I was almost 26 years old and a man said to me, “Grant, quit trying to discover who you are and go out and create who you choose to be.” When he said that it was like the lights went off! And I was like, oh my god! I’ve been spending all this time worrying about what happened to me – my dad died when I was 10, my brother died when I was 20. You know, this happened to me, my twin brother did this to me and woe is me, I have all these problems and I made all these mistakes. But it was when the guy said, “Dude, quit worrying about where you’ve been, quit worrying about who you are or where you came from. Quit trying to discover who you are and turn all that energy and those resources and invest them in creating who you choose to be,” and that was when the lights went off for me. I was like, “Oh my gosh!”
So that is my message to you this week, spend all your time, all your energy deciding who you choose to be. Maybe you were foreclosed on, in this last housing debacle. Maybe you lost money in the internet bust. Maybe you made some mistakes and you are like, “Oh my god” and these mistakes keep haunting you or maybe you lost a big sale last week.
Look, the past doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened or how it happened. It doesn’t matter who is to blame. What matters is what are you going to do about it? Windshields are much larger than rearview mirrors for a reason. Why? Because your attention should be on the future. So keep your attention on the future. Decide who you choose to create. Decide how valuable you can be to the marketplace, what you can create, what makes you unique, what you can do going forward. Hey, the past is the past, it’s over. They call it the past for a reason. You know why? Because it is over.
Hope this finds you well, I hope this inspires you. Create the future, create the you, create the value you want in the marketplace. Persist on that path long enough and I promise you, sooner or later the marketplace will reward you, your family and your company.
