I dislike that phrase in a major way and so should you!
Small business owners, family business owners, business partners—I don’t care what kind of business you own, operate or manage, this one phrase should be stricken, abolished, forsaken and, quite honestly, fire-able!
It-is-what-it-is might just be the most loathed phrase in my entire universe.
When I hear a person say that phrase or a cousin statement, “Well, you get what you get,” “Whatever, nothing we can do now,” or “Crap happens,” I feel a shock wave go through my body that nearly causes me to explode.
These statements are self-fulfilling moments of helplessness that, being honest, we likely all feel from time-to-time but they are false, deflating, debilitating, paralyzing and the source of what I call real failure—which is another way of saying, “I give up.”
Even worse, they are very contagious.
Helplessness is like a disease that wipes through people like a plague. Company teams and co-workers can be infected quickly. We have all seen battles lost because somebody in our organization shrugged their shoulders and said, “It is what it is.”
This ‘giving-up’ of sorts can come in the simple day-to-day struggles or be a part of a monumental struggle.
Personal experience and learning from others has taught all of us that there is so much we can do to change our circumstances when we are facing opposition, frustration, set-backs and fears.
The first step, frankly, is to stop with the notion, “It is what it is.”
That statement, used so often, is simply not true.
Consider these thoughts:
It is what I make it.
It is what we make it.
It can be better.
I can do something, even if it seems small…I can do something, anything, to make it better.
There has got to be a way to figure this out!
Things have a way of working out.
I got this.
I can do hard things.
I challenge any reader to say these statements out loud and see if they do not immediately feel better.
In this simple thought process we can change our mindset from helplessness to empowerment. We can change from agents being acted upon to agents acting upon the events of our life.
That bears slow repeating: giving up our agency and being acted upon verses grabbing our agency and making a decision to act upon the force that is before us.
For some of us, this come naturally—we are naturally gifted at moving forward with faith and courage. We all know historical leaders that have accomplished the impossible with this natural faith—Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill are all examples that come to mind. Perhaps, rather than highlighting a historical figure from the distant past, we would be wise to think of people that have these talents and are part of our life now. What can we learn from them?
My late father-in-law was a man of this caliber. His name was Tim Blackburn—he was a champion leader that figured out and taught me well that life is what we make it.
He solved everyday problems regularly and was known by all his family and friends as Big Tim…always the optimist.
Here are a few stories to illustrate. His daughter, who eventually became my wife, borrowed a dress from a friend when she was in high school for a formal dance. The dress was very expensive and custom-made with thousands of royal blue sequins. When the dance was over, she took the dress to the dry cleaner to make sure she returned it in top condition.
Somehow, the dry-cleaning solution bleached the paint on the blue sequins. A beautiful blue dress was now more turquoise and white. Mortified, Lisa called Tim in tears, “What on earth are we going to do dad?” It seemed a hopeless situation.
Tim was not hopeless. He took action and got up to discuss the problem with his secretary and asked her, “Any ideas what we might be able to do to recover this dress.” His secretary had a surprising solution. She was an in-the-closet-seamstress and felt like she had the skills to fix the dress. She took the dress home and repaired the sequins, one-by-one, until the dress looked like new. It was a tough, hard-fought solution but it worked! The day was saved.
This is a simple example but it does a good job of illustrating that get-up-and-go actions, even when the outcomes were uncertain, did far more than throwing up one’s hands and stating, “Well, honey, I don’t know a thing about dresses…there is not much I can do.”
Tim’s career was long and successful. As he neared retirement, he started feeling sick—he thought he had food poisoning. He lived with it for a few months and finally, while we were all on vacation for Thanksgiving weekend, he was sick enough that he decided to go to the emergency room for help.
That was mid-morning—by day’s end he had a couple of doctors at his bedside explaining that he had pancreatic cancer. The doctors explained that the cancer was serious, that recovery was very rare, that the potential treatments were limited and that his lifespan was likely short—perhaps four or five months.
Tim’s response, which I still hear ringing in my ears, and which I shall never forget was, “Well, that is a lot of bad news…tell me, please, what is the good news.”
The two doctors were taken back by the question, what, indeed, after such a horrible diagnosis, was the good news?
This was not a surprising question for me. I had seen Tim ask that question, in effect, since the day I had known him.
Tim took ahold of the good news. He did everything in his power to change his circumstances. Surgery and chemo-treatments started. He fought and fought.
Four months of life expectancy turned into a shocking three years of life. He skied in the winter, fished and biked in the summer. He often felt crappy but would be heard saying, “When I am fishing I don’t feel like I have cancer.”
Tim did not let the cancer beat him. Another famous phrase I would often hear him repeat was John Wayne’s famous quote, “Don’t much like quitters son.”
Tim finally passed, beating his life expectations by two and a half years. He left a legacy to his family and friends of faith, hope, optimism and good news. He was a tremendous example of courage in my life.
I challenge each of you to look for these types of people in your life and learn from them.
The truth is that sooner or later nearly all of us face battles that take us to our knees. Sometimes they seem to come in multiple doses. We get knocked down and then the punches just keep coming—one problem after another. Frustrating circumstances can quickly turn to devastating circumstances—fear, anxiety and frustration begin to set in and bright days seem gone forever.
These moments in our lives can wreck us or do just the opposite—they can give us the opportunity to fight and become something we never thought possible.
Consider, for a moment, a crushing exercise routine. How many of us have endured extreme exercise routines or physical workouts? We push our physical limitations to the brink of our capacity. I can recall many a workout as a high school athlete when my coach pushed the team with conditioning drills that had half of the group leaned over the garbage cans vomiting. As we get older, we hire personal coaches to help motivate us to the same end.
We are willing to endure extremely hard, and often painful, physical work outs because we know the back-end results will be worth the sacrifice. Abs of steel don’t come from relaxing days on the beach. Abs of steel come from very painful workouts so we can enjoy relaxing days on the beach.
Metaphorically, we can apply the same concepts in the challenges we face at work.
Leadership skills and the ability to overcome tough challenges do not come when it is all good!
Those skills, abilities and talents come to us as we face touch challenges and refuse to give up. Mentally, the strength we gain from these experiences and doing them often, gives us the ability to race forward with the faith that, eventually, somehow, someway, we will find a way through the fights we face and end up safely on the other side.
Our reality is, so many times, what we decide it will be.
Of course there will be times when we are defeated—but even then, when failure grabs us, are we really defeated or just temporarily set back.
It-is-what-it-is mentality might just be the biggest roadblock to universal success that the world faces.
My challenge to each of us is to defy that attitude. Strike that phrase from your thought process and your conversations. Never allow it to be said or felt or experienced.
One last story to illustrate the point. Last fall I had the opportunity to hike the Salkantay Trail through Peruvian mountains on the way to see Machu Picchu. The hike, from all that I researched online, was considered one of the great hikes in all the world.
That statement would prove true. It amounted to hiking four days through majestic mountain ranges and scenic forests. It covered approximately sixty miles and moved in elevation starting from approximately 10,000 feet up to 17,000 feet and then back down to 6,500 feet.
I was invited as a last-minute guest, promised by one of my business partners that the hike would be manageable even for an out-of-shape middle aged person like myself.
I had a couple of months to train, so I started my efforts. I walked on the stair-master at my local gym for twenty minutes each day and would do a few weekly hikes up mild hills in my local town. I tried to lose a little weight and might have shaved off five measly pounds.
I bought some good gear, expensive walking sticks and the kind of stuff to make four days of hiking doable. I read stuff, took altitude sickness pills and prepared with most everything I could think to do.
The exciting day soon came. We were in Peru and stayed for a few nights in Cusco, a beautiful town full of even more beautiful people. The city sits, like much of Peru, on steep up-and-down hills and walking around the town meant taking small hikes which, at 10,000 feet, were more difficult that I expected. I was seemingly out of breath before the adventure even started.
When the real hiking began, I soon realized just how under-prepared I was. Those little twenty-minute stair-master shenanigans where soon meaningless. I understood, too late, that those should have been one-hour conditioning sets at a hard-core pace.
My little hiking forays back at home where like an evening picnic compared to the straight-up pitch I was facing in Peru. The physical exhaustion was real and my legs burned with each step just a few short hours into the first day of our four-day-trek.
I began, naturally, to immediately wonder how the heck I was going to make four days of hiking work when I could scarcely imagine four hours of hiking.
I pulled myself together as best as I could and managed to get through the first day. That night, we setup camp at the mountain base and I ate a light dinner as my stomach wasn’t ready for anything heavy.
I crawled into my tent at 8:00 PM and tried to find sleep. To my utter dismay, I found myself heaving for breath. I could not, as it seemed, catch enough oxygen in my breathing to satiate my body. I started feeling nauseous and was forced to take the deepest breathes my body could inhale.
I would slowly inhale as deeply as I could and struggled the entire night to feel oxygen getting into my lungs.
The next day we arose, and I walked out to see the mountain we would be trekking over that day. In my mind, I thought, “There is no way I am getting up that mountain.” My stomach was sick and food did not appeal to me whatsoever.
I looked up there again and again and wondered, honestly, with my eyes tearing a bit, how am I going to make it up that mountain, which loomed, snow capped, nearly 5,000 feet above us.
I forced myself to drink some of the local tea, hoping for medicinal reprieve and a calmed stomach, and soon started, with the rest of my group, the long hike straight up the mountain.
We started hiking and I somehow just willed myself to march upward. Soon, I stopped looking up and just focused on taking the steps that were right in front of me. Our guide sent back his nephew (both Peruvians and wonderful guys) to hike behind me as a backstop. He had an emergency mule that was an ambulance of sorts, on standby, waiting to take my out-of-shape body, up the rocky, endless mountain slope if I couldn’t go on by myself.
I worked my way slowly up, focusing on the path directly in front of me and forsaking any long looks to the impossible destination up top. Minutes turned to hours and despite the 32-degree temperature, sweat dripped from my forehead like a broken faucet.
Finally, and somewhat miraculously, I started to gain strength as the goal started to become achievable. What once seemed menacing and impossible started to bend. It did not happen quickly and my stomach and altitude sickness intensified but I somehow found a flicker of hope.
In hindsight, that flicker was all but extinguished and could have been easily snuffed out by one moment of weaknesses. I was, honestly, holding on for dear life.
I could have easily quit and hopped on my ambulance-mule striding effortlessly behind me. I could have easily said, “Well, it is what it is…I didn’t realize how hard this hike was going to be and I didn’t get enough time to train.”
Truthfully, that is what I wanted to do. My body was begging me to let go and quit.
The small trick, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was focusing on what I could do. I focused on what was right in front of me. I could take one more little step up.
We finally surfaced the summit at 17,000 feet where the glacier snow never melts. The sight was magnificent beyond words and the feeling of accomplishment was amazing. I felt like I was on top of the world.
Somehow, with God’s help and my small-step focus, I found a way, which I thought was impossible, to the mountaintop.
It was a moving experience; one I shall never forget and I dare say more meaningful to me than any other person in our group—some who traveled up the mountain like they were local Sherpas.
I hesitate to tell this personal story as it may sound self-aggrandizing. Please forgive that indulgence as I risk the telling to make this key point.
Each of us will face these kinds of challenges in our small business, our family business, our home or somewhere in our lives. It may be physical, mental or emotional. It may involve family members, close friends or loved ones. It may seem impossible. However, the lesson I was grateful and humbled to learn, and one for us all to learn, is that little things and small actions can change impossible circumstances.
We have more power and strength than we often realize.
Triumphs can be won by having the fortitude to take small actions and positive steps even when the odds seem overwhelming.
Machu Picchu was every bit the wonder people claim. How ancient South American civilizations created these miraculous mountain cities is mind boggling. Talk about accomplishing the impossible—seeing these enormous stones—hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them—placed meticulously, piece-by-piece, to create city centers without the aid of modern technology is a feat worth considering.
How was it done? It is what we want it to be—that is most certainly what those amazing people thought and that, my friends, is what we need to think and do!