Fortitude

Hello, my name is Gary Shotton and I’m here enjoying the afternoon on my back porch, and where today we’re going to talk about the subject of fortitude, and you know that’s another term for just stick with it, stay with it, don’t give up, make sure you’re staying steady. There is a time to redirect your life, but my experience has been that I want to redirect my life after I’ve accomplished at a plateau of positive events, things that are on the positive Side, and not oh, just because things are going tough. There’s a tendency in our society and if we’re not careful in our businesses to just call it quits when things get to go in just a little bit tough so I’m gonna give plenty of examples in my life about when I wanted to quit and how I wanted to quit and probably the only real difference in myself being at the point that I am now successful in business and not being successful is one simple thing, I didn’t give up. I had a bulldog determination to make it work and yet I did have ability to understand if something wasn’t going to work out, I could redirect in those cases, not the same thing. You know, part of this comes from my background, I’ll talk a little bit about my dad. My dad had fortitude, he had stick to it, he had the ability to last to the long race to the end of the run. I remember a time specifically when I was in college, and I was about to graduate from college, and I had thought about maybe even though I went to college just coming back and helping my dad on the farm, he kind of wanted that, we had a rather large operation, but he told me he said “Gary, you better go on, you better go on with your job, your career because I’m not sure if I’ll have a farm in less than a year from now.” because it was one of those cycles and seasons when things dropped in the cattle market and dad had a large number of cattle, probably as many as four or five thousand head of cattle one way or another either in feeders or in fat cattle or in the feedlots, and he was losing a hundred dollars per animal, and he had pins of about a hundred in a pin and so he was losing ten thousand dollars every single week because he had enough cattle that he was selling about a hundred a week that’s a pin of fat cattle every week, and he saw this go to the bottom. He saw that he had re-leveraged the farm everything he had on the farm, every possible thing he had to stay afloat, and he pulled through because he told me he said “It’s going to turn around, but I can’t guarantee it so go on with your life but when it does turn around I will make it back up.” and sure enough, over a period a couple years the cycle turned and came back, and he made back almost all or all of that, of course he didn’t want to lose that much money he lost in the neighborhood of two full wheat crops in just a short period of the cattle business, so he had fortitude. I had some examples in my life. I’m not bragging, I’m just saying that when I was in my workplace, my first job, I wanted to quit. I had gone to college for four years, four and a half years, I had graduated, I’m working on my first job, and I hated it. It was unbelievable. I’m an engineer, plant engineer and in essence, I’m grinding up and putting dirt in a bag, it’s called bentonite. And I can remember the horror, the thought pattern of just thinking how in the world did I spend this much college time, this much effort, this much money, and I hate what I’m doing, but I stuck with it. I had a determination not to go through, and my words where I was not going to quit my very first job in less than a year. And, before that year was up something happened, I had an experience with my higher power, and my life turned and wow am I glad that I stuck with it. I actually believe that’s one of the qualities of success, is that being able to push through when things are not going so well. I can tell you that if you’re in business, You’re going to want to quit from time to time. I can remember, I’m in the trucking business and while people were not paying me, not paying me on time, we had some moves that went wrong or bad I can remember one morning that when I say morning. I mean I’m talking about 2 a.m. We had started that morning at six dispatching in the morning at work. Well past six o’clock and now it’s 2 a.m. in the morning, so we’re, just do the math we’re up 18, 19, 20 hours, and I was out moving a truck that I needed to move because nobody else could drive and I raised up under this truck and I hit my head, hit it hard right on the top of my head right up here. Man, I went down to my knees in tears thinking “Oh my goodness. How did I get myself into this? Why would I do this? Should I quit?” and I saw no other logical option, and then there’s a saying I use, “This too shall pass.” and it passed and I came through that. And so, if you’re thinking you won’t have any difficulties in your job, you’re thinking that this is going to be easy all the time, you’re going to have another thing coming. Unless you’ve got some sugar daddy that’s going to step in all the time and then you don’t really have a real job, you don’t really have a company, you’re working for someone else, and if as owner we can say it this way: Many times as owner you’re the only person that dreads payday. Yeah, you dread payday because everyone else is looking forward to pay day, and you’re looking forward to the day you have to make payroll, and you really didn’t have enough money for that, and you knew the banker wasn’t going to loan you any more, and you had money out there, but you had to collect the money ,you had to make sure the money was in the bank. So I’m not trying to paint this too difficult, overly difficult but one of the attributes of a successful business person is the ability to stick with it. That not quit, make sure sure that you first of all, make choices that keep you from overstepping your bounds, overstepping your abilities, but when you’re in there, when you’re in your sweet spot, you gotta press through a lot of times, you’ve got to keep with it stick with it, make sure that you can accomplish and finish things. In essence, if I had a employee, and they’re just working for me, I want them to complete the tasks I gave to them. I want them to take on tasks that they are able to accomplish, but then complete that task, and once they complete that task, I will reconsider and give them even a little harder task next time. They’re not stuck, they can always reach out to a little harder task, and I think life has it that way I think we have in our making, that as we complete pages in our life, chapters in our life, that we can expect a step-by-step difficult and more difficult situations. Thank you for listening, I hope you enjoyed. Thank you. Up next AUT