Sometimes kindness is a better strategy.

You can discount tolerance as being weak, but maybe it’s just you giving those around you the chance you want desperately for yourself.

And that’s not something you want to say — that you need help.

You won’t need to ask for it if you’ve paid it forward.

It will be waiting for you.

Which drives an important question.

What are you addicted to?

Usually, we’re good at focusing any discussion about addiction towards personal vices like gambling or alcohol, drugs or pornography. Addictions that are socially unacceptable. Addictions that dramatically impact other people around you negatively.

What is left out of the discussion are the addictions that drive those addictions. The reason behind the sickness.

We’re not good at admitting the ugly, gritty side of under-performance that robs us of our true potential.

1. We’re addicted to fear.
2. We’re addicted to making excuses.
3. We’re addicted to passive aggression.
4. We’re addicted to selfishness.
5. We’re addicted to listening to the crowd.
6. We’re addicted to caring less.
7. We’re addicted to taking the easy way out.

They’re socially acceptable addictions.

Addictions that we let others get away with because we see them in ourselves.

We excuse them away as if the frailty of our humanity is a worthy excuse for our inadequacies.

And the truth is clear that they are not.  Being human does not demand that you live broken.  That you let your weaknesses drive your behavior.

The simple truth is that you can feed a different addiction.

What about being addicted to greatness?  What about choosing purpose over avoiding pain?

Your addiction is your decision.

You can’t change it all in a day.  Maybe not in a month or a year.

You are mighty because of your choice to choose what is hard over what is easy.

Rise up.

What you don’t know, you can find out in seconds.

Take a look.  There are more “how-to” articles on the web that ever before.  There is a “fast, five-step plan” for just about anything.  There are 2,099,179 books on Amazon.com on how to grow your business. Books that dive deeply into business strategy, sales and marketing planning, and ideas for how to become the next Internet sensation.

Which begs a deeper question.

Why aren’t we more successful? Why are we still struggling?

If we know everything that there is to know and if we know where to learn the things that we don’t know, why haven’t we achieved greatness?  Why aren’t we building better businesses? Why aren’t our employees happier, more focused, and exceeding our expectations?

It’s a serious question that flies in the face of pop business psychology.

The answer has nothing to do with what we know.  That doesn’t matter.

But you know this already.

Here are a couple things you know already.

1. You know how to get people to read your blog – You’ve been told by social media experts that to get the most retweeted blog posts you need to create a list or a step-by-step guide for how people should do something.  That inspiration is less important than formulas.   For some reason, after looking at the data the experts have decided that people in general are too stupid to figure out things on there own.  That they should only follow blindly — not lead.  That the journey doesn’t matter, just the destination.
2. You know how to get people to buy from you – You’ve heard about the amazing wonders of auto-piloting your marketing messages.  You’ve read the stats.  You’ve seen the angles.  You get the emails.  According to the experts business seems to just be a numbers game — a series of “get rich quick” schemes and “only today” price cuts.  Sure, there is sophisticated business jargon attached to what is going on, but the focus is clear — it’s all about making more money at any cost.

You know these things already.

And then we wonder why what we know isn’t working. We wonder why when things get tough we can’t seem to find the antidote to our misery.

Because success isn’t about knowing more.

It is about being more.

And that’s not a list you can download off the Internet or a blog post that you can re-tweet or a business strategy that you can duplicate from a  best-selling business book.

You have to be more.  You have to desperately want more.  You have to care more.

You have to look within yourself and challenge the demons that hold you back from being successful. You’ll never rise to be a champion until you can look past the fear and failure holding you back.

Your reality is that you already know what to do. That’s never been a serious question anyway.

The real question is: “What will you do about it?”

Who will you choose to become?

In fact, the busier you are, the greater your chances that you’re not doing things that really matters at all.

Think about that for a second. It might be that the more you do the less happens.  Frantic behavior and midnight paranoia aren’t the answer to solving complex problems.

Nothing is.

You doing nothing is the answer.

And while this flies in the face of your brain’s rapidly-firing fear signals, doing nothing is the secret to achieving audacious acts of mind blowing brilliance.

How well you do nothing determines how successful you are.

It’s not an excuse though.

Not putting in the effort required to achieve success is never the right course of action. Neither is going through the motions so that those around you think you’re staying busy.

The best way to do nothing is to set aside time to do nothing.

Instead of conforming to the chaos of your schedule, you take control and deliberately blocked out chunks of time to do nothing.

Time where you can think. Time where you can meditate. Time where you can stimulate your brain creatively.

It’s a deliberate conflict with the busyness that stops you from thinking about what you are doing and how you’re doing it.  It’s the anitidote to uncertainty and fear and self-induced pain.

It’s less, not more.

You have to pause and be quiet – you have to do nothing – in order to see where you’re going.  To feel your way towards success.

Doing more just means you might be making more mistakes.

The reality is that the best plans in the world fall apart. Your smartest advisers gets it wrong sometimes. Life will serve you a raw deal.

It takes deliberate quietness to stay focused and motivated.

Just going through the motions, pretending that your head is in the game, just makes you a loser.

You lose when you give in to chaos. The best plan is to do nothing about it .

And the best way to do that is to stop and think about it.

Subconsciously you understand what that means at a deeply personal level.  It doesn’t need to be explained.

It’s felt.

Pain drives every decision that you make.  You’re either avoiding pain or accepting it.  There really isn’t any other option.

Which is important to understand — for yourself and those you interact with on a daily basis.

They are playing by the same cosmic rules as you.  They are either avoiding pain or accepting it.

They feel it too.

But they probably aren’t opening the conversation with you telling you about the pain in their life and how they’re handling it.

You see it at the corners of their eye. You hear it in the tone of their voice.  It’s what they don’t say.  It’s how they don’t say it.

And you’ll miss it all if you’re only thinking about yourself.

Which is no easy matter.

Because, you have your own pain to deal with.

You feel it.

And the pressure of that pain and your anxiety in trying to avoid more of that pain will blind you to the best way to start feeling better.

You help others feel less of their pain.

That’s the secret.  You focus on helping someone else.

And somewhere along the line you start feeling better.

Your activity pushes back your fear and thoughts of failure.  Your empathy creates hope.  Together that combination powers your ability to find solutions to the hard challenges that are causing you frustration.

You can’t stop feeling.

You can’t get rid of pain.

It’s a big part of what keeps you alive.  It’s what drives you to achieve success in the face of difficult obstacles.

It’s pain that makes you powerful.

But you don’t have to let it beat you up and steal your motivation.

You need to find someone else to help.

Along the way you’ll feel better yourself.

Just going through the motions might end you up headed towards the finish line, but you won’t find yourself competing for the prize.

It takes more than a “reproducible process” to steer your business towards success.

You need hope.

You need to believe that you can make a difference.  That the effort and the agony of the journey is worth the destination.

That’s not fluff or business psycho-babble.  That’s the gritty side of performance that you think you can ignore.  It’s the reason the “7 Step Plan” you are implementing isn’t getting you the results the consultants you hired promised you would see.

Because the plan is only the beginning.  It’s just an idea.  It take more to be successful.

Hope and love and courage and fear — they all work together to make you what you ultimately become.

They are the driving force behind how well your employees execute.  They are the reason why your industry does what it does.

Hope is what drives behavior.

If you don’t have it, you make bad decisions.  You lose meaning and purpose and passion.

Even the best of your plans crumble at the audacity of reality.

What you believe to be possible breathes new life into how you see the world.

Stop looking for a new plan.  Look for a new will to win.

How you feel today will change tomorrow.

You probably won’t change your beliefs and it’s likely that big problems won’t magically disappear overnight, but time brings about a change in perspective.

We say that “getting older makes you wiser”.  Perhaps it is more accurate that getting older makes you less frantic.

Which is important to leverage in business.

One of the big mistakes that business leaders make is not factoring time and perspective into the problems they’re trying to solve right now.

Instead of understanding how fear and pain drive buyer decisions, businesses adopt generic strategies that present a “quick fix” that only serves to accentuate buyer paranoia.

Content is outsourced to marketing team.  E-mail design is artfully prepared by the creative team.  The public relations team put together press releases and speaking notes for television interviews.

But the message is wrong.

A better, more powerful message gets left unsaid.  Instead of a message that “it is what it is” you should deliver a story that “whatever it is can be changed.” 

It puts the buyer back in control of the conversation going on in their head.

There is a simplicity to being in control. It abates helplessness. It stymies hopelessness.

Buyers want to know that despite the external factors crashing down around them that they are in control of their situation.

A sympathetic message of “it can get better” and “we can help you make it better” goes a lot farther then generic, selfish marketing messages aimed at the masses touting the wonderments of your latest and greatest technology.

It’s not about you.

It’s about how you make people feel.

If you can make them feel safe and inspired, they see tomorrow through a perspective that benefits you.

And it’s not just a better buyer pitch, it’s a better way to treat your employees and the people around you.

Create dreams.  Not more frustration.

The basic concept is that you can create content and marketing that together drive sustainable revenue long after the content is first created.  In other words, you spend a lot of time creating something (an e-book, for example) or reselling someone else’s services (like Amway) and over time the business automatically drives large amount of revenue back to you without much ongoing effort.

Which sounds exciting.

Especially if you’re an entrepreneur who is getting older in age or someone interested in pursuing personal hobbies while making enough money to support your lifestyle.  It’s exciting to imagine that you could plug an idea into a proven process, automate your marketing, and then watch as revenue piles in the front door.

The reality is that that strategy doesn’t work. It’s not just a financial scam (where only the top 1.5% actually make any revenue at all), it is an emotional scam.

Let’s be as clear as possible.  It is a bold-face lie that flies in the face of research from thousands of years of what drives successful business.

And yet you want to believe it.

Psychologically you get sucked into the trap of believing that “pre-packaged recurring business” is a viable strategy for long-term success. That you can sit in our home office and create e-books and videos and make enough money to live happily.  That you can recycle someone else’s automated emails and turn it into success.

It just doesn’t work.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. It takes tremendous effort to build a successful business.  Autopilot strategies just aren’t focused enough to drive successful results.
2. Buying behaviors change too often to be manipulated.  A one-size-fits-all marketing system is too vague (and annoying) to capture buyers who actually have money and motivation.
3. Consumers are quick to pick up on manipulation and emotional redundancy.  Since these systems make it easy to copy the exact same e-mails and selling phrases that everyone else is using, buyers notice the lack of real empathy and choose to do business elsewhere.
4. The pursuit of making money is too unrewarding to keep you motivated for too long.  Just making money, as a goal by itself, is not a large enough inspiration to do the hard, gritty tasks that ultimately determines success.
5. To inspire others you must first be inspired.  The idea that you can manufacturer motivation while sitting in a back office churning out content is just not realistic.

The uncomfortable truth is that success isn’t as easy as plugging your name and phone number into an automated “make tons of money” business system.  Making money is not as easy as renting a “platform” that you can use to generate little bits of revenue from people all over the world.

Success demands more.

It demands an unrelenting focus on excellence.  On the greatness inside you.

Running after neuvo-business trends so that you can make money while living an easy life is just heartbreakingly implausible.

You are defrauding yourself the opportunity to realize the goodness you are capable of.  You are cheating yourself the opportunity to make a difference in the world.  You’re choosing fear over power.

Look within yourself .

See the challenger waiting to emerge.

You’re capable of bigger things.

Don’t rob yourself of the delight of truly making a difference.

The easy buck is just a mirage.  It’s you chasing the wrong fantasy.

The reality is that you’re better than that.

Sometimes you wish other people kept their opinion to themselves.

Criticism hurts.

No matter how thick a skin you have, it’s hard not to get worn down by other people’s negative opinions.

You can spend weeks, months, even years being the best at what you do and it all seems to fall apart when that one person misjudges your priorities and mocks your intentions.

It makes you angry. You’re frustrated and confused.  It makes you want to give up.

But that’s what the critics expect from you.  They want you to go away. Which leaves you only one option

To beat the critics at their own game.

Instead of running away, you have to change how you look at criticism.  You have to reframe the negative feedback to your advantage.

Here are a few ideas to help you:

1. State your intentions more clearly (up front) next time.

2. Practice what still feels uncomfortable.

3. Apologize if you’ve offended someone else (even accidentally close).

4. Take notes on what did not get criticized.

5. Resist the urge to defend yourself publicly.

6. Be brutally honest about how much preparation you actually put into the project.

7. Ask for professional help (i.e. pay for a coach or therapist).

8. Write down how you’re going to do it the next time.

9. Spend time each day meditating on your mission.

10. Try it again (and again and again and again).

11. Focus on helping someone else instead of staying mad.

12. Take a breath.  Let off some steam.  Take another breath.

Beating the critics isn’t really about the critics at all.

It’s about you.

It’s about how you feel when things go wrong. It’s about your motivation. It’s about your reason for doing what you do.

It’s all too easy to just do things because people agree with you. That’s easy.

What is hard is to practice and prepare day after day until you get it right.

But that’s also the way you beat your critics.

You beat your self.

You beat back the fear and frustration and your pain and focus on “why” you do what you’re doing.  And an amazing thing begins to happen.

The clarity of your focus and the extra hard work combine to not just build your own confidence but allow you to see the people that you’re actually helping.  And then it doesn’t matter what the experts say.  Because you can see the good that you’re doing all around you.

You can see you’ve beaten the critics.

It’s abrupt. It’s final. It seems like the end of possibilities.

But maybe that’s just because of how we’ve come to understand the word.

Growing up, when you wanted something really badly, the last thing you wanted to hear from your parents was a “no”.  When you applied to your favorite college, the worst answer you could get back was a “no”.  When you interviewed for your first job, it was rather painful to be told “no”. When you had that great executive idea – the perfect strategy for your business, the last answer you wanted to hear from your boss after your pitch was a “no”.

Because “no” means that somehow we haven’t thought through all of the angles.  “No”means that we’re not as smart as we thought we were.  “No” is the end of the dream.

It’s painful to hear.  It’s hard to say.  Because of what “no” means to us.

And so we half-ass our ability to be amazing.

We forget that “no” is the beginning of clarity.  The beginning of focus.

Every time you say “no” you create more clarity. You give yourself a better opportunity somewhere else to succeed.  It might seem easier to dish out a “kinda”, “sorta”,  ”maybe”, “I’ll think about it” type of answer, but you’re only hurting yourself by muddying up the options.

You’re creating new questions for yourself when you already know the answer.  The answer is “no”.

Start thinking about “no” as an opportunity to focus on what really matters to you.  Stop agreeing to things just because you might hurt someone’s feelings or because you feel you might let someone down.

“No” doesn’t mean you can be selfish.  But it does mean you should give yourself all the opportunity in the world to succeed.

Just say “no”.