Solve Your Problems to Find Success

Hey team, all right. So we’re back for another Monday Message, and I wanted to check in with you. How are you enjoying this? Are you enjoying these as much as I enjoy it? I really am. I’m enjoying getting to talk to you guys every week. And I want you to look at this bulldog I got behind me here. Looks great, doesn’t he? Do you see the likeness? I think you do.

All right, in all seriousness though, we have these stickers. And if you haven’t seen one yet, please talk to a lead. We’ll make sure that you get one. Call the office, let dispatch know, they’ll put you down, and we’ll get you one of these stickers out to your post or whatever. Next time you’re in the office, just ask for one. We also are making T-shirts. So we found a great T-shirt, and we’re gonna get this silk-screened onto it. It’ll be something you can even wear underneath your vest, under your uniform, things like that. It’s gonna look really cool. It’s gonna be a nice shirt.

So I wanted to talk to you this morning a little bit about our attitude and success and stuff and how we deal with stuff. And one of those things I read in a book here recently by John Maxwell. He said he’s yet to meet a person focused on yesterday that had a better tomorrow. And what is that saying? If you’re focused on the past, it’s hard to have a good future. It’s even hard to have a good present because you’re thinking about something maybe that didn’t go so right in your past.

John Foster Dulles, he was in the Eisenhower administration. He said the secret to success is not whether or not you have a problem but rather you’re dealing with a problem that you’ve already dealt with. The same problem that you had last year when a problem keeps coming around and you haven’t yet successfully fixed it, then that becomes problematic, obviously.

So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that. Are you dealing with problems that maybe you’ve already dealt with and you didn’t succeed at them because they seem to have a way of coming back around? I’ve seen many young men and women job hop from one job to another thinking they’re going to find greener grass, more money, a better team, better hours, things that they think are going to be better. But when they get there, they’re not always better, and they’re creating a problem for themselves because they’re looking for happiness sometimes in the wrong places.

The secret of success, and I agree with Mr. Dulles, is that you don’t want to be dealing with the same stuff over and over and over. You want to pass the test. You want to deal with the problem. Because the nice thing about dealing with a problem and successfully dealing with it is it springboards you into greater things for your future. It is true through adversity, and we talk about it with resolve in our core values. Pressure plus pain times perseverance equals prosperity.

That’s what it is. You’re dealing with something. Something that’s tough, you have a problem, but if you succeed in finding out how to have a solution to that problem, you don’t run away from it, you don’t just quit it and go on to another thing thinking that just by quitting it, it’s not there anymore. It’s still there, so you will have it pop back up and happen again. And I think you guys know what I’m talking about because I imagine everyone that is listening to this, like me, has had a couple of times in their lives that they ran away from a problem, an argument, how to deal with it.

I’ve been married for 28 years. You want to know how many times I’ve had the same argument with Karen over something? You don’t really want to know that because it’s more than the years I’ve been married. I mean, sometimes there might be a couple of incidences, and I’ll be honest with you, that probably in just the last couple of years, Karen and I have, for the most part, dealt with a couple of issues that have popped up sometimes 8, 10, 20 times in a year over the last 28 years. But we finally have dealt with it, and we have a little more success even in our marriage and the way that we’re dealing. And it’s springboarding us into a better future, and that’s what I’m talking about.

So what problems do you have? What do you need to deal with? Is it something that you were dealing with yesterday, last year, six months ago? If so, deal with it, solve it, positive attitude, move forward. Remember that sometimes there’s perseverance, even with the pressure and the pain. You have to deal with it. You have to go through it. Perseverance means you’re going through it. You don’t just get to put it on a shelf or run away from it. Deal with the pressure, deal with the pain, have perseverance. In time, you will see success.

All right, have a beautiful Monday, have a beautiful Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I will see you next week. Remember to be valuable because nothing less will do.