Tough Times Don’t Last

Hey team. All right, so here we are. It is Monday again. We’re coming to the end of the month of July. I read a quote by Robert Schuler: “Tough times never last, tough people do.” Got me to thinking on this beautiful Monday. Since we’re talking about our core values on Mondays, resolve, right? Never quit. Adapt and provide. Actually, it’s improvise, adapt, and overcome. How do we do that, right?

Tough people last. It’s indicative of us as people.

To stick to stuff, and I say it all the time, quitting is easy. If you keep quitting, it gets easier and easier. But if you stick to it, you persevere, you push through, you drive through, the next time it is easier to stay with it, just like quitting is easier. So is sticking to it.

I was telling some of the new hires here just in the last week, my five-year-old David, most of you know him. He’s a special little soul, he’s a little different. And he was learning to ride his bike. We took his training wheels off, and we got out there and started riding. He did great the first time through. He was pedaling and he was going, and he was keeping moving. And then he got to the end of the driveway and didn’t know what to do. So he dumped the bike and got off, and he was standing there with a big smile on his face because he did accomplish something.

So we took and started riding back in the other direction, and I pulled back a little more, maybe than I should have as a dad, and he couldn’t figure out exactly how to turn or how to lean. I mean, that’s as we learn to ride a bike and do anything in life, learning how to maneuver and change direction is sometimes comical from one point of view but terrifying from the point of view of doing it the first time.

Little David, he crashed into our garbage cans and stuff that were sitting up down the street, and he started crying, saying, “I hate my bike. I don’t want to ride anymore. I just want my scooter, and I don’t want to ride bikes anymore.” And I told him, “You have to keep going. You have to keep trying, and I can’t let you quit,” is what I told him. As a father and as a leader, quitting gets easier. I told him, “If I let you quit, little buddy, there’s a really good chance you won’t ride this bike until you’re in your 20s. You won’t ride a bike. You may never learn how to ride a bike, not to mention all the other things that you might quit in life because you think you can’t do something just because you had one little crash.”

And guys, there’s a life lesson in there for all of us. Don’t quit. Don’t give up. It’s why resolve is one of our core values because for longevity of any company, for longevity of any person, we’re going to have hard times. It’s going to be tough. Life is hard. It sucks you in the gut, it knocks you down. It stomps on your back. Life is not easy. Work and toil is tough.

But if you don’t quit, you learn to persevere. If you learn from your mistakes, you learn to persevere.

So we did it, David and I, about five or six more times, and he got much better. He learned how to maneuver and he learned how to turn. He’s getting better. We still got some a few more crashes probably in us, and we’ve probably got a few more learning lessons to learn. But he’s going to get faster, and he’s going to get better at riding that bike. And before he knows it, he’ll be out riding by himself, racing his brother and doing great things.

So let that be a learning lesson to you too. We all have a few more crashes in us. We have a few more things to learn how to maneuver, how to turn, and how to make it in this thing that we call life and all the different obstacles and the different things that we run into. So remember, tough times don’t last, tough people do. Remember, be valuable because nothing less will do. I’ll see you guys next week.