Overcoming Loss & Succeeding Anyway

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Your girlfriend or wife could leave you for another man unexpectedly, or you could catch her cheating on you. What happens when it doesn’t work out with the other guy and she wants to come back to you? Do you take her back, or tell her to pound sand so you can move on to find someone who will be faithful?

If you take her back after she has cheated on you, then you’ll always be fearful that she may cheat on you again. You may have spent 20 years of your life building a company that you love and that pays you very well, but due to unexpected or sudden changes in the market or your industry, you could find yourself going out of business within a matter of months and losing everything. How do you overcome something like that? Sometimes people we really love and care about, die unexpectedly. One thing is certain about life: life is change, growth is optional. Here’s how you can overcome the loss of money, a business you love, a lover you love, a relationship that is important to you, the death of someone you care about, etc. so you can keep moving forward and succeed anyways.

300 years from now, you, me and everything we love about this world, including the people we love in this world, will have long since turned to dust. 300 years from now no one is going to care who you or I was, what our credit report was like, what our reputations were, the companies we spent our lives building or working for, who we loved, etc. As Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, Inc. said during his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, “Your time is limited. Don’t spend your time trying to live someone else’s life. Death is life’s change agent, and therefore, you are already naked. You must follow your heart, curiosity and intuition, because they somehow already know what you want to become.” You have nothing to lose, because you can’t take anything with you from this world. In every moment of every day, you get to decide who you are going to be and how you are going to live your life. So why spend your time trying to live your life according to other people’s expectations? If you do, you’re simply going to waste your time being miserable, instead of becoming the person God created you to be. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it’s a matter of choice.

I have a lot of friends and family who have served and are still serving in the military. I have friends who have died while serving their country. Many of my friends, family and several clients have struggled with survivor’s guilt after surviving their combat tours. How do you deal with talking to your best friend one minute, then getting into a firefight the next, and during the firefight you are rocked by a tremendous ear deafening explosion: You feel like you got hit with a giant tree branch, but when you turn around to get the tree branch off of you, you realize it is actually your friends headless, armless and legless bloody torso that hit you so hard? Then you realize you are covered in his guts, blood, bone, brains and that some of it is in your ears, eyes and mouth. You don’t have time to stop and clean yourself up because you have to keep fighting until you kill the enemy or they retreat. Unfortunately, you end up swallowing flesh and parts of your buddy. That’s not a pleasant memory to have. How do you deal with firing your S.A.W. (squad automatic weapon) into a crowd of mostly women and children, because insurgents are shooting at you and your brothers from the crowd, knowing you’re blowing away women and children? How do you deal with having to shoot and kill a beautiful little eight-year-old girl who was coming towards your position with a suicide bomb vest that had been forcibly put on her by insurgents who have told her if she does not do it, they will kill all of her family? Many years later after surviving combat, how do you deal with the memory of your best friend saying to you right before he goes over the hedge row and gets mowed down by a German machine gun, “You stay here, I don’t want anything to happen to you.”; he’s dead but you are still here?

The past is the past and there is nothing you can do to change it. Your only choice is to accept what is. Experience the pain and suffering authentically. Find a way to be grateful you are still alive, and can honor their memories by being at your best personally, and trying to live a life that honors those who gave their lives, so you could live. The best gift you can give to those who are no longer with you, is to live your life to the fullest, and become all that you are capable of becoming. You honor the dead and those you have lost, by being grateful you are still alive, and persisting without exception as you strive to achieve your grandest goals and dreams. The bottom line is: there will come a day that will be your last day here on earth. Steve Jobs, used to ask himself every morning when he got up and looked into the mirror, “if today was the last day of my life, would I still do what I am about to do today? When the answer was no too many days in a row, I knew I needed to change something.”

Maybe you are afraid to ask that girl out because you are afraid of getting rejected. If you knew that today was your last day on earth, would you be willing to go to your grave without ever knowing whether she would say yes or not? I hope the answer is no. The amount of time you have spent on this planet is getting longer, while the days that you have left on this planet, is getting shorter. You really don’t have any time to waste. Start that new business you’ve always wanted to. Go get that job or degree you’ve always wanted, instead of continuing to settle for your current shitty job. If you are not very successful with women, but you’ve always wanted and felt you deserved a great woman in your life, then download the Amazon Kindle version of my book to your Smartphone, Mac, iPad or PC in under 60 seconds for only $9.99 by CLICKING HERE.

The following is an e-mail I got from a twitter follower who has just lost their mother a month ago, and is struggling to move on and enjoy their life. My comments are (in bold brackets like this) in the body of their e-mail:

Dear Corey,

I love your tweets (Thanks!) and I was wondering if you have any advice for someone like me. I’m 35 years old, I just lost my mom a month ago (Bummer, sorry about your loss.) and my dad 8 years ago. I feel very lonely. I’m single and I have a great job, but lately I feel like I just wanna be in my room with no contact with others. (Sometimes we just need to be alone so we can suffer and grieve in order to feel our pain and heal it. Most people tend to try to numb the pain with drugs, alcohol, food, excessive exercise, working more, music, tv, etc. to avoid the pain they feel inside. However, this is detrimental because what you resist… persists. You must feel it to heal it, otherwise you will prolong your suffering and delay your recovery to feeling normal again. Take the time to feel the pain, cry, wail, etc. so you can authentically experience whatever unpleasant emotions you are feeling. Human beings suffer when they want things, or circumstances in their lives to be different than they are. You can only more forward and past suffering when you accept what is, and the fact certain things and events in life are totally out of your control and influence. The bottom line: everything and everyone you love in this world will eventually dissolve and die, including you. Your only choice is to be grateful you still have breath in your lungs, and the ability to continue working to make your life the way you want it to be.)

Thanks for your help,

Mercedes

“Things may come to those who wait, but only those things left by those who hustle.”-Abraham Lincoln