What to do when everything falls apart and you still have to win

You are trying to go somewhere, and the world is trying to stop you. That is the whole situation, and there is no dressing it up. Your push has to be harder than the world's ability to stop you. That is what successful people have done, every one of them.

People ask me about a time I felt completely lost. I remember one very well. Let me tell you where I was standing when everything I had built got shut down in a single day.

The warehouse over the ocean

I was living in Mission Viejo, in Southern California. Beautiful place, right on the water. I was in the telecommunications business, a young man with three little kids, and I was pushing hard to get back up on my feet.

A mentor of mine owned a big office building overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and he had a spare room in it he was not using. Big room, maybe six or seven thousand square feet, and raw. Not finished. I moved in with a copy machine the size of a semi truck and a big crew of people, one huge open warehouse of activity.

And we were killing it. We were running tours and sales shows all over the United States, producing all our own printed material and shipping it out across the country. We were also, I will admit it, cowboys. Under the radar. We had not built anything in there and we had not pulled a single permit, because we were just camped in this raw space getting work done.

Twenty-four hours

One day a fire marshal walked past my office and looked in the door, and he could not believe what he was seeing. He lost his mind. We got exactly twenty-four hours to shut the whole operation down and get out of the space.

So I went to my mentor, the man who owned the building, and he said, look, I have a legit spot. It was maybe one hundredth the size of what we had upstairs. One hundredth. And I had to figure out how to take everything we were doing up there and fit it into that little office.

There was no week to think it over. I had to hit the switch immediately and just get on it. That is the part nobody tells you about a setback: the decision does not wait for your feelings to catch up.

The road is always under construction

People look at successful people and want to get on that smooth ride, the one where everything just rolls along and goes well. I have never found it, man. Not once.

The road to success is always under construction. There are potholes. There are speed bumps. Sometimes the road just ends, and you have to keep putting it there yourself, every day, every minute, every second.

Have there been times I felt sorry for myself? Of course. I am not going to pretend that never happened. But if it ever lasted more than a day or so, I would be surprised. Then you go, okay, piss on it. Let's go. Let's go make it happen. You get back at it. You shift, you pivot, you do whatever you have to do to keep pushing harder than life is pushing you down.

You are the only one who can let go

Everybody reading this has a dream. Something you want to be, something you want to do, something you want to accomplish, or a certain place in life where you look and say, that is where I want to go. Guess what. You are the only one who can let go of it.

And I will tell you something about fear. The fear of falling, the fear of quitting, the fear of what happens if I never hit my dream: that very idea of not being successful is exactly what drives me to be successful. I have that within me, and so do you. So there is really only one question you ever have to answer. Will you hang on to your dream harder than life can rip it from you?

Because if we just keep showing up, keep producing, keep doing the right things, keep learning from our mistakes, and keep pushing forward, we know we will reach it. It is true for me, and it is true for you.