The Harvest Was Never Automatic

To be sure I’m pounding the drum as hard as I can, here it is again: “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” That statement only becomes true when someone finds the seed and does the work. The eleven attributes we’ve worked through are how that work gets done. The harvest is influence, not a better story.

The equal or greater benefit Hill promised in Think and Grow Rich is never automatic, and it is absolutely not reserved for people with authority. Making the best of a bad situation is a discipline: name it, find the seed, own your part, decide and plan, sow more than required, and harvest through people. Leadership is the harvest. It starts wherever you are standing when the next adversity shows up. And this next adversity WILL show up soon enough. 

If you’ve paid much attention to the timeline to this point, you likely noticed that this has covered just over thirty-five years. I certainly haven’t detailed every adversity I’ve ever faced. In complete transparency, there are plenty that don’t deserve to ever see the light of day again. And depending on when you’re reading (or hearing) this, it may seem a bit dated. Don’t think that just because the last adversity I detailed in this process landed in our lap in late 2024 that we’ve since stumbled onto some sort of magic potion that prevents crap from happening around us; I can assure that’s definitely not the case. I could write a whole damn book on just the adversities we’ve experienced in the few years since. That said, I’m not quite ready to relive most of those yet - but we have consistently mined each for any possible seed for every greater opportunity we can pull from them.

Rather than continuing to detail things that have been awkward to share anyway, let’s close the loop with a practical process you can follow for systematically Making the Best of YOUR Bad Situations. I frequently talk about how I’ve never seen myself as being talented in any one thing. I developed a solid work ethic early on and I learned the importance of consistency. Those two things alone wouldn’t have been enough, though. I still had to discipline myself to learn from tough experiences; that’s been through the reflection Cindy still holds me accountable to do routinely today. That combination has made an incredible difference, and the results have compounded over time.

Again, though, nothing about what I’ve done is special. A harsh reality is that most people quit, blame, or coast. The ones who harvest do a small set of things on purpose, from whatever spot they are already standing in - regardless of any position, title, or authority they may (or may not) have. Right now, before we go any further, pull up one bad situation you wrote down somewhere in this process. Is it still a story, or have you found a seed in it? Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to learn the value of one chain and four lenses.