The number one asked question of 2020 (and why it’s the wrong one to ask).

2020 has been a year. Words like ‘unprecedented’ and ‘pivot’ have been used so much they’re starting to wear out. Sometimes it felt like things were changing too fast for us to keep up and everyone was asking, ‘how are we going to come out of COVID?’ Expectations were challenged, opportunities may have been missed, and plans had to be changed very, very, quickly.

The most commonly asked question of 2020 - “Is everything going to be okay?”

Are we going to be okay? Is the business going to be okay? Is the economy going to be okay? Is my dream career going to be okay? Is my plan to …. going to be okay?

And for many, the answer they decided on was yes; everything will be okay as soon as we hit January 1, 2021 and get out of 2020.

But this isn’t the right question to be asking.

It’s highly likely that your perception or definition of what okay looks like hasn’t changed. It’s stuck back before COVID and the expectation is that everything going forward will be the same… 2020 was just a blip in the road.

If this is the case, then no, everything will not be okay. Because the reality is that short term, bad things will happen. This is where people get stuck. 

But the silver lining is that there is always another chance for things to be okay if you're willing to let your perception and your definition of ‘okay’ change, and you start asking “What can I do next time?”

Prepare yourself for things to go wrong by knowing it will

If you understand that everything probably won’t turn out the way you expected in the short term, then it actually gives you a lot of release because you're never worried about it anymore. Things will sometimes go wrong because that’s just life. It doesn’t mean that everything will always go wrong, it just means that if something does turn out bad, well, it’s not a surprise and you can deal with it.

For many years now, I've thought this way; something's always going to go wrong and so I don’t need to get upset by it when it does. What that allowed me to do is that when things have gone wrong, instead of losing my mind, or getting stressed out, I was able to go well, “Of course that was going to happen! And I've already thought through this scenario so now I just need to XYZ, or stop and reflect on what I could have done better.”

How you react when the sh*t hits the fan will determine how successful you will be afterwards

At some point in most people’s life, the sh*t hits the fan. Multiple times, probably. How they handled it hitting the fan is very important to how successful they will be afterwards. Quite often, when things don't happen as expected, people will think it's never going to happen, it can't ever happen because that was the one chance, the deal’s done and today is all there is. That short term, day to day living, is quite problematic but it's also quite common. It's quite a normal thing. 

Whereas for someone like me, I think, “Well, it was always going to go wrong. How can I continue? How can I change my approach to potentially get it back on track or have another crack at it?” Because for the most part, most things can be retried or given another go or restarted or whatever. People don’t understand that life is way longer than today.

It’s about taking a wider, long-term view to say, “Okay, I missed that one particular version of an opportunity. How can I take what I've learned and find another one?” Which of course, can be really hard to do in the moment when you've just lost something but allows you to achieve more, to grow, and to not give up.

Failure is like a muscle, you have to use it to get stronger

The concept of resilience is born out of living through the experiences of failure or disappointment and through that building resilience. Because failure is like a muscle, the more you do it, the easier it gets, the stronger your resilience gets to handle it.

Some people don't have as many opportunities to fail and build resilience. Often it is because they focus on the risk when looking at the risk vs reward. For me, I can only see the reward. I just think that the risk is so minuscule. Am I going to die? No, okay, let’s do it. But most people aren't like that. And if people don't put themselves into situations where they could fail very often, they don't build that muscle, so when they do experience some ‘failure’ they are very hurt.

The three steps to dealing with failure, negative outcomes, and when things just go plain wrong.

1. Look at all the crap that happened this year, and then talk about it, deal with it.

If you're reading an article around this sort of stuff, then probably something happened this year that wasn't great. Go ahead and think about it, really dig into it, talk about it with people, and then figure out what it looks like to give it another crack. What is it next month or even tomorrow that you could do to have another chance at succeeding?

2. Learn from your mistakes and ask the right questions.

You might have lost a trade or a contract, so instead of asking if everything will be okay, ask yourself what can you do to prepare for next time? If you were to give it another crack, what can you do to fix that one? There's never going to be only one factor that caused it to go wrong or for something to happen so figure out which factor had the most impact and focus on that. You can't tackle everything at once so target the one with the biggest impact. It’s the 80/20 rule.

Just by putting your attention to it will fix 80% of it.

Once you focus on that one factor and put a target or a goal to achieve some sort of growth in that area, more often than not you will fix most of the problem. Because you probably already know what it is that let you down, what you forgot to do, so just by turning your attention back to it you've probably already fixed it.

3. Read every book you can get your hands on.

The rest of it just comes down to literally, read everything. Self-awareness comes from going down the rabbit holes. If you really focus on the book, it really teaches you a lot about yourself because you start to see things in yourself or you start to see things that aren't in yourself and wonder why they're not there.

Author’s note: I know you’re probably thinking right now, “It’s not that easy just getting over things, figuring out what’s next. And you’re just talking about it.” Of course, I know that it’s easier said than done. It takes years to actually get to a point where you think ‘Okay, this isn’t easy but I can do it’.

“The journey to self-awareness takes ages and it never stops. It takes ages to get to a point where you have enough reflection about the things that you have trouble with but then you start to understand... And that’s the whole point.”