Charlene Schiff was born into a comfortable, loving family in the small town of Horochow, Poland. She had a good childhood. Her father was a philosophy professor at a nearby university, who loved her and was patient with her, even when she did wrong. Once when her mother was working to paint some rooms in their house, Charlene impulsively took the paintbrush and painted the family’s piano. Her father didn’t yell at her. He did discipline her, but he also took into consideration that she was immediately repentant. And he used the incident to teach her how important it was not to destroy other people’s property.
Charlene’s mother was a teacher, but she gave up her teaching career to raise Charlene and her older sister, Tia. Her mother doted on her, buying her clothes and toys and encouraging her daily. She had a wonderful life.
But then things began to change for Charlene. In 1939, when Charlene was ten, Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union and divided between them. Horochow, where Charlene lived, was annexed by the Soviets. Despite that, life didn’t change much for her family at that time. But in 1941 it did. That was when Hitler decided to take over all of Poland and his troops entered the city. Immediately, Charlene’s beloved father was dragged off by the Nazis. She never saw him again. Soon Charlene, her mother, and her sister were relocated to a Jewish ghetto, being forced to share a single room with three other families. Charlene was only eleven.
Charlene’s mother was subjected to forced labor. And the girls were sometimes made to work as well. There was little food, and it was a struggle to survive. But Charlene’s mother came up with a plan. She began looking for people in the countryside who might be willing to take them in and hide them. She found a farmer who agreed to take one of them. It was decided that it would be Charlene’s sister, who was five years older than she was. Another farmer said he would take Charlene and her mother.
“One day, in 1942, I guess it was early summer, I don’t remember dates, but I remember we got up and I said good-bye to my terrific big sister,” recounted Charlene. “Now when we didn’t hear for a few days anything, that meant that she arrived in good shape and everything was going according to plan, my mother came home from work and she told me to put on my best clothes and shoes and to take an extra set with me and that we would leave the ghetto that evening.”1
The ghetto where they were living was bounded on three sides by fences and on the fourth side by a river. Late that night under the cloak of darkness, they left their room and made their way to the river. They waded in. But before they could cross, they heard shots. On the bank of the river, soldiers waited. “We can see you, Jew!” they shouted. Others had the same idea as Charlene and her mother. They also wished to escape. Many who were hiding stood up and raised their hands to surrender. When they did, they were promptly shot.2
Charlene and her mother huddled among the reeds. The water was up to the young girl’s neck. Her mother kept her quiet and fed her soggy bread. They stayed in the river for four days! On the morning of the last day, Charlene awoke and her mother was gone.
The reality of her situation was dire. At age eleven, she was all alone living in a hostile land where she would be hunted down and killed like an animal. “I felt like screaming but I knew I had to keep quiet,” Charlene recalled.3
With the soldiers finally gone, Charlene made her way to the farm where they had promised to hide her and her mother. Instead of a warm welcome, she was told she could spend the day in the barn but that when it got dark she had to leave or the farmer would turn her in to the Nazis.
At first, Charlene would not face the reality of her situation. She said, “I lived like an animal, going from forest to forest, in search of my mother. I could not allow myself to think that I would never find my mother. I had to find my mother. Where was I going to go, what was I going to eat, who would take care of me?”4
The reality of such an overwhelming situation causes some people to crumble, others to adapt and learn what they must to survive. Charlene did the latter. The girl who grew up in town totally dependent on her mother learned to survive on her own in the woods. Occasionally she stumbled across other Jews hiding from the authorities. Once she came across a small group of men, women, and a baby, who had escaped their ghettos. When the group was discovered by local children, they and Charlene hid in a nearby haystack. But local villagers used pitchforks to jab the haystack, killing all but Charlene.
Another time when Charlene was returning to her sleeping place after scrounging for food, a girl of about eighteen befriended her and offered to help her. They agreed to meet the next morning. But during the night Charlene had a bad feeling about the girl. The next day, she hid herself high in a tree and waited. Sure enough, the girl showed up, this time with her brother. As Charlene listened, she learned that the two had planned to rob her and turn her over to the authorities for a reward.5
Charlene did experience a few moments of kindness during those years. Once she was discovered sleeping in a barn by a hired farm girl, who brought her food and clothing. “It took a long time to sink in,” Charlene remembered. “I had [finally] been treated like a human being, with kindness and generosity. I had forgotten how that felt.” The girl fed Charlene for almost two weeks. But then one day two policemen arrived at the farm and shot the farm girl, whom they said was a Jew.6
“I spent two years in the woods alone,” recounted Charlene. “I slept during the day in a little grave I’d dug, and at night I would crawl out and search for something—anything—to eat. I became very ill.”7
In 1944, Charlene was discovered by Soviet troops who literally stepped on her as she lay in her hiding place. They took her to a hospital, where she was slowly nursed back to health. Her goal was to make it to the United States, where other family members had gone before the war. Finally in 1948, she made the journey there. Three years later she was married.
Charlene didn’t want to talk about her experiences and kept them to herself for years. But eventually her husband Ed convinced her that she needed to tell her story to others. “You have a mandate and an obligation to six million martyrs,” he said.8 Now she shares her story and the reality she had to face in hopes that it will also teach others. “I also want to send a message of hope to the young people of today,” said Charlene. “I’m an optimist, and I feel that younger generations will learn from the mistakes that my generation made and will fight indifference and injustice.”9
If we want to succeed in life and to learn from our losses, we must be able to face reality and use it to create a foundation for growth. That can be very difficult. People who face horrific experiences, as Charlene Schiff did, can be crushed by them. But even losses less catastrophic than hers can tempt us to avoid reality. We may blame other people for our circumstances. We may rationalize or make excuses. Or we may retreat into our own little world, like this man in one of my favorite “reality” stories. He had been an insomniac for thirty years, and finally he decided to see a psychiatrist.
“Why can’t you sleep at night?” the doctor asked.
“Because I’m trying to solve the world’s problems,” the man responded.
The psychiatrist pressed further, “Do you ever solve them?”
“Almost every time,” replied the patient earnestly.
“Then why can’t you sleep?” the psychiatrist asked.
“Well Doctor, I think it’s those big ticker tape parades they have in my honor that keep me up.”
As much as an escape from reality might give us temporary relief from our problems, the truth is it’s easier to go from failure to success than it is from excuses to success. When we lose sight of reality we quickly lose our way. We cannot create positive change in our lives if we are confused about what’s really happening. You can’t improve yourself if you’re kidding yourself.
Everyone’s reality is different. However, there are some realities that are true for all of life.
Somehow people seem to believe that life is supposed to be easy. This is particularly a problem in America today. We expect a smooth easy road to success. We expect our lives to be hassle free. We expect the government to solve our problems. We expect to get the prize without having to pay the price. That is not reality! Life is hard.
In Life’s Greatest Lessons, Hal Urban writes,
Once we accept the fact that life is hard, we begin to grow. We begin to understand that every problem is also an opportunity. It is then that we dig down and discover what we’re made of. We begin to accept the challenges of life. Instead of letting our hardships defeat us, we welcome them as a test of character. We use them as a means of rising to the occasion.
At the same time, we need to understand that society bombards us daily with messages that are quite the opposite. To begin with, technology has provided us with push-button living. We can open the garage door, cook dinner, wash the dishes, record our favorite TV program, and pay our bills by simply pushing the right buttons. In addition, we’re told over and over that there’s a quick and easy way to do just about everything. Within just the past few days, I’ve read or heard that you can lose a hundred pounds, learn to speak a foreign language fluently, become a hot new radio personality, get a contractor’s license, and make a million dollars in real estate. You can do all of these in a matter of days, and with little or no effort. And pigs can fly.
Those ads are all around us because the people in advertising and marketing have a good understanding of human behavior. They know that most people don’t accept life as hard and will continue to look for the quick and easy way instead.10
There is no quick and easy way. Nothing worth having in life comes without effort. That is why psychiatrist M. Scott Peck begins his book The Road Less Traveled with the words, “Life is difficult.” He wants to set the stage for everything else he communicates in the book. If we don’t understand and accept the truth that life is difficult, then we set ourselves up for failure and we won’t learn.
Even if we are willing to concede that life is difficult for most people, deep down inside many of us secretly hope somehow that this truth won’t apply to us. I’m sorry to say it isn’t so. No one escapes life’s problems, failures, and losses. If we are to make progress, we must do so through life’s difficulties. Or as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson stated it, “The walking of Man is falling forwards.”
Life isn’t easy and it isn’t fair. I’ve had unfair things happen to me. I bet you have, too. I’ve made mistakes, made a fool of myself, hurt people I’ve loved, and experienced crushing disappointments. I bet you have, too. We cannot avoid life’s difficulties. We shouldn’t even try. Why? Because the people who succeed in life don’t try to escape pain, loss, or unfairness. They just learn to face those things, accept them, and move ahead in the face of them. That’s my goal. It should also be yours.
In a favorite Peanuts comic strip, the woeful Charlie Brown pours his heart out to Lucy, who is positioned in her five-cents psychiatric booth. When he tells her that he’s confused about life and where he’s going, she says. “Life is like a deck chair. On the cruise ship of life, some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Other people face their chairs forward; they want to see where they’re going.” Then Lucy asks, “Which way is your deck chair facing?”
Charlie’s reply: “I’ve never been able to get one unfolded.”
Let’s face it: life is more difficult for some than it is for others. The playing field is not level. You may have faced more and greater difficulties in life than I have. You may have faced fewer. Your life right now may feel like clear sailing. Or it may feel like rough waters. And comparing our lives to others ultimately isn’t that productive. Life isn’t fair, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. The sooner we face that reality, the better we are going to be at facing whatever is coming toward us.
Your life is probably plenty difficult already. The reality is that you will have to deal with those difficulties already no matter what. One of the keys to winning is to not make things even harder for yourself, which is, unfortunately, what many people seem to do.
To help you with this reality, I want to point out the top five ways people make life harder for themselves so that you can avoid these pitfalls.
As you know, some people never make the intentional effort to grow. Some think they will grow automatically. Others don’t value growth and hope to progress in life without pursuing it. For such people, life is more difficult than it would be if they were dedicating themselves to continual improvement.
People who won’t grow are like the peers of the great scientist Galileo, who tried to convince them to believe what he was learning about physics. They laughed at him and refused to acknowledge his discoveries, saying that his theories could not be true because they contradicted the teachings of Aristotle.
In one instance, Galileo decided to give them a demonstration that would provide them with clear evidence of one of his observations: that two objects of different mass dropped together from the same height would reach the ground at the same time. On the day of the demonstration, the scientist climbed to the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. As the crowd below watched, he let drop together a ten-pound shot and a one-pound shot. They landed simultaneously. There could be no doubt that Galileo’s theory was correct. Yet many still refused to believe it—in spite of the evidence they saw with their own eyes. And they continued teaching the outdated theories of Aristotle. They wanted to hold on to what they had—even though it was wrong—rather than change and grow.
While some people experience greater difficulties in life because they refuse to grow, there are additional kinds of people who create difficulties for themselves: those who become satisfied with their gains and start to plateau.
A few years ago Margaret and I visited the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. We spent hours listening to lectures and reading about people who have made a difference in so many lives. Our tour guide shared something with us that day that surprised us. He said very few of the Nobel Prize winners ever did anything significant after they had been recognized for their achievements. I found it hard to believe, but after doing some research I concluded that he was correct. Daniel McFadden, who received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2000, said, “If you’re not careful, the Nobel Prize is a career-ender. If I allowed myself to slip into it, I’d spend all my time going around cutting ribbons.” Literature winner T. S. Eliot stated it even more strongly: “The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.”
Success can have a way of distorting our view of reality. It can make us think we are better than we really are. It can lure us into believing we have little left to learn. It can convince us that we should no longer expect to face and overcome failure. These are dangerous concepts to anyone who wants to keep improving.
How do we fight such ideas? By facing reality. Successful coaches understand the importance of honest and realistic evaluation. In football, that means spending time in the film room grading the performance of the team. My friend Jim Tressel, former coach at Ohio State, says, “Grade the plays the same, win or lose.” Why? Because there is a tendency to not be as objective grading plays when you win as when you lose. Winning causes people to relax and enjoy the spoils of victory. Do that and you just may coast your way to failure.
One of the most striking things that separate people who are successful from those who aren’t is the way they think. I feel so strongly about this I wrote a book about it called How Successful People Think. People who get ahead think differently than those who don’t. They have reasons for doing what they do, and they are continually thinking about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how they can improve.
That doesn’t mean that good thinkers always succeed. No, they make mistakes just like everyone else. But they don’t keep making the same mistakes repeatedly. And that makes a great difference in their lives. Frank Gaines, who was the mayor of Berkeley, California, from 1939 to 1943, explained,
It never bothers me for people to make a mistake if they had a reason for what they did. If they can tell me, “I thought this and reasoned so, and came to that decision,” if they obviously went through a reasonable thought process to get where they did, even if it didn’t turn out right, that’s OK. The ones you want to watch out for are those who can’t even tell you why they did what they did.
I have to admit, even though I place a high value on good thinking, I’ve often been guilty of not thinking things through as I should. A prime example of that occurred during the 1980s, when I was the lead pastor of a church in San Diego, California. Back then many pastors like me had heard about the astonishing growth a congregation in Seoul, South Korea, was experiencing by starting small groups that met all around their city. I traveled to Korea to learn about it firsthand. My time there was very inspirational—so much so that I went back home and shared the small-group story with the people of my congregation. They were inspired.
A few weeks later in my enthusiasm I cast vision to start thirty small groups within the coming year. The people responded wholeheartedly, and we launched our small-group program. I wish I could tell you that it was wildly successful, but it wasn’t. Within only a few months, we could tell that it wasn’t working. By the end of the year, instead of having thirty small groups, we had only three! What happened? I had failed to train enough small group leaders to lead the groups. Any group that was started without a trained leader fizzled out and disbanded.
Today the lesson seems clear and simple to me: an organization can sustain only as many groups as it has trained leaders to lead them. That’s the reality. Back then I hadn’t thought it through, but I quickly learned my lesson. For the next two years we trained hundreds of leaders, and then we relaunched our small-group program again. That second time it was successful.
We often make life harder for ourselves when we fail to think. A joke I came across years ago describes how many people make a bad situation worse by failing to think things through. It describes the strategies people use when they discover they are riding a dead horse. They try the following:
These ridiculous practices were cited as being used in business, but we can do such things in any area of our lives when we don’t use our heads. Life is filled with plenty of disappointments and heartaches without our adding to the problem.
Perhaps the people who have the hardest time in life are the ones who refuse to face reality. Author and speaker Denis Waitley says, “Most people spend their entire lives on a fantasy island called ‘Someday I’ll.’ ” In other words, they think, Someday I’ll do this. Someday I’ll do that. Someday I’ll be rich. They don’t live in the world of reality.
They’re like the average-looking young woman talking to a priest in the confession booth.
“I’m guilty of the grievous sin of vanity,” she admitted to the priest. “Only this morning I looked into my mirror and admired my beauty.”
“Is that all, my daughter?” the priest asked, having known her since she was a child.
“Yes, Father,” she answered sheepishly.
“Then go in peace,” said the priest. “To be mistaken is not to sin.”
Roots author Alex Haley observed, “Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.” If you want to climb the highest mountain, you can’t expect to do it overnight. You can’t expect to do it unless you’ve been trained in how to climb and gotten into physical condition. And if you try to deny reality and make the climb anyway, you’re going to end up in trouble.
What you do matters. And to be successful, what you do must be based on reality. Journalist Sydney J. Harris observed, “An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.”
Life is difficult. But here’s the good news: many of the things you desire to do in life are attainable—if you are willing to face reality, know your starting place, count the cost of your goal, and put in the work. Don’t let your real situation discourage you. Everyone who got where they are, started where they were.
My older brother, Larry, has been a mentor to me in many areas. He is especially gifted when it comes to business and finance. Often I have heard him say, “People don’t cut their losses quickly enough.” He has taught me to make my first loss my last loss. I find that difficult to do. Do you? Instead of cutting our losses, we rationalize. We try to defend the decision. We wait to see if it will change and prove us right. Larry advised me to face up to a problem and either fix it or bail out.
The great heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield said, “Everyone has a plan until they are hit.” What did he mean by that? The stress of a difficult situation can make you forget your plan and if you don’t handle the situation well, you won’t be able to make adjustments. Yet that is exactly what you need to be able to do—make good adjustments.
While it’s true that acceptance of a problem does not conquer it, if you face reality you create a foundation making it possible for you to make proper adjustments. And that greatly increases your odds of success.
Advertising executive and friend Linda Kaplan Thaler has been very successful in helping companies brand and market their products. She is the person who came up with the idea for the duck in the Aflac insurance commercials. She has worked on ads for many successful products, but she really loves to represent unsuccessful ones. She says, “I love working on a product that is ‘D-listed,’ meaning dead.” Why? The companies “are desperate so they will let me do anything.” Sadly, many people are unwilling to face reality and make adjustments until after something has died. If we want to be successful, we can’t wait that long.
People who respond correctly to adversity realize that their response to a challenge is what impacts the outcome. They accept and acknowledge the reality of their situation, and then act accordingly. I didn’t find that to be easy at first. My natural optimism tends to make me want to ignore a crisis and hope it will go away. That doesn’t work. Wishing isn’t solving. Denying a problem only makes it worse. So does getting angry and yelling, or taking it out on loved ones. I had to learn to say to myself, “This is the way it is. I have a problem. If I want to solve it, I need to take action. What is the best solution?” When you have a challenge, you can turn lemons into lemonade, or you can let them sour your whole life. It’s your choice.
Facing reality, maintaining a confident sense of expectation, and performing at your best may not be easy, but it is possible. And it does make a huge difference in your life. It sets you up to learn, to grow, and to succeed. That’s what Jim Lovell did when he was leading the Apollo 13 mission to the moon. When the Saturn rocket that was pushing them toward the lunar surface malfunctioned and they had to abort the mission and try to return safely to Earth, the future looked grim. Lovell calculated that their chances of survival seemed slim. “But you don’t put that in your mind,” Lovell noted at a forty-year reunion of the mission’s remaining astronauts and flight directors. “You don’t say how slim they are but rather how you can improve the odds.”12
Author and business expert Jim Collins says, “There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, ‘We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail.’ ” That’s a fantastic way of stating the correct response to challenges. You create opportunities by looking trouble in the eye and performing, not looking away and pretending. If you want to learn, you must build your problem solving, your planning, and your performance on a solid foundation. Reality is the only thing that won’t crumble under the weight of those things.