Last night, after watching “Mad Men” with my wife (finally, we have found some shows which we both love as I am not too fond of Will and Grace and Sex and the City reruns, but hey that’s a story for another day) we were sitting on the couch chatting about the fact so many people give up just before they strike gold.

And I got to reflecting as to why.

The more I thought… the clearer it became that this is the #1 reason why most people aren’t rich.

After all, I remember my own journey.

From the failed hairdressing salon.

To starting my business on credit.

To struggling week after week to pay the bills.

You put in so much damn effort…

to get very little return on your investment.

It’s a struggle in the beginning.

And it can be easy to just throw in the towel.

After all, you don’t have marketing systems in place. You don’t have existing customers. You don’t have the relationships.

And this makes everything harder.

I can remember when I had cash flow problem after cash flow problem lying in my office on the couch and thinking to myself:

BRING IT ON

That’s right.

I decided that I was no longer going to live in fear. I was no longer going to be scared of something going wrong. And I was going to face things headfirst knowing that none of this could kill me and it could only make me stronger.

After all, if you look at nature, many good things come out of adversity.

Consider the oyster.

It’s sitting there minding its own business until one day it finds a grain of sand inside its shell with jagged edges which give it nothing but pain.

At this stage, it has four choices:

choice #1: wallow in self pity

choice #2: try to live in an environment of wishful thinking. “I wish that grain would go away and just leave me alone.”

choice #3: have the noble attitude that it can endure such terrible character and this will build character.

While choice #3 is better than choice #1 & #2 the oyster does none of these things.

Instead, the oyster carefully and patiently deposits upon the grain of sand a milky substance which ultimately becomes a pearl – creating a thing
of beauty wrapped around trouble.

Take a moment and ask yourself:

Can you do the same?

Can you create something beautiful out of the adversity you are going through right now?

Can you use it as your springboard… as your teacher?

And remember this…

The person who stops digging for gold when he is just metres away from the goldmine…

GETS NOTHING.

The person who goes that “little bit extra” gets everything.

So whatever you do…

Don’t give up.

Change direction yes.

After all, doing the wrong thing over and over isn’t going to get you anywhere either.

I see people doing this all the time on the internet.

They are doing everything wrong, but expecting to get a positive results.

You need to have the ground rules with whatever you are doing.

That’s why I created http://www.scottbywater.com/internetsecrets

… because if you are doing things against the laws of the way things work, you are not going to succeed.

And if you keep learning, keep growing and take heed to the words of Winston Churchill

“Never, never, never give up”

… you will eventually strike your personal gold mine.