“Resilience is just like a good beer, it brews, it ferments, the ingredients transform and eventually you’ve brewed your own batch of success.”
When I look back on my life, I can see that I have always been connected to my purpose in different ways. As a middle school teacher, I was a mentor. In law, I was also mentoring my clients in many ways. In my business today, I mentor executives and entrepreneurs. Mentoring is my purpose in life. As I’ve evolved as an individual through these different experiences and capacities, I have also become more aligned with my purpose. It’s not just mentoring – it’s a specific kind of mentoring. Now I work with a core group of people who seek me out for business, leadership and speaking coaching or as a resilience keynote speaker because they want to change the world or their organization for the better.
Why does this matter?
Collectively, we think about purpose as the “it” thing that shows up and falls in line. Like we’re one day searching for our purpose and the next day have discovered it and start living our dream life. I believe purpose is something we have to go several rounds with before we see full alignment. And this process is actually part of how we build resilience – or become Change Proof as I’ve discovered. Just like a good beer, it brews, it ferments, the ingredients transform and eventually you’ve brewed your own batch of success.
Billy Broas left a promising career in the renewable energy industry to go full-time with his side hustle (sounds familiar) – an online home beer brewing school. This launch led Billy to sell online courses in over 50-different niches, generating millions of dollars in revenue for his clients. But this wasn’t where he started, or intended to be and you know how I love a good Pivot story…
A good school, a good career, an MBA, and an opportunity to work at a great company. So why the urge to pivot? These are things that we traditionally aspire to vs. something that inspire us to action. Yet, I think it’s important to consider that epiphanies don’t always come from what we would deem a “negative” event in life. Yes, for me my career transition did rise from a lot of negative emotions and work habits. But for Billy, it was this deep internal voice encouraging him to do more with his talents. Success often requires brewing. The perfect “batch” or recipe doesn’t happen overnight.
I Thought It Would Be Easier
While I love to discover how people have arrived at their “success” – however they may define it – I also appreciate learning about their struggles. These are the things that really connect us, when we can look at another human and say, “Okay, they’re going through what I am, they understand, we are brothers, simpatico in that experience.” And one thing I hear all the time – and have experienced myself – is how much work it takes once you align with that purpose and start brewing your own success.
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart because sometimes that heart is all you have to keep you going. Whether we’re brewing beer or building online courses like Billy or mentoring top leadership speakers, chasing entrepreneurship is not easy.
We Learn As We Go
Add COVID to the mix and we’ve been forced to grow in our resilience and learn new ways of continuing our entrepreneurship journey. Billy talked about how he always envisioned himself as this digital nomad, living from beach to beach and COVID offered a form of relief in the sense that he could build more structure into his life. So, we learn as we go – if we’re lucky – and we build our Change Proof habits as we go – if we’re lucky.
The reason I tell you this is because reality doesn’t always reflect our imagination and that’s okay. Reality and purpose don’t always fall in line the first time, and that’s okay. The path might be difficult and lonely, and that’s okay. And if you want to be successful, you’ll need to go the extra mile, do the right thing, or be left behind by another beer brewer or course builder or mentor who is willing to do just that.
Don’t Be Scared to Stay Put
This does not mean, by any standard, that you are required to work your fingers to the bone and never sleep and dig yourself into an early grave. What it does mean is that an important measurement of success is longevity. This is how you find out what you want and what works for you. So don’t be afraid to commit and stick around, build up that resilience, even if it doesn’t look like what you thought when you get started. Remember, just like brewing a good batch of beer, you might not get it right the first time and even when you’ve got the recipe sorted, it still doesn’t develop overnight.
In many ways, success is a product of the lifestyle that you want and what you will and will not tolerate. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all answer to this. We’ve got to explore that ourselves. But the one skill we can apply across the board to any business or entrepreneur is resilience. That is the most important skill I can think of. It’s a soft skill on some levels. It’s a hard skill for others. To me, it is what’s required.
For more on this topic, listen to my podcast with guest Billy Broas.
