Ep 383 | Endure the 1s to Appreciate the 10s

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. The No Days Off Nation is comprised of a bunch of hard-charging entrepreneurs who are trying to build lives worth living, these big careers, wealth, positive, you know, make positive contributions to this world, build amazing families. We're on this journey, right? This journey is likely to be a long one. Along this journey, we're going to have some wins, but we're also going to have some setbacks and some challenges. I want to talk about my buddy Colin O'Brady, a friend of No Days Off. Many of you listening either know of Colin O'Brady or her, or have maybe even spent some time with him personally in that he's presented at different events that I've hosted, uh, and run certain events that we've all attended. Colin is this world record holding endurance athlete, this adventurer, and he talks about this concept of experiencing both what he would call the ones and the tens in life. He suggests that in order to really appreciate and savor the 10s, the 10s are really the, the most rewarding and exciting or euphoric moments in life. In order to appreciate and savor the 10s, you've got to first endure and learn from the 1s, the 1s being the toughest, most challenging experiences. So in order to get the highs out of the 10s, you got to experience and endure the lows of the 1s. Now, Collins says this because he believes many things. His perspective here is that, number one, this contrast in experience, the, the highs in life, they're made more meaningful by experiencing the lows, the struggles and hardships. The ones, they give you perspective and they allow for you to truly value moments of success and joy. In addition, you get the privilege, you get the opportunity to grow from the challenges, the ones. The ones oftentimes represent discomfort or represent setbacks or pain. And for Colin, these moments are crucial for personal development, for resilience, for, for character growth. If you don't face adversity, you might not fully appreciate the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with reaching that 10, you know, achieving that 10. Colin also talks about, you know, life is about life not just being about seeking highs, but about understanding that it's both the highs and the lows that are part of the journey. So we'd say find meaning in the journey, embrace the difficult times, and in doing so, it makes the triumphant moments even sweeter. And then lastly, as Colin talks around this with respect to his personal experiences, I mean, going through Antarctica a couple times, um, and nearly dying, I'd certainly call that a 1. You know, through his own experiences though, things like that, like trekking solo across Antarctica or summiting Everest, these things involved extreme hardship. That required endurance, it required perseverance. Colin talked about how enduring physical and mental pain, the ones, allowed him to feel immense joy, immense fulfillment when he reaches his goals. So this philosophy, which is really what it is, is about embracing life's full spectrum of experiences, seeing value in both the lows and the highs, and in using the challenges to fuel greater appreciation for the, for for the rewards. I love this concept of Collins. You've seen it show up many times in life. You've probably personally experienced it. You know, just the other day, one of our past episodes, just a recent episode, I was talking about Diana Nyad, who, if you haven't listened to that episode, you want to go back and listen to it because it's about her story of perseverance, of enduring setback after setback. She was trying to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida, 110 miles. And she failed, not just one time or two times or three times or four times, right? Like she failed four times over before she, I think the fifth time made that swim and was successful. And those five times weren't in the span of a year. They were in the span of 30+ years. Now, when she finally achieved her goal because of the ones that she not only had to fight through and persevere and endure, but she learned from and she grew from, and, you know, she got to experience kind of the full raw emotion that comes with that. Not only did she get to do all of that, it made that victory, that achievement of the objective, that much sweeter. She said when she, when she completed that journey, she was following this mantra, this mantra being "find a way." Well, the reality is she wouldn't have come up with that mantra, "find a way," if she hadn't failed a time or two prior. I think about J.K. Rowling, who is pretty well known for being the author of the Harry Potter series, one of the most successful authors. But before she was that, she had all sorts of personal hardships. She was a single mother on welfare. She was battling depression. She was dealing with this aftermath of a failed marriage. She had no money. She was barely making ends meet. But despite these challenges, she pursued her dream of working on this manuscript for Harry Potter. And after multiple rejection— rejections from publishers, She landed the deal and Harry Potter went on to become this crazy global phenomenon and it made her an icon and a billionaire, by the way. So her ones, the poverty, the rejection, the emotional turmoil, made the eventual tens that were made up of success and recognition and stability financially, made those things even more profound. As a matter of fact, J.K. Rowling, in a lot of her interviews, she'll tell you about how her tough times helped her build resilience and creativity. And it was through those ones that she ended up having the degree of success that she had. You know, I think about Howard Schultz when he was building Starbucks. Harold was in this working-class family in Brooklyn. Facing significant financial difficulties throughout his entire childhood. He had this vision of transforming coffee shops into something much different. However, it was faced with significant amount of resistance from the company's founders who didn't have— who didn't share his vision. It was a pretty low moment in time for him. Yet after a long struggle to secure financing and persuade the investors He ends up buying Starbucks in 1987 and turns it into a powerhouse. I mean, Starbucks is literally synonymous with the coffee experience. He becomes a billionaire as well, and he's one of the most respected entrepreneurs in the world. His early experiences of hardship, the struggle to get his vision off the ground, those ones are what made the success, the tens that much sweeter. The lows of financial and business hurdles that he had to overcome helped him appreciate the growth and the transformation of Starbucks into the brand that it is now. There's just so many examples of this, and my guess is, as entrepreneurs, you know exactly what I'm talking about. As much as we'd all love to immediately have success— it wouldn't be bad to have immediately have success, success— Most of us, it's going to require a lot more than just, you know, short-term magic. It's a grind. It's a battle. It's winning a little here and there but getting your ass kicked a number of times as well. It's having the ones, you know, those moments where you're working and there's nobody left in the office, or those times where you're putting things on your credit card because you believe so much in where you're going, but you don't have the finances to get through. And so you start charging things on credit. It's taking these risks. It's the difficult conversations you've had, maybe the relationships that fell apart. These are all ones. These are all struggles. But it's those things that really make that journey to the tens so much sweeter. That's the game we're playing. You gotta have some ones to truly appreciate and experience the tens. So for you, I don't think there's so much a focusing question, but I think it's important today for me to just make sure you're, you're aware, you're thinking about these ones. Maybe you're in it right now. Maybe you're in a rut. Maybe you're experiencing these ones. Maybe you're getting your butt kicked. Maybe you don't know if you could survive. Recognize you're learning so much, and I swear, I promise you, if you stay the course, like our buddy Mac Newton used to say, if you never get out of the batter's box, You won't strike out. You can't strike out if you never get out of the batter's box. Eventually, what's going to happen? You're going to make contact. You're going to get a hit. In the business world, while that hit may not be a 10, successive hits or a string of hits, especially if they start to amount into bigger hits or more powerful hits and they end up being home runs, those are 10s. But you wouldn't appreciate those without the ones you're experiencing right now. And I want to encourage you, stay the course. Stay strong. Learn to embrace those ones, and you'll really appreciate those tens. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.