In this motivational video, entrepreneur Evan Carmichael shares seven practical strategies to help entrepreneurs navigate difficult situations. He begins by emphasizing the importance of a positive mindset, urging viewers to reframe challenges as growth opportunities. He then stresses the need to remember one's core purpose ('why') beyond money, using passion as a resilience driver. Carmichael advises modeling successful entrepreneurs to gain both tactical guidance and motivation. A guest speaker contributes a personal anecdote about betrayal, illustrating how focusing on a teachable lesson—specifically forgiveness—can transform pain into learning. The fifth tip encourages finding an alternative approach when current methods fail, illustrated with Carmichael’s own experience of pivoting his business strategy. The sixth tip advocates simply returning to work, using structured schedules to overcome inertia. Finally, he reminds viewers to keep perspective by recognizing that many face greater hardships and that role models have succeeded with fewer resources. Throughout, Carmichael invites audience interaction, asks for feedback on the tips, and promotes his book "Your One Word" and related content.
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Hello, Believe Nation! My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs are going to solve all the major problems of the world. So to help you on your journey today, we're going to learn 7 ways to overcome bad situations. And as always, guys, as you're listening, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please leave it down in the comments below. Put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. And when you write it down, it's much more likely to stick stick with yourself too. Enjoy. So being an entrepreneur is tough. It's one of the hardest things you're ever going to do in your life. If you think it's going to be easy, you are in for a world of pain. And so overcoming bad situations is going to be part of the game. It's something that you're going to deal with on a consistent basis. And so I'm going to share with you my 7 tips on how you can do it. Number 1 is change your mindset, and this is a really important one. It's so easy to get sucked in and lost in negativity that you just stay there and spiral out of control. And you, as an entrepreneur, you're the leader. There's nobody above you saying, "Hey, come on, let's do this, go, go, go." That's on you, and especially if you have your team, you can't get stuck in a bad place because you're going to bring all of your team down. And they won't be productive either. And so start by changing your mindset. Look at it as an opportunity to grow, to get better, to build stronger. Anytime there's something major that happens in my business, it sucks, but immediately I start to think, okay, how can I make this better? How do I solve this problem? How do I see this as an opportunity? How is this going to make my business better for the long term? And as soon as you can break out of the immediacy of the negativity and start looking at how do I fix this, How do I solve this? How do I get better? How do I make this stronger? As soon as you start asking those kinds of questions, it pulls you into positivity and it pulls you into the most important part of all, action. Fixing the problem and actually doing something about it. Change your mindset. Tip number 2 is remember your why. This is why it's so important to have a strong why when you're starting your business. If you're just starting the business because you're trying to make money, you're just chasing some kind of opportunity, this is where you're going to quit. As soon as you start facing multiple bad situations over and over and repeat it again, you're going to quit because you thought it was easy money, you thought it was passive income, and so that's why you got into it. It gets hard, you're going to bail and go somewhere else. If you have a deep passion for it though, you have a strong why as to why you are doing this. Why it's important that this is going to get done. Remembering that helps push you through the crap that you have to deal with. There's a great interview with Steve Jobs where he's talking about you have to kind of be crazy as an entrepreneur. You have to be crazy in love with your idea because running the business and starting it is so hard that any sane, logical person would quit. Because you're sane, because you're normal, because you're logical, because it's just way too hard. Nobody wanna deal with all this crap. But the thing that gets you through is that strong why, that insane passion for what you're doing. And so whenever you're down in the hole, think back to why you started this business, why it's so important to you. And you better have a reason other than money, otherwise you're in trouble. Tip number 3 is model success. Whenever you don't know what to do, modeling success I find is one of the best single strategies that you can do to help you get out of your hole. And so find somebody who's been in that same situation as you have, and how did they overcome it? And I find two great things happen when you model success and read their stories of famous entrepreneurs who've come before you. One is you get the tactical things of what to do. Like, okay, Oprah Winfrey went through this and here's how she came through. Or Steve Jobs went through this and here's how he came through. Or Bill Gates had this happen and here's, here's how he came through. And you get the tactics, the specific steps of what to do that they did. Second thing though that I think is really important is just the motivation. Just knowing, at least for me, knowing that these people struggled and suffered early on in their careers makes me feel like I'm not alone. Made me feel like if they could do it, I could do it too. And so I would always start my day reading a story of a famous entrepreneur and how they got started. Now we use the top 10s because it's video and I much prefer video. But being able to watch somebody's story, hear from their advice, gave me both the motivation to keep going as well as the tactics on what to do. And so whenever you're in a hole, at least I found that to be super helpful to help me get out. Model success.
[MUSIC] Tip number 4 is to focus on a teachable lesson. So I had a situation where I had a really close friend of mine betray me in the worst way possible. She stole something very important to me that was really near and dear to my heart. And I focused on the negative. I focused on the bad situation that happened, and I carried that resentment everywhere I went. I'm not an angry person at all, but I was punching holes through walls. I was hurting myself. I was angry at everything around me, and I was so resentful and angry everywhere I went. It affected my relationships, it affected my friendships, affected the way I operated at work, and I needed to find a solution. So the solution was to focus on the teachable lesson. What can I learn from this? I had to learn how to forgive. Resentment wouldn't take me anywhere, anger wouldn't take me anywhere, but forgiveness can. So every single day I worked on forgiving this person. I had to let her go. Even though I haven't seen her again, I no longer hold the need to seek revenge, to see her suffer because she made me suffer so badly. I wish her all the happiness in the world, and I hope she's doing well. So the next time you find yourself in a bad situation, always try to remember the teachable lesson and think to yourself, what can I learn from this?
Tip number 5 is find another way. And so this again is why the why is so important. You know, you're down in a hole, you're struggling, you're sucking, you've got, you know, no energy left. Thinking to yourself, what I have done is not working, but there is another way to go. This is what I used really effectively in my first business when I told my partner that I quit when I felt so so worthless and useless and I had no value. I felt like I wasn't bringing anything to this business and I just felt so low on myself. I woke up the next day after telling my partner that I quit and I said, I have to find another way. There has to be another way. Somebody has solved this. There has to be another way. It's not that the whole idea sucks, just the way we've been doing it has sucked and there's another path. There's another way to stay and I've just gotta find that. And it actually ended up being a blessing because good is the enemy of great. If what I was doing was kind of working, I might have just stuck with doing what was kind of working. But knowing that it wasn't working at all meant that I had to find a totally different path. I had to find a totally new innovative way to market and promote my business. And it ended up being by modeling success, by going through partnerships, by looking at what Bill Gates did to build Microsoft through partnerships and applying that to my company. And that's when we started to get a lift, but just that mindset that this isn't total failure what's happening right now. Just the way that I've been doing it hasn't been working and I need to find another way. Tip number 6 is just go back to work. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just get back to work and start building something. When you start taking action, good things start to happen. When you are just negative and sad and down, what ends up happening? You don't do anything. You sit there and you wallow and you, you stay in your head and you get frustrated and you complain. And the solution out sometimes is just do the work. There was this interview I was watching recently of Joe Rogan. We're doing a Top 10 Volume 2 on him. He was saying that if he waited until he was super motivated and excited to go out and go work out, He would never work out. He would be this fat slob because he never feels motivated to work out. He forces himself to just go out and do it. And so having a schedule, I find, really helps me. Knowing what I'm doing every day really helps me. Yes, there are some days that I'm inspired and motivated and excited and I want to do this brand new thing. And when that happens, sometimes I'll throw away my schedule and just go all in on this new idea because gold's going to come out of it. But on the days when I wake up and I'm not super excited and motivated and pumped and ready to go, you know, I have my calendar. It's like, this is what I'm going to do today. I have a schedule. I know what's going to happen. And if I grind out that work today, good things are going to happen. I'm going to get closer to achieving my goals. And so sometimes the way out of a bad situation is just going back to work. And my number 7 tip is remember that somebody has it worse. Both from a global perspective, you know, the fact that you are watching this video, you have access to the internet, you invest in yourself and personal development and watching these, you know, video content to help you get better and improve, just the fact that you are here puts you ahead of most people in the world, right? And so the problems that you're facing are not actually that big compared to what most people in the world have to deal with. That sometimes can help. The other thing that really helps me though is also remembering that a lot of people that I look up to, the people that I, that I aspire to be like in terms of the impact that they're having, People have done things, amazing things, with fewer resources than you have right now. The people that you look up to, people who've gone on and done just amazing, mind-blowing things inside and outside your industry, your role models, look back to how they started. Chances are they started with less than what you already have right now. And so remembering that, and that they were able to rise up and do such amazing things, and the forced creativity that had to come from it because they didn't have a lot of resources when they were starting their business. That always serves as motivation for me and pulls me through bad times. So those are my 7 tips on how to overcome bad situations. I'd love to know which one did you resonate the most with and why. Is there an 8, 9, 10 that you want to add to the list that maybe I missed? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm super curious to find out. I made this video because Emervin Bonano asked me to. So if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in a future 7 Ways video, check out the link in the description and go and cast your vote. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Christy Vlad. Christy, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and making that YouTube video on it as a review. I really, really appreciate the support and I'm so glad that you love the book. So thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.
