Short motivational monologue by James Laughlin advising listeners to focus on factors they can control. He recounts a 2009 personal episode—diagnosed with cancer during the global recession—and describes using the situation to retool his consulting business; the outcome was subsequent business success. The piece emphasizes response over circumstance.
There's a lot of things we can't control. We can't control necessarily the state of the economy. We can't control a lot of things that are out of our realm, let's say the politics and. But what we can control is what we're going to do about it. So in 2009, I got diagnosed with cancer. I'm completely fine, but at that time I got diagnosed with cancer and the US as well as the world was going through a pretty big recession. And so one of the first things to obviously get cut and recession in companies is what I do, right, consulting. I don't agree with that, incidentally. They should not be.
But they did. And so I faced with, you know, I couldn't control that I had cancer, but I could control how I responded to the cancer. I couldn't control that we were in the middle of the recession, but I could control how my company responded to the recession. So what I did is I took that as an opportunity to retool my business, look at everything. And from that year on, we've had our best years ever in business. It's not that I'm that smart, it's just you have to focus on what you can control.
