Many times we come to a point of desperation and don’t know what to do. We feel helpless. We feel lost. We might even feel ashamed because we aren’t supposed to feel this way. We are supposed to be able to take care of ourselves. We are supposed to be conquerors.
I think if you would sit down with most successful people you would hear a different story. The humble ones don’t call themselves conquerors. They call themselves survivors.
Life can be rough sometimes. Sometimes it can be rough all the time. All stories of success are stories of people overcoming the obstacles and frustrations in their life. They decided to make it through the storm and they did. They survived.
Stories of success are also littered with miracles. Things that happened or people that came along just in the nick of time to save the day. When things were looking down successful people did one thing differently than what most people do. They looked up.
Not only did they look up, they also looked to the left and the right. They looked high and they looked low. They asked everyone they knew if they could help them with the situation. More often than not, someone knew someone who knew someone that could help. If it wasn’t someone that could help someone knew someone who knew some thing that could help.
I do believe that we are meant to take responsibility and help ourselves as much as we can, but we all have our limits. Being responsible means more than just taking care of yourself and giving up when you can’t do any more. When you can no longer help yourself, you have to seek help. You need to not let pride get in the way and you not only need to seek help, but you need to also let people help you.
When you have a community of people you can reach out to the world becomes a much happier place. No matter how you feel in the moment you are never alone. The answers are out there and you just need to start searching for them so you can find them. When you can no longer help yourself the only thing you have left is to find someone who can.
Depending on your circumstances maybe 1 out of 100 people will be able and willing to help you. Maybe it is 1 in 1000 or maybe even 1 in a million. That may sound like a lot, but you need to never underestimate the power of a network. Someone always knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who can help.
You must move quickly. Ask everyone you know about your current situation and see if they know anyone that can help. Your friends and family may try to help you by giving you their advice, but tell them you don’t want their advice. It may be good advice, but more likely it is bad advice. If they have no personal experience with your exact problem I an almost guarantee you that they will give you bad advice.
I find that complete strangers often give me some of the best advice. People that love what they do freely give the best advice because they love what they do and they have usually practiced their love for a very long time. Unless you just happen to love the family business or know friends that are doing exactly what you want to do you will have to go to strangers to find the answers you seek.
If you want to buy a house the best advice to get is from someone who has bought and sold numerous houses. It makes sense to talk to a real estate agent on buying a house, but they have a financial incentive to make sure a sale goes through more than they have an incentive to give you good advice. In this instance you would just want to hire a real estate agent to negotiate on your before in the sell of the house instead of seeking specific advice from them. You want to find someone who has done what you want to do, hopefully multiple times, and loves it so much they would give you their advice for free.
Many people think that advice is only a suggestion on what to do. More often than not, the best advice is one on what NOT to do.
Our first inclination is to go to an expert for advice, but experts are almost a dime a dozen these days and don’t always have the experience to back up their expertise. It is sometimes in your best interest to find someone who has completely failed at what you want to do. Ask them what caused them to fail? If they say it was beyond their control listen more closely to the story. Were the factors really beyond their control? Ask them if they discovered anything in the process or what they would do differently the second time around. Ask them if they think they would be successful today in doing the same thing if they tried again. Listen very closely to how they did it in the past and how they will do it now if they were going to do it again.
Where do you go when you can’t help yourself? You go where the answer is. I can’t tell you exactly where to go without knowing your specific situation, but I can tell you that the answers are definitely out there. The key is in discovering who actually has the answer you seek.
I really want to emphasize that the people closest to you probably don’t have the answer to your problem because they probably would have helped you see the problem and avoid the problem in the first place if they could have helped you. The answers are out there in YOUR network of people. With the internet, your network is vast. The help is out there. The question is whether you will take the time to seek and find it.