PUKKA’s BUSINESS LESSON 101: THOMAS EDISON

At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the lab. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away.

As he calmly made his way to the fire, he called out to his son, “Go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see another fire like this again.”  Don’t worry, Edison told his son.

“It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”

You see, acceptance is not the same thing as resignation. All though Edison unquestionably—even joyously—embraced the calamity that befell him, that did not mean he gave up.

Instead of being devastated by a fire that destroyed his life’s work, it invigorated him.

He told a reporter the next day, “I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.”

Within about three weeks the factory was partially back up and running. Despite a loss of almost one million dollars ($23 million in today’s dollars), Edison would marshal enough energy to make nearly ten million dollars in revenue that year ($200-plus million today).

Edison not only suffered a spectacular disaster, but he recovered and replied to it spectacularly.

He was able to turn what he had to do into what he got to do. We can all be like Edison, our factory on fire, not bemoaning our fate but enjoying the spectacular scene and then starting the recovery effort the very next day—roaring back soon enough.

Your obstacles may not be so serious, but that still warrant only one response: a smile.

As the Stoics commanded themselves: Cheerfulness in all situations, especially the bad ones

The goal is:

Not:  “I’m okay with this.”

Not:  “I think I can feel good about this.”

But:  “I feel great about it. Because if it happened, then it was meant to happen, and I am glad that it did when it did. I mean to make the best of it.”

We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it.

Opportunities and benefits lay within these feelings.

These lessons come harder but are, in the end, the most critical to wresting advantage from adversity.

In every situation, we can:

•  Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times

•  Always accept what we’re unable to change

•  Always persevere

•  Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us

•  Always protect our inner self, and retreat into ourselves

•  Always submit to a greater, larger cause

•  Always remind ourselves of our own mortality

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