As the story goes, there once was a farmer and his only son in the days before the Civil War. Having only one horse, the farmer and his son worked long, hard days, dawn to dusk, just to survive, with nothing left to spare.
One day, while father and son were plowing the fields, their horse got scared and ran away. The son was devastated; “Too bad, now what do we do?”
The father answered; “Good luck, bad luck, too early to tell.”
The father and son continued to work on the farm. Then one day his horse comes running back down the hill with 6 other horses. The son exclaimed, “How lucky, we now have all the horses we’ll ever need!”
To which the farmer replied; “Good luck, bad luck, too early to tell.”
The next day, while the farmer and his son were working with the horses, a particularly difficult horse knocked the son off its back and broke his leg. The son shouted: “Oh father, I’m so sorry, now you have to work the farm by yourself. What bad luck!”
Again the father replied, “Good luck, bad luck, too soon to tell.”
Several days later the Civil War broke out and all able-bodied young men were sent to war. The farmer’s son, who had a broken leg, was forced to stay home.
After the leg healed, the father had the only farm around with a son to help and seven horses to kick. They worked on the farm and prospered.
Good luck, bad luck. It’s too soon to say that.
Maybe.
Good luck, bad luck. It’s all in how you look at it.
Getting closer.
Good luck, bad luck. It depends on which one you choose and what you do with it.
Bingo. Absolutely. Now you have understood!
At each stage of “bad luck”, the farmer might have given up, which could have prevented the farmer and his son from taking advantage of the “good luck” that came their way.
In this story, there are at least three success principles that allowed the farmer and his son to prosper. We’ll see:
respond vs react
At every turn of events, the sound reacted. Reacting generally involves not thinking things through, operating without enough information to make a good decision. The farmer, on the other hand, responded to each event using his brain and the power of perspective. This allowed him to be “responsible, able to respond” to events, both good and bad, that came his way.
Attitude
The son’s attitude was “things happen to us and there’s nothing we can do about it.” The farmer’s attitude was “things happen and then we happen to them. What we do with what happens is the difference that makes the difference.”
filters
We all have “filters” in our thinking that determine how we see the world.
For the son, he filtered the events into two categories, “is this good for us or bad for us.” He had what I call “problem filters,” seeing only the bad in events and how it affected him.
The father, on the other hand, had different filters. He had what I call “solution filters”. Whatever the events, he knew that a solution could be found in both “good luck and bad luck.”
It’s like the character Qui-Gon Jinn, played by Liam Neeson, says in the recent installment of Star Wars when a solution doesn’t work: “…another solution will come.” Now that’s a solution filter!
While it may not be runaway horses, broken legs, and civil wars, we all have events in our lives that can make or break us. When we bring the tools of response, attitude and solution filters to these events, we have a much better chance of making them work for us and prosper as a result.