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Shuttle Hook
Is It Really Too Hard…Or Are You Just Too Impatient?
"It's too hard, Kent! It's too hard!" I hear this refrain far too often. Part of the problem here, I think, is that people insist on acting as if we live in a fantasy world, rather than the real world of hard work and hard knocks. They want something for nothing, and refuse to believe that Christmas comes just once a year—and then only for little children.
Let's get something straight here: if you expect to succeed at anything, you need to be willing to pay the price for it. There's no way around that fact, and usually, paying the price involves time and a steep learning curve. Whether it's learning to tie your shoes or use a computer, or figuring out exactly how you're going to make the kind of money that would make you a success in your own eyes, it's going to take you a significant amount of time to learn how to do it. You have to accept that. While some of us do learn things quickly, and it's true that there are people who are "naturals" at some things, I believe that the idea of talent can be overrated. Most of us can learn to become competent at just about anything, as long as we keep plugging away at it.
So if you tell me that the road to success is just too hard, then I have to reply that you don't want success enough. It's obviously not impossible to become successful and wealthy, because people accomplish it every single day. A good number of those people started from very little. So if something seems too hard, then flex your problem-solving muscles. Look for a way to make it easier. If nothing else, break your tough tasks down into smaller chunks that you can handle, and work on one chunk at a time. Do something every day to advance your enterprise before your head hits the pillow at night, just one thing to push your enterprise forward.
"It's too hard!" What specifically does that mean? Here's what I think: beyond their refusal to live in the real world, most of the time people want an excuse to stay stuck. This may sound counterintuitive, but you see, it's because there's a secondary payoff involved. Like all excuses, saying "It's too hard" lets them off the hook for not succeeding. Remember, excuses are comforting lies that you tell yourself so that you can feel better about not succeeding. If you convince yourself of the comfortable lie that the path to success is so full of potholes and pitfalls that you can't negotiate it, then you let yourself off the hook. You can blame the product, you can blame the business opportunity, you can blame the marketing plan, you can blame the company.
It's just too hard!
"Yeah, I would love to make money, but it's too hard. And since it's too hard, it's not my fault, so hey, I'm going to go watch TV. And besides, American Idol is on tonight! Dancing with the Stars is on tonight…and look, if I hurry, I can catch that new episode of House, M.D. That's my favorite show!"
There you have it: the secondary payoff. The primary payoff of trying to succeed is success, obviously. But if you tell yourself this excuse, you get a gain anyway: you don't have to succeed. Succeeding requires work, and it can be a real pain in the tuchus. Instead you can watch TV, which is more fun than working, because why keep banging your head against the wall when it's all too hard to handle? Well, that makes me wonder: how can it be that you belong to the same species that built the Great Wall of China, and colonized most of the world in flimsy boats? The same people who built the Space Shuttle and put humans on the Moon? Wow, how was it possible for anyone to do all that, when you're so easily defeated that you give up on a business opportunity just so you can go watch TV?
Let me tell you this: someone certainly looked at all those monumental human accomplishments when they were still dreams and said, "Nope, never happen." Well, they were wrong, weren't they? Instead of giving in to a comfortable excuse, the people who moved those things forward broke them down into smaller tasks that they could accomplish, one at a time. Kind of makes you wonder what kinds of magnificent things we might have accomplished that will never happen, just because someone gave up and said, "Too hard for me. I'm gonna go have a beer and watch the ballgame."
Humans are problem-solving animals. We're endlessly inventive, and that's our biggest strength as a species. In fact, it may be our only strength. So don't squander your strength by making excuses for why you can't do something. Every great idea, every wonderful invention, requires some work for it to really succeed. Oh, sure, you'll get something from making an excuse that lets you off the hook. It won't be money, but there will be a payoff in some sense. It'll probably be some kind of short-term comfort, and no more, but sure—we all get gains from telling ourselves these lies, these excuses.
If you read a manual and say, "It's too hard!" then the payoff of that comforting lie is that you don't have to do it. Fine, but don't be annoyed if you don't get the money and success you were (supposedly) after in the first place. You can say, "It was a bad product, and it was too hard, so I'm just going to go watch reruns of American Idol and Dancing with the Stars," and that's fine, too. You can just waste all your time on the boob tube, and it will just suck your mind dry, and you won't advance your enterprise. But that's okay. You can make money, or you can make excuses. You can't make both.
That's a recurring theme in this series of articles, and by now you're probably tired of hearing it; but that doesn't make it any less true. And get this through your head, too: as the great Stephen Crane once put it in a neat little poem, your existence hasn't created in the universe a sense of obligation. The universe doesn't care if you live or die. All the entitlement programs in the world aside, the universe doesn't owe you a thing…so what you get from the universe is what you manage to scrabble out. If you keep making those comforting excuses, then how are you ever going to be able to afford anything but the most basic lifestyle? Why aren't you willing to work hard for what you desire? There's got to be some reason there. Maybe it's not that you're lazy, because when I look at poor people who haven't succeeded the way they want to, I often see people who've worked damned hard all their lives. Maybe they're just unwilling to accept the responsibility it takes to be a true success, which often means being audacious, being bold, becoming a leader. Maybe they're just too impatient to wait for success.
Think about that for a moment. Every excuse you've ever told yourself for anything, every story you've ever had that's held you back in any way—there's been some reason for it. You may not have realized that reason immediately; it might not have been obvious at all, and maybe it still isn't, but the reason is there. To get beyond your lack of success, you have to figure out the reasons behind your excuses. What do you get from telling yourself these stories? Do you think you're keeping yourself safe? Do you get to stay in your comfort zone, where it's all warm and fuzzy and known? What's the deal? Because there is some reason.
That's why I have to reject the "too hard" excuse. There's no such thing. Even if you can't do it all yourself, usually you can find someone to ease the burden. I know that because that's what I do. With every product and service I offer, I've got a great team backing me. You can always call us if you've got an honest question, and we're happy to help you. If you have something that you think is an obstacle related to one of our products or services, we're happy to help you bust through that. We're all in this together: you and me and my team.
You are not alone, so it shouldn't be too hard. You don't have to feel like it's one person against the world, against all odds, some kind of heroic story where you have to overcome all the obstacles on your own…unless you want to see it that way. If you do, if you blind yourself to all the potential angles so that everything's just too hard, well, that's your doing, your excuse. We're here to help, so it should never be too hard. That's just an excuse, and it keeps people stuck—so they can just go watch American Idol and Dancing with the Stars.
Again, a lot of this "too hard" nonsense comes from false expectations. This is a world of instant gratification: we all want it right now. We don't like to wait even for a few minutes. We're used to that from the Internet and from McDonald's and other fast-response businesses and services, and certainly, that attitude has its place in some situations—but it's not reality for most of us, and shouldn't be seen as such. Modern people are just plain impatient! They tell me, essentially, "This is too hard! It takes too long, Kent! I want money to fall out of the sky tomorrow—and I don't want just a little money, I want a lot!" Does that sound familiar? Have you found yourself thinking that way? I'll bet you have, because I've thought that way, too.
But having weathered my own marketplace storms and come out ahead, I know what the real world is like. Here is my response to you, the traditional business opportunity seeker: it's not going to happen unless a) You win the lottery, or b) a rich relative dies and leaves you everything. I guarantee you that either is much less likely to happen than you building your own success. If you would just clear away that magical thinking, apply yourself to reality, and wait to reap the rewards that will come with the fullness of time, you'll get them—assuming you're willing to be patient.
You have to think like an experienced gardener here. To grow anything, you need to go to the nursery and buy some cuttings or some seeds. Let's say you want to grow some oak trees, because they represent a real success in your eyes. Mature oak trees are tall and wide, and are very successful trees: sturdy, strong, and almost impossible to kill. Well, if a gardener were to respond like a standard biz opp seeker, they'd plant the acorns one week, go out and water them every day, and search in vain for signs of growth. After about a week of nothing, they might start cursing their lack of progress, and eventually say to themselves, "I wonder if these are defective acorns?"
After another week or so, they'd probably dig those acorns up and say, "Hmmm…I just don't know." And maybe they would plant them again, and water them like crazy, and check them every day…and if they had a high threshold of patience, this might go on for as much as a month. Then they would grumble, "Shoot! A whole month, and I've got nothing! All I see is this little tiny brown thing, and I want a big oak tree! What is the problem here?"
You know what comes next. They dig those acorns up—and maybe they find that a few have sprouted. These little acorns are in the process of becoming baby trees, really tiny micro-trees, so something is happening…but it's not enough! They're furious! They yank the acorns out of the ground and take them back to the nursery, where they throw them in the face of the nurseryman and shout, "Doggone it, you sold me some scam acorns! This is unbelievable! I want my oak trees to grow 90 feet high and eight feet wide, and I want it to happen quickly! These are, like, the slow ones! What is the deal here? I wanted the good acorns. Can you sell me the good ones or not? Because these are a scam! I'm tired of waiting around for stuff to happen—I want it now! I want it to work like magic, to happen overnight, so what is the deal?"
The deal, sadly, is that the gardener who wants instant results from their acorns is an idiot. If someone responded this way to planting an acorn, it would be clear that they had lost sight of reality, and had somehow fallen for the idea that magic really does exist in the world…and worse, that they can buy it for a few bucks. Think about that; it's unreasonable, isn't it? By now, the nurseryman is looking at our would-be gardener with a shocked, disbelieving expression on his face. The best you can do with the impatient gardener is to calmly explain that such things take time.
Everything of significance, everything that needs to be profitable and permanent, takes time to grow. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is a successful business. In order to succeed, you've got to plant those seeds, which admittedly may not cost you that much; but this isn't a Jack and the Beanstalk fable. They'll grow, if you nurture and baby them, but it'll be a long time before you get the massive oak tree to shelter and protect you. You've got to nurture your enterprise and treat it like a real business. You can't allow the specter of impatience to ruin your efforts.
Most people don't want to hear that. They want money to fall out of the sky, and sure, that's fun to dream about. We all want to win the Lotto…but we can't bring that Lotto mentality into the business opportunity and expect to succeed. People do it anyhow. I can't count how many times I've seen people just bounce from opportunity to opportunity to opportunity like a ping-pong ball, jumping around the entire industry in the time that sober investors would spend on one or maybe two opportunities. There are junkies who just like what's new, what's hot, what's next—and they never stay in an opportunity long enough for it to gain traction and to grow and pay for itself, much less become profitable. They're incurring huge startup costs to get involved, and then they scream about how nothing works.
Folks, it's not always the opportunity that doesn't work. You can make money with most opportunities, if you've got your BS detector on full so that you avoid the obvious and inevitable scams. It's not the biz opps that are broken here: it's the people involved in them, the ones who are screaming loudest that it's all a scam and they just can't make it work. They fail because instead of getting serious, instead of working a business opportunity and being patient, they let their impatience overwhelm them, and go and dig up their acorns before the oak seedlings even sprout.
People like this just spin their wheels, and they never get it that it's all their fault. Let me state this baldly here: being a program hopper does not work. It never has worked, and it never will work. It's really too bad that people do this, but again, it's a nice, comforting excuse to explain why they can't succeed.
I want you to imagine your baby crawling up to you and saying, "I want to become an Olympic sprinter!" Well, what do you do? Do you say, "Okay, great! Next week we're going to move to Colorado so you can be close to an Olympic training facility, and I'm going to hire a top-flight Olympic coach. You'll be sprinting in no time!" If the baby's still crawling, does this make any sense? It's nice that the baby wants to do this and all, but he hasn't even learned to walk yet, much less run. So if the baby tells you, "I want to run fast! I want to break world records in the hundred-meter dash!" that's nice—but it doesn't make any sense to expect them to do it right now, or even any time in the next decade.
What you should do is tell that ambitious baby, "That's great! Buy hey, you're still crawling right now. You need to learn how to walk, and I can help you with that. It'll take some work, but I know you can do it. Once you learn how to walk, and you get good at it, we'll try you on jogging. Once you can run, we'll get you to sprinting; and then you can learn to sprint well. At that point, maybe you can compete against all the other sprinters out there." So that baby has 16-18 years of world-class, hard-core, put-your-hours-in get-dedicated training to be successful. And to get there, they really have to want it.
It's not impossible, but it's going to take endless practices before they even have a shot at the Olympics…and even when they do go to the Olympics, there's no guarantee they're going to smash the world record or get the gold, or any medal at all. Maybe they'll flunk out in the Olympic trials, and won't even have a shot after all that training. So realistically, they've got to have patience. They know what they want to do, but their parents can't just uproot the family and move to Colorado and get them started on wind sprints, when they can't even walk yet. That's ridiculous.
So why would you expect to succeed in no time at all in a business, especially when, from a marketplace perspective, you're still crawling?
There are a lot of reasons for this type of impatience, which is ultimately just a cry that it's too hard. I've covered the desperation aspect of it in another article, but I feel I need to touch on it here, too. All the time, people say to me, "Kent, I'm down on my luck. I have no money. I just lost my job, and I'm about to file for bankruptcy. I want to make millions of dollars, and I would like to do it within, I don't know, the next 18-24 months." Wow! That's such a major disconnect with reality that I hardly know how to respond. You've got to got crawl before you can walk, you've got to walk before you can jog, and you've got to jog before you can run. You have to run before you can sprint; and if you want to become an Olympic sprinter, you have to get good at it. There's no shortcut here, no way around it. There are ways to make the process faster and easier, sure; and that's what I specialize in providing. But to really make them work as they should, you've got to become a master marketer. There's no way around that. You've got become a master salesperson in the first place.
So I'm sorry. The "I'm too impatient" flavor of the "It's too hard" mentality is simply another way of limiting yourself. It's much easier for you to get into one business opportunity, get committed, do everything you can with it, and start making money over the course of a year than it is to bounce around among five or six biz opps that don't make money because you can't or won't focus on them. At the end of the year, what have you got? A lot of annoying paperwork, and you've spent 5 or 6 times the money because you've gotten into 5 or 6 times the opportunities, none of which have traction. All they're doing is sitting up on your shelves, gathering dust.
Meanwhile, if you had just gotten into one opportunity and worked it hard, you could be making some decent money by the end of the year—and probably much sooner than that. Therefore, "I'm too impatient" is worse than the other "It's too hard" variants; in fact, I consider it the worst excuse in the world. You might as well throw your money away on the Lotto. So watch out for that tendency, and don't be a program hopper. Program hoppers never win. They never succeed.
People who treat business opportunities like real businesses, people who get serious and get committed and put some time in, realizing that money is not going to fall out of the sky next week—those are the success stories. The people who are tough-minded enough to embrace reality are the ones who will win.
About the Author
"Kent Sayre is a 'top gun' marketer and author. You can get sensational FREE business-building tips online at http://www.KentSayre.com"
My wife's Brother PS-1000 sewing machine manual said not to oil the shuttle hook race?
but it was stuck so bad that it would not turn when she tried to sew. So I put the end of a toothpick with a tiny drop of Liquid Wrench where the shaft meets the race. Now it turns freely, but the machine doesn't sew at all. It doesn't pick up the bobbin thread. What can I do to correct this?
The needle is in wrong or the bobbin case is not properly seated into the shuttle. The later could have been why the shuttle would not turn and had nothing to do with your use of LW.
There is a long groove on the front of the needle and this faces forward. The sewing or embroidery machine needle also has a flat side at the top of the needle shaft. This is the back of the needle.
See the maintenance section for cleaning and replacing the bobbin case into the shuttle.
A top loading bobbin needs to have the bobbin case removed and the cleaned (as well as the area around the shuttle) more often than the vertical type bobbin assembly. You can use the brush that came with the machine, but I like to use cotton swabs as they will pick up the lint and then can be tossed away.
This type of machine (computorized) has factory sealed areas that would normally be lubricated or oiled on a mechanical machine only.
Service starts around $60 and the tech is not going to be a happy camper when he finds you have used Liquid Wrench.