On a flight, when your plane takes off, the pilot tells all the passengers to stay in their seats with their seatbelts buckled. In many cases, the pilot will say, “We expect a certain amount of turbulence for the first part of the flight, so please stay buckled up.”

When you start any new business or job, you will experience turbulence as well. The first phase of any job, business, or new venture usually plunges you into a series of unexpected problems and difficulties that you never imagined you would encounter. It’s very much like a plane hitting a downdraft and being put into a dive.66

As soon as you commit to your new goal and take the plunge, everything that possibly can go wrong will go wrong. You will learn more lessons in the first few days after starting a new venture than you may have learned or thought of in a year of planning and organizing.

When you start toward a new goal, you will make a continual series of mistakes, all of which will cost time, money, and emotion. There is no other way to develop the knowledge, skills, and character you need to succeed except by making mistakes and learning from experience.

Your journey toward your destination will consist of a series of problems, reversals, and temporary failures. They are an unavoidable part of life. No success is possible without your developing the ability to deal with and overcome the inevitable challenges and obstacles between you and anything you are trying to accomplish.

Control Your Responses

Strong people expect to experience problems on their journey toward their goals and destinations. Weak people are surprised and dismayed when things don’t work out the way they had expected. They become angry and lash out. They blame other people for their problems. Often they become depressed or irrational.

You can influence only one part of the problem equation: the way that you respond to difficulties as they come along. This is often called your “response-ability.”67

Your success in life is largely determined by your ability to respond effectively to problems as they come up. Fortunately, you can learn a number of effective strategies practiced by successful people to deal with problems.

Problems Go with the Territory

First of all, expect to have problems, disappointments, and temporary failures. Don’t be shocked, surprised, or angry when they occur. Instead, take a deep breath, relax, and say, “Solving problems is my job; problems are what I do.”

Each time you solve a problem, you will become even more capable of solving even greater problems. The major reward you get for solving problems is the opportunity to solve even bigger problems. But with bigger problems come bigger rewards and responsibilities.

You will always rise to the height of your ability to deal with the problems in your work and personal life. Big people solve big problems. Little people solve little problems or no problems at all. The most successful and confident people in every area are those who have effectively dealt with the greatest number of problems, large and small, in their fields.

Think in Terms of Solutions

Superior people are intensely solution oriented. They think about solutions and what can be done rather than the problems and who is to blame. They are future oriented and continually think in terms of the actions that they can take immediately to control the damage, minimize the problem, and move ahead.

One of the best strategies you can use is to practice mental preparation with regard to problems. Resolve in advance that no matter what happens, you will remain calm and relaxed. Resolve in advance that you will not become upset or angry. Preprogram yourself mentally to deal with problems in a calm and effective manner.

When you have preprogrammed yourself in this way and the inevitable problem situation arrives, you will find yourself automatically slowing down and becoming calmer. You will be more relaxed and objective. You will take control of the situation.

Ask Questions

When you deal with unexpected turbulence in your business or personal life, you can keep yourself calm, clear, and focused by asking questions rather than reacting or overreacting.

First of all, get the facts. What exactly is the problem? How did it occur? What are the exact costs or dimensions of the problem? Be sure to double-check your facts. Very often, what seems to be a problem will turn out to be exaggerated or based on incorrect information.69

Sometimes, the solution to the problem is contained within the problem itself. It may be that when a problem occurs, it turns out not to be a problem at all. Often it can be a blessing in disguise. The very act of asking questions keeps you calm and in control. Focus on the solution. Ask, What actions can I or we take immediately to deal with this problem?

When faced with a problem of any kind, most people tend to “catastrophize,” or think of the worst possible thing that could happen, and to look for someone to blame for what has occurred. You must resist both of these tendencies and discourage the people around you from thinking like this as well.

Accept Responsibility and Take Charge

Once you have clearly defined the problem (and confirmed that it actually is a problem) and you have thought about the various actions you can take to solve or minimize it, the next step is to either take responsibility for taking action or assign specific responsibility for taking action to someone else.

Think always in terms of the actions you can take. Just as a pilot facing unexpected turbulence keeps both hands on the wheel and his or her eyes on the gauges, when you experience problems, you must take command of your situation and ensure that you are flying in the right direction.70

Every difficulty in life is a test of some kind. The only question is whether you pass or fail the test. Each time you respond effectively to a problem or difficulty, you develop greater wisdom, intelligence, and personal power. You become smarter, more competent, and more capable of solving even greater problems.

Change Your Language

In flying, the word “attitude” refers to the angle of flight or your approach relative to the horizon. The way you think about a problem determines your attitude, or approach, as well.

You can use three words to change your attitude and your approach to any difficulty you face. First of all, change the word “problem” to the word “situation.” Whereas “problem” is a negative word that triggers feelings of fear and anxiety, “situation” is neutral. Instead of saying, “We have a problem,” you can say, “We have a situation.”

My personal preference is to change the word “problem” to the word “challenge.” Whenever something goes wrong, immediately say, “We have an interesting challenge facing us today.”

“Challenge” is a positive word. When you think of a challenge, you think of something that you rise to, something that brings out the best in you and others. Challenges are what make life exciting and worth living. By rising to the challenges of day-to-day life, you fulfill more and more of your potential.71

Perhaps the best word of all is “opportunity.” Instead of saying, “We have a problem,” you can say, “We have an unexpected opportunity.”

Napoleon Hill is famous for saying, “Every problem or difficulty you face contains the seed of an equal or greater advantage or benefit.” Your job is to find the benefit, and this way of approaching a problem is determined by your attitude.

This attitude of looking for the good in every situation, of looking for the advantage or benefit in any problem or difficulty, is the way that the most successful people think most of the time.

Unlock Your Mental Powers

Your brain is a remarkable organ. When you are calm and relaxed, your neocortex, your thinking brain, is fully active and available to you. But when you become anxious or angry, your neocortex shuts down, like all the lights in a building being turned off. When you become emotional about a problem, you fall back into thinking with your paleocortex, which is your limbic or emotional brain.

Your emotional brain has two states: fight or flight.

When you become fearful or anxious about a problem in either state, you can quite easily slip into a state of denial, anger, or blame. You may feel like lashing out and attacking, or you may want to ignore the problem and hope that it goes away by itself. But neither of these responses is helpful.72

Superior people, leaders in all areas, face the inevitable ups and downs of daily life on the way to their destinations by taking complete control of their thinking and their emotions. They do this by choosing the words they use to describe a situation, their tone of voice, and their behavior in dealing with problems.

Flying into Headwinds

When you set off toward a new destination or goal, like taking off in an airplane, you will have an idea of both your departure time and your arrival time. You will set a schedule for yourself and expect to arrive pretty much on schedule. But as soon as you take off, you will experience what pilots call “unexpected headwinds.”

Over the years, I have traveled many millions of miles. I have had almost every experience, except a crash. It is not unusual, especially during the spring or fall, for a plane to run into headwinds on a cross-country trip. Sometimes these headwinds can be 150 to 200 miles per hour and delay a flight by as much as two hours in the air. Once when I was flying from New York to Dallas, the headwinds were so strong and lasted so long that the pilot actually had to land in St. Louis to refuel the plane.

The situation in your own life is similar. As soon as you embark on a new journey, you will experience head-winds as well: everything will cost twice as much and take three times longer than you anticipated. In a new venture, you should make your very best financial projections and then double them to reach a realistic number.73

You should estimate how long you will take to achieve certain milestones and then triple that time to get the actual time period required.

Types of Headwinds

Headwinds in your business and personal life will come from several sources. Your primary source of headwinds will be other people. They will disappoint you, cheat you, betray you, fail to live up to your expectations, and turn out to be incompetent or indifferent. If you expect that everyone you deal with is going to be intelligent, competent, and honest, you are going to experience a considerable number of challenges on your road to wisdom and experience.

Your customers will be a major source of headwinds.

When you start a new venture, you will be amazed at how difficult it is to get customers to buy your product or service for the first time. You will be astonished at how hard it is to get customers to switch from their current suppliers to buy from you. Most customers are in their own comfort zones. Following the Law of Inertia, they will continue to buy from an existing supplier, even if your product or service is superior, because they are comfortable with what they have done in the past.

Your customers will disappoint you in that they will buy less than you expected, take longer to buy than you expected, pay slower than you expected, and complain more than you expected. You will often find that the product or service that you offer to your customers to add value to their lives is overpriced, not competitive with others, and defective in terms of delivering the results or benefits that you promised. These difficulties and challenges are normal and natural. Your job is to deal with them as realities and find some way to solve them.74

Remember that the customer is always right. It is not what you produce but what people buy that counts. It is not what you want to offer but what people want to enjoy that determines your future. In life, we earn our livings by serving others in some way. And those others always define what we have to do to be successful. Face the facts, deal with reality, and modify your product or service so that customers buy it, buy it again, and tell their friends.

Financial Headwinds

Another form of headwinds that you will face has to do with money. Some people will tell you that it is easy to make all the money you want just by thinking positively and visualizing yourself as wealthy. Everyone wants to believe that this is true, and many people embrace the idea of effortless wealth with their whole hearts.

But that doesn’t include those people who have actually achieved financial success. People who have made a lot of money have learned through bitter experience that the only thing easy about money is losing it. As the Japanese proverb says, “Making money is like digging with a pin; losing money is like pouring water on the sand.”75

Money is a very emotional issue. People are extremely reluctant to part with their money for any reason. When you approach friends, banks, lenders, or suppliers for loans or lines of credit, you will find that they are skeptical, suspicious, slow to act, and extremely careful with their money. Because people with money have had every kind of experience, including being lied to, deceived, and cheated many times in the past, they are extremely hesitant and cautious about providing money to you, or to anyone else, for any reason.

Personal Headwinds

You will experience headwinds personally in that you will discover, much to your surprise, that you lack specific talents, skills, and knowledge that you need to succeed. You may find that you are a poor time manager or that you lack self-discipline. You cannot seem to focus, concentrate, and apply yourself single-mindedly to your most important tasks. You waste time and feel overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time in which to do it.

You may lack financial, analytic, marketing, or selling skills. You may not know how to plan and organize your business, advertise effectively and attract customers, or persuade your prospects to buy from you. You may not know how to attract and keep good people or to make good business decisions.76

If you are starting and building a business, you may lack the ability to choose the right people for the right positions in your business. You may lack the ability to delegate to and supervise your staff to ensure that they get their jobs done on time, on budget, and to specific measures of performance.

Fortunately, these are all learnable skills. But the starting point of mastering these essential skills is for you to admit that you need them, that you are not particularly good in some areas. After that, your education can begin.

Because of your incredible mind, you can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. You must never allow yourself to be held back simply because you lack a particular skill or ability. Instead, you must set the development of that skill as a goal, make a plan to achieve it, and then work on it every day until you have mastered that skill.

Don’t Be Surprised

A mark of maturity, a vital quality to develop on the road to success, happiness, and balance in life, is expecting problems and difficulties as normal, natural, and unavoidable parts of life. Becoming a superior person requires accepting that when you set off toward a big, exciting goal or destination, you will experience unexpected turbulence and headwinds continually. Your job is to learn to navigate through these difficulties with calmness, clarity, and complete self-confidence.77

You become a calm, effective thinker by remaining calm in the face of any adversity. You become patient by practicing patience whenever it is called for. You become a superb pilot of your own destiny by dealing effectively with the inevitable storms that occur in your work and personal life.