Why Does S*&t Always Happen As Soon As You Set A Goal

Does all hell breaks loose when you commit to success? It did for me until I figured it out.

When I started my cooking school in 1978, my heart’s desire for over a dozen years, I had everything set up for my first class. But before I opened the doors, every appliance broke down at the same time. I had no money for repairs, so it looked like I’d have to call the whole thing off.

Years later, I signed up to do a marathon after decades of surfing my couch. For ages, I hadn’t had been bothered by so much as a sniffle. Three weeks before the big event, my back went out, I came down with a bone-rattling flu, and a publisher offered me my first editing gig.

I tried to fit it all in, asking the powers that be why these challenges couldn’t have come at me one at a time. Would it have killed you up there pulling the strings, I silently screamed in the midst of my self-pity, to wait until after the marathon to add the stress of an editing job from a big publisher? Or keep me healthy until I’d proved I could walk 26.2 miles all in the same day and chew gum at the same time?

And then, at 72 years old, I walked out of court with my second set of divorce papers and realized I’d probably have to work until I was on my way to the pearly gates. But that didn’t daunt me. I had big plans for a new career working from home. I could already see myself as an internet marketing mogul. I just had to spend a little more time at the gym getting myself in shape.Why else was I getting short of breath?

Turns out, a few weeks later I got the news I had to have open-heart surgery, which meant putting my very necessary career plans on hold for who knew how long? My heart was broken in more ways than one.

Why does the shit wait until the moment just before you’ve reached the top of the mountain to hit the fan and threaten to send you back to the bottom?

I know by now that when I make plans, something, somewhere in the universe begins to file its nails and say, really, girl? You think you’re gonna sail right through to the end without breaking a sweat? We’ll see about that.

Except, I don’t really believe a higher authority out in cyberspace is watching my every move and throwing obstacles my way to keep me humble and honest or merely pissed off just as I’m about to make a big leap.

The answer is much too simple for that. In the past, I’ve been too busy feeling sorry for myself to see the pattern in success. And, no, it’s not that I had to run a gantlet before I could grab the brass ring as I used to think. Obstacles were tests of my mettle instead of …well, problems to solve.

I can’t give you the secret to success, but trust me on this part. There’s a link between success and obstacles, and it’s not hard to figure out.

When you open a window, you let in both fresh air and the flies.

Unless you happen to win the Powerball lottery, you don’t become successful by playing it safe. Success takes risks and risks entail opening yourself up to opportunities that don’t exist when you spend your time sitting on the couch. And sometimes opportunities look like pitfalls. You have to widen your horizon if you want to achieve something big and that wider expanse of the world will include many types of experiences, both rewards and obstacles.

The pitfalls don’t suddenly materialize out of thin air when you declare your plan to go after a dream. They’ve been there all along, but you’d never have noticed them if you’d stayed in your lane and didn’t try to get ahead of the crowd.

When I started my cooking school, I did it on a shoestring. It’s in the nature of appliances to break down. If I hadn’t spent my savings on business cards, newspaper ads, flyers, and some special cooking equipment, I wouldn’t have worried about calling the appliance guy to fix the washing machine.

The gods weren’t teaching me a lesson about the arrogance of my dream to have my own cooking school when I ran into that wall. I’d opened myself up to financial stress when I decided to quit my day job and run cooking classes out of my home. All I saw were lines of students signing up for classes. Broken washing machines? What did that have to do with teaching French cooking?

Since that was my mindset at the time, instead of seeing pitfalls as part of the scenery waiting for me when I stepped into the greener pastures of my dream, I saw them as proof of some self-defeating prophecy. Added to the burden of the job, I had to add, “Look at what went wrong. What makes you think you can do this?”

You’re stressing yourself, so expect your body to run into a wall now and then.

When I trained for the marathon, anyone could have told me that my body would break down. I hadn’t done much more than walk from the couch to the refrigerator and back. Now I wanted to walk 26.2 miles at a stretch? Sure I trained under the guidance of a professional, but I was veering toward 60. Are you kidding me? All that went wrong was a backache and the flu? I couldn’t have planned that my muscles would spasm or my immune system would crash and I’d catch the first virus making the rounds? But come on. I should have known something bad would happen to my body. This was the biggest athletic challenge of my life, and I’d started from scratch.

I had tremendous will to finish, and I edited the book and completed the marathon. I’d raised several thousand dollars for a charity. No way could I back out. But I crossed the finish line feeling defeated because my body was so beaten up from pain and fatigue. I expected to feel triumphant, not half dead.

With a different mindset, expecting my body to suffer instead of being shocked by the trauma of a marathon, I wouldn’t have ruined one of the greatest achievements of my life. I would have expected to feel totally beaten up; to have something to go horribly wrong. To have leg cramps and fatigue, and said, yup. Here’s the challenge. Now let’s do this.

The result would have been the same. I’d still have the gold medal I received that day. But oh wouldn’t I have loved to feel joyful instead of a failure because I hadn’t planned for the wall I’d hit from stressing myself beyond my limits.

Perspective for the win.

A hard-won lesson came late for me. Eventually, I got it. Instead of berating myself for hitting a wall, or confronting an obstacle that loomed too large at the time, I could finally take a big step back and have some perspective.

When a problem appeared that needed solving, or I’d reached my physical limits, it became much easier to realize all this was part of the process, the recipe for my success.

No more wasting energy weeping and wailing, or blaming the gods I know don’t exist. I can view the challenges of pursuing a goal the way I’d view my gas tank running low. There’s no blame in running out of gas. After I travel X number of miles, it’s time to solve a problem: fill up the tank.

It may be inconvenient to find a gas station, but that’s not the fault of some invisible power ruling my life and checking if I have the grit to succeed. Yet under the stress of a big goal, I lose my perspective about problem-solving and pacing myself.

If I could have a nickel for every minute I’ve wasted raging at some force I believed was holding me back, I’d be so rich I could forget about working for a living.

I’ll take perspective these days. Water is wet, and hard things are hard. Don’t be surprised when your tank runs dry. Take a break if you have to. Seek help to solve a problem. But don’t waste energy railing at the gods or condemning yourself because life is hard, or feel sorry for your bad luck. Negativity will never lead to a solution, so give perspective a try.

Shi’ts gonna happen. It’s the way of the world. You can do one of two things, go around it and move on to your dream, or step in it and make things worse.

I wish you good luck on reach your summit.

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