Don't Try To Skip The Bad Parts

Life is made up of good and bad. It is normal to wish only good happened in our lives and to wish that the bad would go away. But we, as winners, don't want to be normal. Most of us have a problem with definitions.

We think that ice cream, blue sky, smiles, and watching TV or playing unproductively is always good and desirable. We tend to think that hard work, watching what we eat, having to get up early, and being chewed out by the boss are undesirable or bad. Especially when we are younger we feel these ways.


I believe there are lessons we must learn, and we usually won't learn them--won't even realize that there is something to learn--until something adverse happens to us. I'm not saying that predestination has decided what we are supposed to be and will herd us around until we figure it out and become it. There are certain things that everyone must learn to be functional as a human being. There are things that we must learn to be adults rather than children. There are things we must learn to be successful. We can't resist leaning hard things and going through hard patches in life and arrive anywhere worth being.

If we do get around a "bad" part of our lives that is there to teach us something, to help us get through life more successfully, it will come back and will come back again and again if necessary, because life has an assignment to help us learn the things we have to know.

Many of our happiest moments are just after getting successfully through a rough patch. Continued happiness in life comes from living according to truth; meaning living according to what we have learned, most of which learning has come from having gone through something we wish we had not had to go through.

If we ate only ice cream and other goodies, we would be unhealthy and perhaps die of malnutrition. If the sky were always blue, we would be in a serious drought. Crops would not grow and the price of food would skyrocket. If everyone always smiled at us and approved of us, we would never have the idea that we should get better. Peer pressure is not always bad. If we could always play and have fun, we would never accomplish the hard and worthwhile things. We would be no better than a puppy who gets taken care of simply because he is cute.

We learn that we feel better from eating and sleeping correctly. We come to enjoy getting up early and accomplishing a lot early in the morning when we are freshest and most alert. We hate to be chewed out by the boss, and perhaps the boss can be nicer about how he or she acts, but we learn what we need to do to keep our jobs and to be promoted and to earn more money. We learn things that are transferable to a different job if the boss is sufficiently insufferable.

I can't say honestly that I am an Adam Sandler fan, but I have seen some of his movies. One I particularly enjoyed was Click. I saw it on network television, and I have been told that there was a running gag in the movie, typical of Adam Sandler, that was unnecessary to the plot and was completely stupid. I am glad it was taken out of the version I saw. In this movie, Adam Sandler's character is given a remote control with which he can skip the bad parts of his life.

He's a normal human being. Why put up with "bad" if you don't have to? So he uses the remote control to skip quite a bit of his life. The theme of the movie, as I remember it, is that in skipping the "bad" parts of his life, he skipped the best parts. He loses his wife, family, job, and self-respect. I may be wrong but that's the way I remember it. A good thing about art is that we can interpret it to suit ourselves. So for me, that's what Click was about. Adam Sandler's character learned that you have to take the bad with the good. If you don't, it can ruin your life.

That is absolutely true in real life. Only by taking life as it comes and dealing with it and learning from it will we be happy, will be become successful, will we become of value to our fellow human beings.

I knew someone in college who didn't seem to understand that things you get with a credit card are not free. You have to pay for them sooner or later. This person's parents were well-to-do and made sure that purchases were paid for. I don't know what happened to this person after college but I pity this person's spouse. I pity this person.

If we don't learn as we go along, we will have to learn in a way that probably feels like driving a car into a brick wall going 100 miles per hour. It can't be pleasant. This person's parents perhaps thought they were taking care of their baby, but they were really doing an immense disservice, keeping this person from learning something that must be learned.

I have known lots of people who have not learned what must be learned. And I wonder how much I have not learned. Is there any brick-walls-at-100-miles-per-hour in my future? I'm trying to pay attention to reality to keep the chances of that minimal.

Don't wish the bad parts of life would leave you alone. Savor them and be happy in them, because only through them will we get to where we don't need them anymore.

Weldon Smith is the author of the book True Leadership and False Counterfeits, which explains what True Leadership is, and why any other idea of what Leadership does not work. Furthermore, Leaders are not only those who have followers. Every success in every aspect of life is the result of practicing true Leadership.