The Reason You Want to be a War Time General

Western society has been living through the longest uninterrupted time of peace seen in the last 1000 or more years.  There have been some conflicts in the world since the Korean War which ended in 1953, including the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, but overall, there has been relative peace in the world of late.  There has certainly not been the threat of young people being drafted to fight in a war for over 50 years.

While living in a time of peace has led to incredible economic and technological progress, there has been one side effect that has affected many people.  That is, the ability to deal with adversity.  The simple reality is that it is much easier to live in a stable time of peace and prosperity.  In other words, it is easy to be a peace time general.  There is no war to fight.

I am certainly not advocating for hard times and would love prosperity to continue for the next 200 years, however, even if over the long-term things have gone well, we all have our ups and downs, and there have been plenty of economic downturns that have occurred. It pays to be prepared for when hard times inevitably hit and we need to deal with them, whether on a personal level or in the entire economy. 

Adversity makes us grow and become stronger, just like lifting weights makes our muscles and will-power stronger.  The opposite is also true:  easy times make us soft and complacent as we are not challenged and working hard for results.  In good times most people are able to prosper, it is in difficult times that those who know how to manage challenges distinguish themselves.  If we look for more challenges and ways to develop more skills on our terms, we will be better prepared for when real difficulties arise.  If we seek out rather than avoid adversity we will not be paralyzed or surprised and better able to deal with issues.

How do We Exercise Our Adversity Muscles?

If you work for a company, constantly seek out more responsibility and ask for different projects to work on. You will be exposed to diverse areas in the company and learn about them and how to tackle different issues that come up. If you are self employed you can talk to your clients and suppliers and ask them what their biggest challenges are and then work on how to help them with over-coming them. This will not just make you a better problem solver, but it will bring you much more business as you are catering to the needs of your clients.

The point is to be constantly on the lookout for issues that you can solve so that you grow and learn and are prepared for when a major challenge happens to you.

In case you need inspiration, here are some famous fortunes that were made in very difficult times:

Joseph Kennedy, the father of Bobby, Teddy and John F. Kennedy, invested $4 million dollars into real estate right after the Great Depression started in 1929.  At the time, it seemed that no one wanted anything to do with real estate.  Joe’s investment grew to $180 million by 1935!

Fred Smith started a small company at the end of the recession of 1969-1970.  He faced major challenges as it was a new type of service recession affected companies were very hesitant to use.  To add to his challenges, the 1973 oil crisis made it very difficult for him to get fuel for his vehicles.  Fred persisted and turned that little company into FedEx, a company with $65 billion in revenue!

A bookstore was incorporated in 1994 and started selling books online in 1995.  The “dot-com bubble” burst in 2001 and the company was written off as a fad of the internet.  Jeff the founder persisted and by this time the company was selling hundreds of different items.  The 2008 financial crisis once again brought claims that the company was finished, yet Jeff persisted and continued to offer many more things for sale.  You will have figured out by now that Amazon.com has become one of the largest companies in history and Jeff Bezos one of the wealthiest people ever even after having been dismissed so many times.

So rather than worry about how to deal with adversity, we can seek it out on our terms so that when we really need to, we can be War Time Generals.