You have to be willing to make changes in your process to accomplish great things. Not every performance is going to be your best one. However, the secret to winning in the long term is knowing all the ways you can lose beforehand, and then preparing like hell before showtime to overcome those scenarios.

From what I have found, and I sure you have too, that there will always be some kind of reconfiguration in life’s circumstances to throw off the power process. And if you haven’t figured this out already, then take it from me, it is your responsibility to overcome what your life throws at you.

Still, there will be times when life gets the better of you. That’s just how it goes, and you need to prepare like hell for when it does. To be better prepared, what you need to know is that there are only a limited number of ways that life will best you. And after I list the following instances, I am going to discuss the one that I hope isn’t happening to you on a consistent basis:

The Four Performance Killers

• You didn’t show up
• You were late
• You are in overtime
• You focus only on the problems and not the solutions

Three of those instances can be overome by better preperation, more focused practice, and innovation. But only one of them is a total failure.

Let’s go through the one instance that I find most deplorable.

You didn’t show up

Look I get it, there are times when life is so powerful that there simply was no way you could have made the performance. Unsurmountable and unexpected things do happen. I am not going to be so brash as to say, ‘Just overcome, bro.’

Where most folks go wrong though is that people often confuse the unsurmountable with the meerly inconvenient.

So here’s a useful and simple metric to figure out which is which, it goes something like this, ‘Shit and stuff happens, so which is it?’

What I am talking about here are those times when you didn’t show up because stuff got in the way.  Not showing up on account of stuff is just a half-hearted way of saying ‘I quit’ beforehand.

Quiting before your performance got started by simply not showing up is just plain loser mentality behavior. If improving your performance and participating in your passion is still your desired outcome, you have to ask your self why you let stuff get in the way and honestly reconsider you priorities.

If your plan is consistently improve your performance, you will show up. Simple as that. Sure you might be late, you might have to go into overtime and you might only be focusing on the problems instead of the solutions, but to not show up…

Well, here’s a simple solution to not waste any more time: reassess and recommit, or simply resign.