A man’s life is full of tough times; divorces, health problems, or losing a job. The question is not If it will happen to you but When.
So step one is to accept that fact instead of burying your head in the sand or living like you’re exempt from hard times.
Too many men, especially young men, have been raised in an environment that has them thinking their lives will be free from any difficulty. And if some difficulty does sneak through, the solution is to find someone to sue or have them fired.
That’s how boys think, not men.
Men understand there will be hard times, so they need to learn how to deal with them.
Did you know some hard times you face will result from bad choices you made, some hard times will result from the bad choices made by others, and some hard times will happen because good decisions can have bad outcomes?
Because hard times come from so many different directions, it means you won’t always see them coming. So you must develop the skills and mindset to deal with hard times if you want to be a man who survives and thrives.
One way is to incorporate the Marine Corp way of dealing with hard times into your life. It’s just three words,
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
What does that even mean? How does it work in practice? Here’s a story directly from the United States Marine Corps Field Manual, FMFM 1-0 called “Leading Marines.”
“During Operation Desert Shield, as Marine forces began to expand their lodgment, one of the “greatest concerns was overland transportation. Doctrinally, the Marine Corps planned for moving support no more than about 50-80 kilometers from a beachhead port. Faced with double and triple these distances,… [Marine logistic leaders] resorted to a series of practical if somewhat unconventional actions to solve the problem.” By leasing as many civilian trucks as possible, virtually every truck in Saudi Arabia was thrown into some kind of use regardless of its age or mechanical condition. Dubbed “Saudi Motors,” the new transport fleet grew to more than 1,400 vehicles and eventually included 50 colorfully decorated 10-ton lorries, over 200 civilian buses, and about100 rental cars – everything from Toyota Landcruisers, to Mitsubishis, to Jeep Cherokees donated from allied governments.
It was this fleet, together with some quick thinking by Marine leaders that led to the establishment of a remote logistics base well beyond the distances “allowed” by Marine logistic doctrine. “
Think about what you would have done if you had been a Marine in that situation?
Would you have said, “sorry, the Book says we do no more than 80 Kilometers”
Or
“We’ve never done it that way before.”
Or
“We don’t have the equipment or resources to do this.”
A man can’t think like that because it means he will fail to answer the bell when his family or others need him to step up and handle a challenging situation. So that’s why I want you to be the man who knows how to improvise, adapt, overcome when times get tough.
Here’s what the process looks like
Step 1 – Improvise
The first thing you have to do when faced with a tough situation is figure out what tools you have and how they can be used in a new way. There’s a great line in the movie Apollo 13 that illustrates this.
The engineers are meeting to figure out how to get the astronauts home when somebody says the spacecraft was not designed for what needed to happen. Mission Control Chief Gene Kranz says ,“I don’t care what it was designed to do, I care about what it can do.”
That’s the mental attitude to improvise.
Step 2 – Adapt
Once you figure out your situation and what tools you have to work with, you are in a new normal. Now you have to adapt or figure out how to move forward in the new normal. You have to think differently to survive. The biggest mistake you can make now is to fall back to old ways of thinking.
Step 3 – Overcome
Now that you’ve done the hard work, it’s time to kick ass and execute. This is where you overcome your situation. You conquer it.
Just like a Marine.