The Complaint Department

I don’t often publish guest articles on this blog, but when an article from Dan Kennedy lands in my inbox, it’s hard to pass up.  Considering the debates raging around the world with gas prices, healthcare, education, war and more (and the mountains of complaints associated with each), you’ll definitely take something away from this timely article.  Enjoy!  — Chris 🙂

Take it away Dan…

****

Why People Fail: The Complaint Department

“Every year back spring comes, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”

So said: (a) W.C. Fields or (b) Dorothy Parker or (c) Woody Allen.

Dorothy Parker, and if you haven’t read her, you’ve missed one of the most vicious biting wits and grand cynics of all time. When you visit NYC, you can stay at or have a drink at the Algonquin Hotel, home for years of Dorothy Parker’s famous roundtable, where literary lions met to drink and spar.

“You can be married and bored or single and lonely. Ain’t no happiness nowhere.”

So said: (a) Chris Rock or (b) Elizabeth Taylor or  (c) Ann Landers.  The correct answer is Chris Rock.

It just seems few people are really happy or even content with much.  We are all too eager to complain, myself included – and I stop myself often. Truth is, everybody does have something to complain about because no business, no career, no relationship, no one’s health, no life is ever free of problems, hassles, annoyances or disappointments for very long.

Having a lot of money helps but I doubt there’s enough money, period, to insulate somebody from things worthy of complaint. I certainly have been willing to spend any sum, have spent quite a bit, and brought in a dozen experts, technicians, people from the manufacturer to fix my fireplace but, after 5 years trying, I still have a gas fireplace that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, with no rhyme or reason. It’s not as worthy of complaint as, say, coming home from Iraq missing a leg. But it’s still worthy of complaint.

Right now, everybody’s continues to complain incessantly about gas prices – even though they pay more per gallon for bottled water and Starbucks, even though our prices are a bargain vs. other countries, even though we could easily go out less and cluster errands but don’t, and even though the economy’s booming in many places. Nuts.

Well, we’re never going to stop others or ourselves from complaining at times we should be celebrating and giving thanks. To a degree, our ever-restless dissatisfactions and complaints are the forces leading to invention, innovation and, in some cases, improvement.

But I would offer this observation, for whatever it’s worth – the most successful people I know keep more of their complaints to themselves than they air and operate in a broad, general way, happy and enthusiastic, “on fire” about what they are doing and where they are going.

I talk to a lot of people who complain about parts of their businesses, some of the work they must do. Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones says:

“If you can’t get excited about the miserable job you’ve got right now, you’ll never get a good job worth being excited about.”

I think that’s true hour by hour, day by day.

Certainly there are lots and lots of people who would follow you into your lucrative business if they could only do the pleasant tasks – like kids licking the crème filling out and discarding the rest of the cookie or cake. The reason there’s so little competition at the top levels of the prosperity pyramid in America is NOT barriers erected to keep riff-raff out and the elite small in number; it’s mostly because most people won’t get their hands filthy doing all the ugly tasks that are required in order to get to do the pleasant ones.

When I was speaking a lot, I got approached at least 1,000 times by people who wanted to be on stage and speak to thousands and make $100,000.00 in an hour or two…

I found none were eager to learn the craft, create and perfect a presentation; study the 100 or so speakers and stand-up comedians I pointed them to; go find inconsequential venues like local car dealership sales meetings and Chamber meetings to practice; to create their own business filling seats so they could prove they could sell from the platform before asking someone to give them a valuable slot; then develop marketing materials; relentlessly mail to people who might hire them; write books and articles and newsletters to create prominence.

And it doesn’t take long for most people to complain a lot about the endless hours in airports, the delayed or missed flights, the bad hotels, the bad food. Everybody’d love to be rich. Most people just aren’t willing to put up with all the crap you have to shovel and occasionally swallow for the privilege. In this life, you pick your place and the prices you will pay for admission – so you really have little right to complain about either.

So if this is one of those days, think twice before complaining. Because the secret of secrets that we know and never speak of is that our exceptional success and prosperity has only a little to do with all the things those wishing they had what we have think it does – with education or expertise or who-you-know or luck, etc.  What we know that we won’t speak of is it mostly has to do with a willingness to do a lot of things others can do but won’t.