Life is 10% What Happens To You [Quote of The Day]

Video transcript below:​​

​Hello everyone, Colin Stuckert here, Founder/CEO, Wild Foods Co.

Today’s quote is, life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it by Charles Swindoll, Charles R. Swindoll. That’s an interesting last name.

What is life? 10%, 90%, what do you think? Is life 90% of what happens to you? Or, excuse me, how do you react to it? Ha!

Do you think life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it? That’s a good question. I would say the answer is yes.

You make your luck in life. Have you ever heard the quote, the chance is what happens when preparation meets opportunity?

So when you prepare and meet an opportunity, you take advantage of that opportunity because you’ve been preparing. And the more you prepare, the more opportunities that come your way.

That’s an example of how you create your success.

I also have this concept of those that are born into affluence, that is, let’s say they grow up and they’ve been given everything they want, well, they’ve never had to feel what it’s like to struggle, they’ve never had to feel what it’s like to want something, not have it, but learn that if they work for it, they can get it.

And that’s why you see a lot of kids born to wealthy families that are kind of, maybe, given what they want, free education, trust fund, whatever, they don’t ever go on to change the world because they haven’t had to struggle.

And that’s a perfect example of how people make the mistake of thinking that someone that has all of this opportunity or has all this affluence, or money, or privilege, or whatever, the idea that they’re going to have a better life as a result.

In a lot of cases, that’s not the case at all. They often have a worse life because they’ve never felt what it’s like to grow up with struggle.

Struggle defines you. The work is who you become.

Without struggle, you’re an uninteresting person. And what happens, these other things happen as a result of not struggling. You get a lot of failings from the human mind.

Human beings are designed to live in the wild. Where it’s harsh, where people would die, where things eat you, where you might go with food for long periods. The struggle is built into our DNA.

If we don’t struggle, we don’t thrive as human beings.

I won’t go into all the evolutionary biology reasons why that is, but that’s the way it is. We can see a million examples of that in anecdotes from day-to-day life, observing successful people, observing people that aren’t, observing kids born into lower-income situations that have risen, et cetera.

Now, I’m not saying that every kid born into a lower-income situation might have a lot of blocking their way, environment, family, schooling, teachers, whatever; I’m not saying that that’s necessarily easy; I’m not saying that that is ideal.

But in the world we live in today, at least in our country, green is the only color that matters. If you can provide value to the marketplace, you can be successful. And that’s why it’s the ultimate meritocracy, in regards to that.

Now, again, I don’t want to go down the deep rabbit hole of privilege and all these things. Still, anyone born in the United States today, especially with the invention of the internet, can you imagine being held today and the amount of information you will have access to as a child growing up?

You have; I mean, anyone born today is privileged; I don’t care where you’re born.

There is just so, I mean, with a billion cell phones about to be showing up in Africa, and all the different places around the world that are getting more infrastructure, more opportunity, and more access to the internet, limitless information at your fingertips, guys.

We are all more privileged than everyone that came before us.

Everyone has the opportunity to change their circumstance; if you provide value to the marketplace, employer, and customers, whatever it doesn’t, nothing else matters, and you will win in that instance. And then, from there, you can, life, take you where you want.

You get power over your time, control over your destiny, et cetera. And so, your life is 10% of what happens to you.

If you’re born into a shitty situation, you’ll have to work hard to overcome that. You might have to work harder than someone else may have.

Someone was born middle-class, had certain privileges, and got a scholarship. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re happy, but it might mean they had it easier to make a certain amount of money than you.

And you have to work harder to make the same amount of money. That’s just the reality of life. This is nature.

There’s no morality and equality in Mother Nature; it survives and doesn’t survive. And some species are more successful, like humans, and some are least successful, like the dodo bird that went extinct.

You’ll have to overcome whatever your relative struggles are to get there. And that’s just the way it is.

And the problem I see with a lot of this equality and privilege stuff today is the idea of making everything equal and an even playing field, which will never happen. Human beings don’t do well with that.

Did you see what happened with communism? That didn’t work, and that was all about spreading things out, making resources equal, and not letting this guy make more than that guy. It’s not going to work.

Again, I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but you have to think about how you can take personal responsibility for your life.

Because ultimately, if the goal is to win in life, you have to get out there and figure out what I am doing about your situation. How am I responding to my life?

How am I responding to the 10% of my life that is my situation? What am I doing about it? That’s the only question you have to answer.

And what you see is people play the victim, blaming other people, races, minorities, sexes, whatever. They blame the institutions, the government, blah, blah, blah. It’s only you.

It is only you. It’s up to you. It’s your responsibility. You are responsible.

Nobody owes you anything. You don’t owe anyone else anything, for the most part. There are certain exceptions. Family, whatever. But you live for yourself, find out what you value in life, and what you can contribute to the world, and the world will reward you.

You will determine your life through that 90% of you responding to your environment, responding to the marketplace, and whatever you have to respond to.

And if you want to play the blame game, you want to play the victim; you’re going to end up in the same spot. You’re choosing to respond to your 10% situation with 90% negativity, 90% being the victim, and 90% blah.

And, as a result, you’re not going to win. You could gripe all you want, and you’re not going to win. That’s just a truism; we have to accept that.

So I hope this video was helpful, guys. It takes a little longer than I’d like, but I get fired up on these topics.

You can follow me @ColinStuckert. Shoot me an email if you ever have any questions or comments, info@wildfoods.co

And slap the subscribe button, jab the thumbs up, and let’s get to it. ​Have a good day, and take some action.

- Colin Stuckert, Founder/CEO, Wild Foods