The forecast was waiting for us when the wheels touched down in Japan a couple of weeks ago: a typhoon, a great white swirl on everybody’s phone screen, bending toward the very place I had promised a group of guests sunshine. 

They had crossed the planet to visit shrines and museums, and a brave few hoped for some time to break out their easels. I was anticipating all of us stuck in a high-rise hotel, swaying in the heavy winds, putting a damper on our trip to visit paintings and artworks. 

Then suddenly, it changed course. Nobody asked it to. Nobody earned it. The storm simply went somewhere else, and we got to work, visiting museums and powering through some mildly wet days with occasional sunshine.

Being prepared for a storm is always a good idea, but there was no way I could possibly be prepared to lead a group through a typhoon in a foreign country. You won’t be prepared for every storm, no matter how good you are. Life brings them anyway, perhaps at random — or perhaps on purpose, to get our attention or to show us a door we’d never have looked for.

Rained-Out Day

Toward the end of the trip, a few of us split off for some days of painting at Mount Fuji before moving on to paint in China. One day, the rain finally won. No painting, no sun, no light. A group of people who came to paint outdoors, and me trying to figure out how to take care of them. So we got creative and stumbled onto a museum show with the largest collection of Monet paintings in Japan, along with a huge number of other Impressionist paintings … all just an hour away. 

It may have been better than any day of painting we had. And here’s what I keep thinking about: if the weather had cooperated, we’d have been out at our easels, pleased with ourselves, and we’d have missed the show completely. It was one of the highlights of our trip. 

A Thrown Insult

Standing there with wet shoes, looking at those paintings, I thought about the word on the wall. Impressionism. Most people don’t know it started as an insult.

In 1874, Monet was 33 years old. The art establishment in Paris had no room for him and his rule-breaking friends. Because no one else would show their work, they put on their own show. A critic named Louis Leroy went to see it and made sport of them in a satirical paper. Looking at Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, he wrote that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished. Then he called the whole lot of them “Impressionists,” because it was the funniest way he could think of to dismiss them.

Three years later, they took the name for themselves. A hundred and fifty-two years later, people stand in line in the rain on the other side of the world to see that work.

But Monet didn’t know any of that the morning he read the review. All he had was the sting.

Maybe you have that sting right now. Somebody whose opinion mattered to you looked at what you made, or who you are, and was unkind. The phone stopped ringing. The door stayed shut. You put your heart on the table and got silence. I can’t tell you how your story comes out. I can tell you that one person’s opinion on one bad day is weather, not climate. And the person holding the door closed has never once had the final word on what’s worth doing.

Forty-Three Years

As a business owner, I’ve spent 43 years pushing hard, building, gutting it out, trying to make progress. It doesn’t always go the way I expect. I’ve had severe, embarrassing failures that slammed my ego and grounded me for weeks, months, sometimes years.

Each typhoon did its own damage. Each one left a huge mess, revealed problems I was compelled to face, and forced me into humility. Sometimes I lay wounded, not wanting to get out of the fetal position. Sometimes I brushed myself off, bluffed my way forward, and learned something important, because there is always something to learn. Sadly, I’m a slow learner. I’ve foolishly repeated my mistakes. I’ve paid full tuition for the same class more than once.

The Divine Wind

Japan knows something about this. In 1281, Kublai Khan sent an invasion fleet there that history claims was 4,400 ships and 140,000 men. A massive typhoon hit as they prepared to attack and wrecked nearly the entire fleet. The Japanese had a name for that storm, long before the word came to mean something else: kamikaze, the divine wind.

Historians still argue over how much credit the storm deserves, because the defenders had spent years building walls along the shore and fought like mad. I love that part. They did everything they could do to be ready, and then something happened that they could never have accomplished.

Think about that storm from both sides. On the attacking ships, it was the end of the world. On the beach, it was an answer to prayer. Same wind.

There are a lot of people in this world right now who have had the wind taken out of their sails, fear creeping into their minds, while that same shift in the wind is pushing other boats forward. Tragedy happens to one person at the very moment it creates opportunity for another. That’s hard to watch when you’re the one going backward. But it also means the wind against you has no long-term contract. Winds shift. They always have.

Heeling Isn’t Sinking

As a driven entrepreneur, I find it hard to lose, and when I do, it’s easy to lose interest and want to jump ship, because running away from problems is the first thing we usually think about. It’s tough to keep people committed when things don’t go as planned. But pros don’t run. They stick it out and study what’s changed, and they adapt. They keep the boat afloat and keep sailing.

A sailboat under pressure leans hard. Water hisses along the rail, things slide across the deck, and to anyone new on board, it feels like the end. Sailors call it heeling, and much of the time it means the boat is moving fast. But no sailboat can go straight into the wind, either. It gets there by zig-zag, turning again and again, and every turn feels like a wrong one to somebody.

Your next problem may only be a temporary zig or zag across bumpy waters.

The Apostle Paul once stood on a ship that had been beaten by a storm for days, with everyone aboard giving up hope, and he told them: “There shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but of the ship” (Acts 27:22). They lost the ship. Every last one of them made it to shore. Sometimes that’s the deal. The thing you were sure you couldn’t live without goes down, and you’re standing on the beach, soaked and alive, with work still to do.

Keep the faith, and remember that God is in control. Not you, and not me.

Lunch Line Lesson

In seventh grade, a bully named David walked up to me in the lunch line and punched me in the stomach. It knocked the wind right out of me. It hurt like heck, and I’ve never forgotten that feeling. I’ve spent the rest of my life avoiding it.

That’s the trouble. We shouldn’t go around picking fights, but a lot of us are still flinching from a punch we took years ago. We stopped trying something, stopped asking, stopped showing our work, stopped putting ourselves out there, and we call it being sensible. It may just be an old bruise making our decisions, keeping us from trying again and living boldly.

Sometimes we need to get punched in the stomach, even though it hurts. Bad times and losses build character and humility, and all of us need some of both from time to time.

My Toughest Year

I’ll admit something to you. Last year was my toughest in a decade. Everywhere I turned, I took another stomach punch, and all because I was repeating past mistakes, easily distracted, not keeping my hand on the ship’s wheel.

I’m tempted to blame the tough economy, and it played a role. But I’ve seen tough economies before, and I usually know how to sail through them. Yet I still ran aground.

When all was said and done, I had to make hard choices to get the ship back on course, and I’ve now done that. I also had to admit that I was part of the cause. I can’t place the blame elsewhere, though it would be easy to do.

I faced a fierce storm. And somewhere in the middle of that, I found out my true purpose and why I do what I do. The storm made me see it when comfort would have hidden it. All those years ago, my ego helped me build the business, but ego wasn’t what made it worth saving. What’s worth fighting for is all the good it does in people’s lives. That is my sole motivation.

Hands on Wheel

Here’s where I’ve landed after 43 years of weather. The wheel is my job. The wind never was.

I spent a long time wishing every storm would turn away, like the one that greeted us in Japan. Looking back, the ones that turned taught me nothing. The ones that hit me taught me nearly everything I know.

If you’re somewhere out there this morning with the wind knocked out of you, you haven’t been told the end of the story. Monet hadn’t either.

Over to You

What punch are you still flinching from? What did you quietly stop doing because of it? And if you believed the wind could shift, what’s the one thing you’d put your hand back on this week?

Life’s storms play important roles. Don’t give up or give in. Keep sailing, 

Eric Rhoads