There is no such thing as luck, but if there was, it is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. it is amazing that the harder you work at something, the better you get at it. We all know people that talk about luck like it were a real thing but in truth, there is no such thing.

Think of your life in terms of two graph lines. Ability and opportunity. In an average person’s life, I am told those two graph lines cross 4-6 times in a person’s life. What it means is that several times in a person’s life, the ability you have lines up with an opportunity to use that ability. The issue is what the person does when his/her two graph lines cross. Do they take the opportunity or not? Fear, inferiority and insecurity probably account for most of the missed opportunities in life.

Take my business for example. We have people that handle the face to face well but not the phone. We have great writers with incredible analytical skill but no personality.  Then we have people that do fantastic on the phone but then bomb when they get face to face. Then you have people like me that don’t do any of it well but just too dense to know better. I cannot tell you the number of people I have met that have such a great presence about them when they speak but because of fear, they never allow themselves to become what they were meant to be. For these people, the years get by and the opportunities to use their abilities become less and less and their life becomes one of regret that they missed the opportunities in their life. They are ones that grow old with the music still in them.

I have often said that the most important ability is availability. The people that do great things are the ones who don’t care what other people think about them and have the courage to try. I stutter so if I had let other people’s opinion of me determine my life, I would have a job today that didn’t require me to talk to anyone. I have a client and dear friend, (SM for short,) who said the first time he talked to me on the phone, he couldn’t understand most of what I said (makes me laugh thinking about it) but he said he picked out three words he understood and answered based on those words. SM and I became like brothers and have been dear friends for 25 years and we have transacted many many times together on hotels. It all started with that first phone call that I was not afraid to make.

There is no luck involved in life. There is preparation and willingness to try and the more you try it is amazing how much you accomplish. In life there is rarely a euphoric life altering moment that defines your future. Most of time the opportunities come when you just lace up your boots and put one foot in front of the other and just don’t stop. KT

Wouldn’t it be great if you could stand at the entrance of a path/ trail and see all the way to the end? You could then know if you want to take that path. Unfortunately, that is not how life works. Every decision we make leads to a result and every path we take leads to a destination. Life would be so much easier if we could see the result before we decided to take a certain path. Every path we take leads somewhere and the decision we all must make is; do we want to be at that somewhere.

We all know the wrong paths a person could take; cheating, drugs, sex, infidelity, lies, stealing, alcohol and the list could be quite long. The problem with entrances to a path is they always look good and inviting at the beginning. If you can, read that last sentence again.

By way of example, say a person is at a crossroads in life. One path looks hard and the other path looks easy. Let’s say the easy path is a little bit of drugs and a little bit of alcohol; At the entrance of that path it looks like so much fun and the person can envision a long life of freedom and joy. Everybody else is doing it so it must be ok, right?

What you cannot see at the entrance of that path, is the destruction, devastation and possibly death. See, all that is hidden from you behind the pretty entrance. The real result is only revealed once you start down that path and many times you don’t even know it until you are too far to turn back.

We as adults know (if we are honest) how the story ends for most paths. Unfortunately, we fool ourselves into believing it will be fun. If you are ever out with a bunch of guys and one of them says “watch this,” there is pretty good chance it will not turn out as expected.

So, if you are standing at the entrance of a path (change in your life) put on your spiritual infrared goggles and humble yourself and ask God to tell you which way to go. KT

In 1919, Conrad Hilton when to Cisco Texas to buy a bank and ended up buying a little hotel named the Mobley hotel. He became a hotel man that day and went on to build one of the greatest hotel companies in the world.

What most people don’t know is that after Conrad bought that first little hotel in Cisco Texas, he began to build major high-rise Hiltons (one per year) all over Texas. By 1929 he owned around nine-ten major hotels when the stock market crashed in 1929. He ended up losing all the hotels to his lenders except for the newest Hilton hotel in El Paso Texas which opened in 1930. It took years after the great depression for banks to lend again but once they did, Conrad Hilton began to build back the company he lost by buying distressed hotels in California and New York and became the Hilton Hotel Company we know today.

During the great depression, 80 percent of all US hotels went bankrupt but somehow Conrad kept believing in the US economy and was determined to build a hotel company. He lost it all yet retained the will, perseverance and the drive to start over.

Looking at history, it is always easy to read stories like this and discount them because we weren’t there. We know how the story ends and it somehow lessens the impact and we don’t quite grasp the grit it took for many Americans to get through the great depression. We can’t relate to what it was like halfway through the depression when it seemed like everything was lost and no one had any answers.

Those people in the 1930’s did what many people today are doing, just move forward and keep trying. If you do that you will break through. History is full of great success stories and I have no doubt that 100 years from now, students will be leaning about the year 2020 and the struggles, failures, and successes. In 2120 if a blog is still a thing, someone will probably write a story about how we came through the pandemic of 2020. KT