Richard Gunther’s How High is Up: The Tale of a Restless Spirit (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2009) is written as a love letter about life for his sons. His message is simple – times may be tough now, but they’ve been tough before, and if we can manage to keep our eyes and our hearts focused on things that truly matter, we can defeat fear and anxiety – and live well.
His tips for getting through tough times apply to business as well as your personal life:
- Take reasonable risks – “When the economy is bad, everyone tries to mitigate their risks, and it’s contrary to the way life should be lived,” he said. “I’ve lived my life as an adventure, and I learned early on that if we are to get anything out of life worth sharing with others, we have to take reasonable risks.”
- Ignore failure – He added that people who resist taking risks, because they are afraid of failure, lose out on life’s richness. Whether it’s in business, personal or somewhere in between, being proactive is a philosophy that still stands. No good judgment was ever borne out of fear and anxiety.
- Learn from mistakes – “One thing to remember is that there is no such thing as failure,” he said. “If we attempt something in life or business, and it doesn’t work, we don’t have to consider it a failure. When we do, it’s a crime of ego, because we automatically assume that if we failed, then it was because of some deficiency within ourselves. It’s better for us to leave ego out of the equation and simply say, ‘That didn’t work, so what have I learned from it?’ We have to be open to learning and that learning can come from the most unlikely of places.”
- Solve problems – “More important than anything I learned in business, I learned from my children,” he said. “With children, just as in business, it’s not always as important to be right as it is to solve problems. You can be right in your opinions or actions, but it may not always help the situation. Today’s economy is fraught with injustice, and many feel they are in the right to take punitive action against those who have caused it. But that doesn’t always solve the problem. My children taught me that being right isn’t of any real importance. Solving problems is.”
About The Author: Richard Gunther is a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune by age 34, Dick Gunther is an investor, writer, husband, father and grandfather; he is a man who learned to give. His charitable efforts have earned many awards and much recognition.
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