Ever noticed that whenever something goes really badly wrong, how you somehow manage to jump into gear and get shit done?

It’s fair to say that most of the time we are looking for that status quo where life just seems easy and a cruise, where you go to work, earn money, and go home happy, easy life.

Then all hell breaks out and the shit hits the fan, and you wonder w t f, what now!!!!

A friend and long term mentor of mine once said:

‘When the shit hits the fan and you need to get stuff done, think – if someone put a gun to your head and said, ‘sort it out’, what would you do first?’ Metaphorically speaking, of course.

It’s an interesting thought and one that, on the whole, I did not take seriously.

Then the shit hit the fan! Not once, but multiple times in my career, and it’s just happened again, completely out of the blue, completely unexpected.

It seemed as is if the whole world was about to implode, everything I’d worked towards was up in the air with no security at all.

Then… the words of another friend came to mind: ‘Nothing is as good or as bad as it may at first seem’.

So, what to do with these two pieces of information?

I remember the dragon, my long-suffering wife, saying to me ‘what are you going to do?’

Well, another thought came to my mind, something I have always said, ‘There are no problems, only solutions, and if you can’t find the solution, you aren’t looking hard enough!’ I’ve always lived my life by this statement.

Guess it’s time to practice what I’ve always preached to myself again.

Now I’ve always thought most clearly when I’m on my own. In the past, that was usually in the hot tub. But since I gave that up, a long hot soak in the bath was a great second best. It took 2 hours and 3 water changes and eventually, after mulling the problem over and over again, I had a ‘eureka’ moment. The thoughts and solutions came flooding into my mind, so thick and fast that I could almost not keep up with them.

I work best late into the night and into the early mornings, and by morning I had not one, but multiple solutions planned.

It’s still early days, but before the life changing problem revealed itself I was simply cruising; I had reached a point of, ‘easy come easy go’, a level where business was cruising, everything seemed so normal and I was seriously at risk of being boring.

That is all about to change, and once more I’m fired up about where things may go. I guess the difference between true entrepreneurial spirit and the norm is that, under these circumstances, normal folk would have thrown in the towel.

I once wrote an article for a magazine about body rhythms and life cycle, and how I had established, that stuff I did, worked in 7 year cycles. Guess what, this has happened at the end of a 7 year cycle, so I should have been expecting it.

The thing that interested me the most about this experience was how quickly I came up with, not one, but multiple possibilities, which in turn could improve my situation, not hamper it.

But these only came about because of something an outside factor had imposed upon me.

What if I had asked myself the question? So here it is-

If you HAD to raise an extra £300-500k in the next 12 months, what would YOU do?