When you are involved in a business, you will be acutely aware that certain problems are hard to solve. Some people just don’t cooperate, and some nuts are just hard to crack. What I have found in life is that will power simply isn’t enough. You need to unleash the power of decisive thinking. I remember meeting an Israeli guy twenty years ago. He was playing a game of ping-pong. His words were, “We gonna win and that’s final!” I’m not sure if he won or not, but when your back is to the sea, you fight good… or well (if you use correct grammar which Israelis generally don’t. Israel would be wiped off the face of the planet if they didn’t decide that they were going to survive and prosper. They don’t hope they will survive, they decide they will survive even if it is against all odds. So, why should you be any different in your business.
I had a non-business type of a problem in my apartment. There was a faint noise of a stereo playing techno. It sounded far away, but the boom boom boom of the subwoofer and the bass were audible when I was very quiet. I called security several times. They looked around, but couldn’t find the noise. They didn’t bother knocking on doors until I asked them to. The long and short of it was that I had to supervise each step of the process because they couldn’t do their job on their own. I am a manager, but why do I have to manage other people’s business? In any case, it took me seven calls to security to resolve the issue. They couldn’t stop the noise unless they knew where it was coming from, but the one thing I had a lot of trouble getting them to do was to invest a little time to do detective work to find out where the noise was coming from. After security talked to the guys above me, he learned that they also heard exactly the same noise, but neither of them knew where it was coming from. I went to all 12 floors of my building to try to find the noise.
The problem finally got solved when I stopped monkeying around and decided that I would get the problem solved that day. I would harass the hell out of security until they did what they were supposed to. I had to call them during the day, and again in the early evening. Finally, they got the noise stopped.
The sad part of the story is that this noise got so into my head that I started going crazy. I had trouble sleeping because of the noise even with ear plugs. The minute I woke up in the morning, I heard the noise all over again. I went so crazy that even when I was blocks away, I still heard the techno melody. I thought the sound might be coming from far away, but my brain had gone haywire in the meantime. It took three days for the noise in my head to completely go away.
The moral of the story is that when I was decisive about stopping the noise and decided to stop it no matter what, it finally went away! Maybe you should find issues in your business that require serious will power to fix as well.