Orrin Woodward on LIFE & Leadership

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    Former Guinness World Record Holder for largest book signing ever, Orrin Woodward is a NY Times bestselling author of And Justice For All along with RESOLVED & coauthor of LeaderShift and Launching a Leadership Revolution. His books have sold over one million copies in the financial, leadership and liberty fields. RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions For LIFE made the Top 100 All-Time Best Leadership Books and the 13 Resolutions are the framework for the top selling Mental Fitness Challenge personal development program.

    Orrin made the Top 20 Inc. Magazine Leadership list & has co-founded two multi-million dollar leadership companies. Currently, he serves as the Chairman of the Board of the LIFE. He has a B.S. degree from GMI-EMI (now Kettering University) in manufacturing systems engineering. He holds four U.S. patents, and won an exclusive National Technical Benchmarking Award.

    This blog is an Alltop selection and ranked in HR's Top 100 Blogs for Management & Leadership.

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LIFE Adversity Quotient

Posted by Orrin Woodward on August 23, 2011

Adversity Quotient (AQ) is the ability to persevere through numerous setbacks in order to achieve one’s dreams. Everyone has the ability to develop AQ, but winners through pupose, vision, and perseverance develop it, while the rest do not. The LIFE community is a great way to start learning AQ. Here is a portion of the Adversity Quotient chapter from RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE. Enjoy. Sincerely, Orrin Woodward

Another compromise that leads to failure and despair is an improper response to the pain inherent in the process of growth.  There are actually two types of pain: one comes from the inside due to the change process; the other comes from the outside due to criticism from those unwilling to make the same changes. Hope is the only fuel capable of burning through both types of pain.  Without hope, either of the pain versions will trump one’s willingness to endure, instead choosing to stop the pain by quitting the journey.  Author Robert Grudin writes, “One might reply that most people who surrender simply lack the ability to get very far.  But it is more accurate to say that ability and intelligence, rightly understood, include a readiness to face pain, while those characteristics which we loosely term ‘inadequacy’ and ‘ignorance’ are typically associated with the avoidance of pain.” When the pain reaches a certain threshold, everything inside of a person screams for relief, but champions, people with high AQ, persevere. Pain is overcome through the continuous focus on one’s purpose. Moreover, achieving greatness will require a faith that can move mountains, an AQ to endure the rising pain in the process, eventually reaching levels of success that more timid souls refuse to believe possible.

Grudin elaborates on the outside pain given to achievers as an unjust reward for their quest for personal excellence:

Modern society has evolved an idiomatic defense of non-achievement so subtle and elegant that it almost makes failure attractive.  We can equivocate with failure by saying that we could not stand “the pressure”. We can inflate mediocrity by calling cow colleges universities, by naming herds of middle-level executives vice presidents or partners, and by a thousand other sorts of venal hype.  We can invert the moral standard by defending a fellow non-achiever as being too sensitive or even too good for the chosen arena. This double rejection of pain—a surrender sanctified by a euphemism—has in our time achieved institutional status.  Because it includes its own anti-morality, it can be passed on with pride from generation to generation.  Other ages may have been as full of non-achievers as ours, but no other age, I believe, has developed so comprehensive a rhetoric of failure. To conclude, then:  those people in quest of intellectual dignity and independence in the late twentieth century must act in a cultural context that has done its best to annul or camouflage one of the key elements in the quest, the challenge of pain.  For this reason such people currently labor under a double burden: they must face the pains inherent in their task, and they must do so in a culture that has little appreciation for their suffering.

Today’s achievers then, handle not only the traditional pain associated with excellence, but the additional pain associated with the envious prattle of today’s internet age non-achievers. Champions understand that it’s better to be mocked and criticized by non-achievers, than to become a non-achiever themselves.

AQ can be developed, but only through discarding excuses, rejecting compromises, and choosing to feed one’s faith, not one’s fears. In order to achieve dreams, people must willingly surrender who they are, to become who they dream to be. One cannot have his cake and eat it too. AQ refuses to surrender personal responsibility (what one desires) to an impersonal environment (what is offered). Bestselling author Chris Brady, in his book Rascal, articulates what it takes to break free the herd, “It takes character to be different. It takes character to stand apart from the masses for legitimate, purposeful reasons. It takes character to be who God called you to be without succumbing to the pressures of others and their ideas of who you should be and how you should live. For those who embody this concept and live a truly authentic life, we will assign the name of Rascal.” People with AQ are Rascals, refusing to be lulled to sleep by comfort, choosing instead, to pursue their convictions over conveniences.  Rascals pay the temporary price of pain for success, rather than pay the permanent price of regret for failure.

11 Responses to “LIFE Adversity Quotient”

  1. CJ Calvert said

    Brilliant article on AQ, Orrin. With excercise as an example, winners learn to program their mind in such a way that when their body begs for relief, their mind visualizes winning the Gold Medal and they are flush with pride for having pushed through. Discomfort truly is the merit-badge of champions.

  2. Scott Reinhold said

    This is great! I can not wait until your book comes out through system!!

  3. So many great gems in this short blog post alone… I can’t imagine how awesome to book is going to be!

  4. Steve Hartka said

    Orrin, you bring my daily information intake to new heights every time I read your blog.
    Can’t wait to read your book and share it with the few who wish to leave the 95% thinking behind in their own lives.

    As a great leader once said to me, “Bring it!”

  5. Mike Hellweg said

    Excellent brain food nuggets! The following line summed it up for me as the foundation “AQ can be developed, but only through discarding excuses, rejecting compromises, and choosing to feed one’s faith, not one’s fears” . The rest of the nuggetts in this post fine tune the character developement for me. Loving the journey and purpose! Thanks so much for walking the walk!

  6. Greg Johnson said

    Adversity is the nemesis of the non achiever.

  7. […] link: https://orrinwoodwardblog.com/2011/08/23/adversity-quotient/ […]

  8. […] separates the winners from the rest in life? It’s Adversity Quotient – the ability to endure the pain inherent in the change process. The Lewis’s win because […]

  9. […] separates the winners from the rest in life? It’s Adversity Quotient – the ability to endure the pain inherent in the change process. The Lewis’s win because they […]

  10. […] Adversity Quotient is essential for success. A person will never rise to the mental fitness challenge until he develops it. The formula for AQ is: AQ = IQ (Intelligence) + EQ (Emotional) + WQ (Will).  When a person combines these three factors, he has an unbeatable AQ. Indeed, I have never met a champion in any field that hasn’t mastered the concept of AQ. Are you rising mentally to the challenge of AQ in your life? Here is a short video to help you on the journey. Sincerely, Orrin Woodward Share this:TwitterFacebookLinkedInStumbleUponRedditDiggEmailPrintLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]

  11. wildtarg said

    “What’s killing this country right now is fear.”
    -Robert Kiyosaki, at a business conference in 2002

    “Hope is what they make faith out of.”
    -Claude Hamilton

    And what is hope? Hope is the ardent desire and expectation for a result better than the circumstances indicate. Hope does not come from circumstances, it comes against circumstances.

    Keep going, we’re with you…

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