“All good will be attacked” – Jim Rohn
Yesterday, I had just sat down to compile a new version of TaskBlaze freeware when I noticed that my shield in the lower right hand corner of the screen was off. I rebooted the machine to see if it was a fluke. “Nope, it has left the building. Ugh…” I knew what that meant. There was a virus on the computer that had shut down the scanner.
I immediately went to Trend Micro’s site to use their free scanner and it was blocked. So was McAffee’s and so was Symantec’s sites. What a hassle! The virus also disabled my firewall, automatic updates, Regedit, msconfig and task manager.
Initially, my reaction to this predicament was not positive.
I thought about how unfair it was. I thought “Here I am trying to help people and some guy who lives in his mom’s basement and has never kissed a girl is getting in the way with his stupid virus.” I toyed with the idea of formatting the drive but that would have set me back several days.
One of Jim Rohn’s quotes came to me during this time. He said “All good will be attacked.” He offers no real explanation why, just that it’s one of the laws of the universe. Personally, over the years I’ve found this statement to be powerfully true in its simplicity.
Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon were assassinated. People destroy good churches by burning them. Criminals can attack small “Mom and Pop” businesses by robbing them or shoplifting from their shelves.
Unfortunately, I have little wisdom for dealing with attacks except to say if you are not attacked as you work your goals, it would be odd. If you are overweight and start to jog, people may snicker and laugh. If you go against your family and aim for a career in music instead of law, your family may react with hurtful words and actions. If you open a restaurant, you will undoubtedly face attacks by reviewers who don’t like the food or service.
I am not writing this to be negative. No, I just want to point out part of the burden of achievement is dealing with the attacks of people who don’t understand or people who are troublemakers. In fact, part of my Achieve-IT! Goal software helps in dealing with these setbacks. It helps you anticipate the attacks and problems before they arrive so you’ll know what to do when they appear. I like to call them pitfalls. We must prepare for our pitfalls; otherwise we can become negative and give up on our goals too soon.
Regarding my problem at hand, I decided instead of bemoaning the whole Sunday and sitting around staring at DOS screens, I’d boot to a rescue CD and scan it. Then I’d go do something with the kids. Since my wife was studying for an exam, I’m sure she’d appreciate the quiet.
To make a long story short, the boot disk found no virus. BUT, getting away from the problem reminded me to pull a “hijack this” log and look for some inconsistencies in the startup files. Looking at the log, I immediately noticed a winlog.exe in the startup. This was the new Beagle virus. It must have slipped in before my virus definitions updated at 2 a.m.. A quick boot to Safe Mode allowed me to delete the virus and edit it out of the registry. From there, it was a simply a matter of updating my spyware scanners and loading a new Norton Antivirus.
So why is all good attacked anyway? Why do people try to hurt instead of help?
I’m afraid I don’t have an answer. But what I do know is you and I can handle it. People may laugh and ridicule you as you work toward your goals. Work anyway. People may steal from you as you do. Do anyway. In progressing toward the finish line, someone may try to block you. Progress anyway. Trolls under bridges are an inevitable part of the journey. They are by no means fun to deal with, but they make the story of your life more interesting.
Technorati Tags: productivity, gtd, Goals and goal setting, task management, optimism
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{ 5 comments }
Even harder to predict are attacks from within; involuntary self-sabotage, unexpected bouts with emotional problems like depression, and over- or underestimating your own ability to get something done. Not to mention unexpected illnesses ranging from a cold that wastes a few days to a chronic disease that reshapes your entire life view.
It’s good to think ahead about these sorts of things, and at the same time it’s dauntingly depressing.
Glad you managed to solve the problem at the end!
Next action: Switch to the Apple Mac !
… Grass is greener on the other side!
Good thing we’ve got the Mac missionaries to distract us from how hard life is. Point and laugh, and forget your pain!
I’m going to go re-read the works of Jhonen Vasquez now.
“All good is attacked” and “people hurt instead of help” are true statements. But so is “everything bad is attacked” and “people help instead of hurt.” It’s because we care more about the good things and want people to always help that we ascribe disproportionate weight to the things that go wrong.
But it cuts both ways.
FekketCantenel, thanks for your comment you make a good point. But I’d argue that we can still prepare for many of our inner conflicts. If we have a tendency towards self-sabotage, then during the planning stages of the goal, we can list it as a potential pitfall. We don’t want to list things like “I might get cancer.” Though if someone has a chronic disease that will interfere with progress, it should be listed and planned around. This might not make these issues any easier to deal with, but at least the person doesn’t beat themselves up for non-progress when they are hit with a bout of depression or self-sabatage.
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