Things I've Learned in Denver (part one)

Life is What You Make it??

The sentiment that life is what you make it assumes you control almost everything. You don't. You cannot control a bad boss, the screaming driver in the next lane, or the rain that destroys your season's crop.
You cannot control your life, but you can control your responses. To draw a parallel, the secret to a perfect golf shot is not squeezing the club tighter. Counterintuitively, Gerald McCullagh, one of America's top golf instructors, advises his pupils to "grip the club like a baby bird." A golf ball travels further when you let go.
If you insist on trying to control things you cannot, you will keep squeezing tighter until something breaks. Focus on the one thing you can control, however, and life can change for you, literally overnight.

Life is not what you make it. It is how you take it.

Make Yourself Uncomfortable

An athlete learns that "you need to burn to grow."
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche learned a similar lesson that he expressed in a different language. "That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger."
Other have observed the wisdom of these sentiments, and have translated it as "a crisis is just an opportunity," or a related idea, "a failure is just a success, the details of which have yet to be revealed."
Everywhere you look, pain is the path to pleasure, and discomfort is the road to something richer.
Make yourself uncomfortable. Make the cold call you do not want to make, the confrontation with an employee that you dread.
Seek comfort and you will shrink into the background, and never accomplish what you hope to.