We Can Do Hard Things
I remember watching my grandfather and father when they were faced with a broken piece of equipment or a seemingly impossible task. Most people would have given up, but I never once heard them say, “I don’t think we can fix this.” Their response was always, “Let’s figure out what it will take.” That simple phrase became the soundtrack of my life. It taught me that hard things become doable when you believe they are and then get to work.
One of the speakers at RECON25 gave me a term for this: prospection. It’s the ability to mentally simulate future scenarios. And no, this isn’t “name-it-and-claim-it” theology. Prospection is about how our brains get ready to act. Picture a positive future—even one requiring serious struggle—and your brain primes you to spot opportunities and push through setbacks. Picture failure and danger instead, and you’ll start defending and resisting—usually creating the very outcome you feared.
Kimray just finished replacing our entire ERP system. These implementations are brutal. The failure rate runs between 55% and 75%. Most failures don’t happen because people are incompetent. The difference lies in how they prospect the future.
When you’re facing something genuinely hard, you have two paths. The defensive path sees failure everywhere: “This probably won’t work. We need to protect ourselves and have contingencies ready for when it falls apart.” The other path sees the difficulty but also envisions success: “Yeah, this is hard. But we can do hard things. What does success actually look like?”
Both groups work hard. The difference isn’t effort—it’s direction. Defensive teams spend their energy protecting turf and resisting change. Positive teams spend energy on collaboration and solving problems creatively.
Same effort. Completely opposite outcomes.
We succeeded with our ERP implementation by prospecting success and then working like crazy. Planning, hard work, mistakes, adjustments, more attempts. The exact pattern my grandfather and father showed me.
The past two years of ERP work taught me something unexpected. Prospection isn’t just individual—it’s the shared vision teams hold together. There were moments when parts of our team doubted. What kept us going? Not everyone doubted at once. When some turned defensive, others held the positive vision steady.
Leadership’s role was vital. When anxiety made people prospect perfection—which is really just defensive thinking in disguise—we redirected to the actual vision. Success didn’t mean implementing every possible feature. It meant keeping customer orders flowing without interruption. Internal problems? We expected those. Disrupting our customers? That was the line we couldn’t cross.
This goes way beyond ERP implementations. Marriage is hard. Staying sober is hard. Building a business is hard. Raising kids is hard. The question is not “Will this be hard?” (it will be). The real question is “How am I going to prospect this future?” That determines the actions you take today.
There’s a parable about a master who gives three servants money to manage. Two invest it and double what they were given. The third buries his, explaining later, “I knew you were a hard master, so I was afraid.” He wasn’t lazy—his fear-based prospection drove fear-based action. The other two prospected positively and worked toward that future.
Same resources. Different prospection. Different outcomes.
My grandfather and father gave me something valuable—not blind optimism, but a way of seeing hard things as doable. They knew success takes planning, hard work, and learning from failures. But underneath was something more basic: the belief that we could figure out what it would take.
“We can do hard things” sounds like a motivational poster, but it’s really just describing how humans work when we prospect positively and then do the work. See the world as dangerous and you’ll shrink back. See it as full of possibility, and you’ll create opportunity. The future you imagine shapes what you do today. And what you do today shapes the future you end up creating—the Bison Way.