The Daily Mastermind
ALL EPISODES
Episode 839 · Sep 1, 2023

Adjusting to the Seasons in Your Life and Business

Listen

Life and business move in cycles, and the sooner you recognize which season you are in, the faster you can act with purpose instead of confusion. In a session from his high-end mastermind academy, George Wright III shares a framework for understanding the natural seasons of life and business, and more importantly, how to adapt your mindset and actions to each one.

George credits his late mentor Robert Stuburg with a core insight that anchors the whole conversation: life and business are like the seasons. You will have good ones and bad ones. You will ride waves and hit walls. The critical variable is not the season itself, it is how you respond to it.

You Cannot Change the Seasons, But You Can Change Yourself

Most people move through life wishing things were different. When it is hard, they want fewer problems. When it is good, they coast and stop preparing. Neither response is adaptive.

You can't change the seasons, but you can change yourself. You can change your perspective. You can change how you adapt to the seasons.

The shift George challenges you to make is simple but demanding: stop reacting to seasons and start recognizing them. Once you see which season you are in, you can take deliberate action rather than operating on autopilot. As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything and a reason for every activity under heaven. These are not just comforting words. They are a call to situational awareness.

How to Endure Winter

Winter is the hardest season, and it looks different for everyone. It could be a business failing, financial pressure, isolation, or a relationship falling apart. George is direct: you have to learn to endure the winters of your life.

The single most powerful thing you can do in winter is remember one truth:

All the winters end. Every single one of the winters end and spring will come.

If you make it harder on yourself by denying where you are or spiraling in frustration, the season stretches longer than it has to. Accepting winter does not mean surrendering to it. It means staying steady so you are ready when the turn comes.

Why Spring Demands Urgency

When winter ends, spring arrives, and spring is brief. George emphasizes this point more than almost any other: you only get a few spring times, and missing them is costly.

Spring is when opportunities start to appear. It is when doors open, momentum builds, and the seeds you plant now determine your harvest later. The trap is that people who have just survived a hard winter are often still focused on their problems. They are looking backward instead of scanning for what is ahead.

If you recognize a spring in your life, your job is to triple down. Put your head down and do the work. This is not the time for extra days off or letting your foot off the gas. The momentum lever available in spring is one of the most powerful tools you have.

What Summer Really Requires

Summer is when things start working. It feels like a reward, and in many ways it is. But George warns that summer is also when your discipline gets tested most.

When things go well, people tend to ease up. Others around you may grow jealous or critical. You may face distractions and temptations that would not have appeared when you were grinding. Summer is the season to nourish and protect what you have built. Keep pushing. All values, habits, and commitments will be challenged. Do not give up when you are this close.

How to Reap What You Sow in Fall

Fall is harvest season. It is when results show up based on the work you did three to six months ago. And here is where George gives it to you straight:

You don't get what you want in life. You get what you deserve.

If the harvest is thin, the honest answer is to look back at whether the seeds were actually planted. Two or three weeks of effort does not produce a fall harvest. Consistency over months does. The results in your life right now, whether large or small, reflect choices you made earlier. Owning that reality is not discouraging. It is empowering, because it means you control the next harvest.

How Adapting to Seasons Shortens the Hard Ones

One of the most practical insights from this session is that when you adapt correctly, you can actually shorten your winters and lengthen your summers. George is clear that you do not have full control, but you have more than most people use. We are our own worst enemies. We extend difficult seasons by refusing to accept where we are or by skipping the work that spring demands.

When you take personal responsibility, act in spite of your mood, and recognize opportunities instead of chasing what looks exciting, the seasons start to move in your favor.

Action Steps

  • Identify the season you are currently in, winter, spring, summer, or fall, and name it honestly.
  • In winter, focus on endurance. Accept where you are, reduce self-inflicted suffering, and stay ready for the turn.
  • In spring, act fast. Opportunities are brief. Drop distractions and do the work now, before the window closes.
  • In summer, protect what you have built. Strengthen your discipline and do not ease off when resistance comes.
  • In fall, assess honestly. Look back three to six months and take full responsibility for the results you are seeing.

Recognize the season you are in, take the right action for that season, and trust the cycle. It is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind, guys. Hey, listen, I've got a segment of one of our high-end mastermind groups that I want to play for you today. I think some of you need to recognize what's happening in your life right now and learn to adapt and optimize to the seasons in your life. So I'd love to be able to give you the opportunity just to listen in to one of our mastermind groups that we had. I hope you enjoy and have an amazing weekend. I'll talk with you soon. I know most of you and most of the members I've tried to get to know in the academy and even in our community. And there are some of you that are crushing it. I've got a couple other CEOs that are very successful. And then there's some of you that are like making great money, but it's a job. Like you just don't have any time. And there's others of you that are just struggling. And believe me, I know what it's like. You're struggling both with your job, your income, your mindset. You're struggling like eight ways from Sunday. And so this topic I want to talk to you about will apply to all of you. So it's very important you think about this. One of my mentors, Robert Stuburg, who's no longer with us, he used to talk about the idea that life, and you've probably heard this, life and business are like the seasons, right? Life and business are like the seasons. You got good ones, you got bad ones, you're up, you're down. It's like a roller coaster. In fact, sometimes you feel like you're riding waves in life. And the second point that I want to make, and I want to talk a little bit about this is, yes, life and business are like the seasons. They're changing all the time. But the second thing you have to understand is that you can't change the seasons, but you can change yourself. You can change your perspective. You can change how you adapt to the seasons. And the problem that some of us have, even when we're doing well, the problem some of us have is we don't adapt to the seasons because we go through life wishing or thinking that we had less challenges when it's hard, when it's wintertime. We want less adversity. We want less problems. Or when we're doing well, we're coasting. We're thinking, this is great. Everything's good. We're not preparing for the winter. We're not preparing for the fall. So most of us go through life exposed to the seasons, but we're not adapting for the seasons. And it's so important. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because you will be more successful by adapting to the seasons and you will deal with the seasons better if you adapt to them. And it's not always a negative. I'm not talking negative. Some of us just can't wait for freaking summertime. I'm one of those guys right It could be wintertime and I like I want the results right now Well guess what you not gonna plant seeds and get them in the winter It not how it works So Ecclesiastes says there a time for everything and a reason for every activity under heaven. These are universal principles that we hear and we say, yeah, I've heard that, but we don't adapt to them. And so what I wanted to say is I want you to recognize, I want you to really truly take a minute and think about this. It's the whole point of the academy every week is that I pull you out of your rut. I pull you out of your grind and I pull you out of all the good things happening. And you listen to principles that are universal truths. The key for you, the number one thing I've got to hammer home is you've got to recognize the seasons that you are in right now and take action accordingly. And I want you to think about this because I'm going to talk through a couple of these things. The reason is number one, you're going to be able to deal with the season better, but more importantly, some of you are doing well and you could be doing a lot better because you're out of season. You're not recognizing what's going on. The other thing is that you may be in different seasons than other people around you. Your circle, you got somebody that you're working with that's flat out crushing it and you're not, and you're pissed off and you're jealous or you don't understand. You don't understand why they're doing better and you're not. Or maybe you're doing well and you just want to try to help everybody else that's not serving you because you're not adapting to where they're at. So you can't change the seasons, but you can change who you are and what you do. So let's talk about that for a minute. You know, Robert used to say a winter time. What's the winter time? This is when you got to, listen to me when I say this, you got to learn to endure the winters of your life. This is when, yeah, man, it's just business sucks. You know, it's a COVID-19 thing. It's isolation. You're starting over. You got a business that failed. You've got money problems, or maybe you're killing it here. You got a relationship issues. Life and seasons, we're not going to get into the depth of the fact that different areas of your life could be in different seasons too, but you got to learn to adapt and endure the winters because you got to remember this. And this is so important for you to remind yourself of this. All the winters end. Every single one of the winters end and spring will come. But if you make it harder on yourself, it's just going to be harder on yourself. And so then you got springtime. And springtime, because the winter ends, it's going to come. Spring will come. You've got to take advantage of opportunities coming in your life. And some of us, because where your energy and your focus goes, your energy flows, right? So some of us are caught up in stuff so much that we don't recognize when springtime's coming. You don recognize when the opportunities are there You too busy focused on all the problems You not looking at solutions You got to recognize the springtime and take advantage of opportunities that are coming your way And that when you got to go to work You got to go to work because opportunities are like planting seeds. Opportunities will always be guaranteed, but the results will not. The results will not. And so you have to be willing to recognize the springtime and know, all right, I'm just going to have to put my head down and get to work. It's no longer about, you know, taking a little extra time. You know, we should always have the three-day weekend. You know, it's Labor Day coming up. I mean, we're taking four days off, you know. No, you could, if it's your summertime, maybe a little bit, but not if it's winter and definitely not if it's spring. If you don't recognize the spring times in your life and triple down, you are losing the momentum lever that you could be using in your business or in your life or in your relationship. And so, you know, where all winters end and spring comes, you've got to recognize when spring comes, because this is the season that can be very brief. These are the seasons, you know, spring times, it can be very brief and you only get a few spring times. It's like everything else. There's only a few spring times. You've got to take advantage of that. Don't miss the spring times in your life. And I think you might know what I'm talking about, Because some of us in business, we went through the grind, we're through the grind, and all of a sudden, something good happens. And we're just in the summertime. We're ready to go. And we miss the opportunity to plant seeds that we're going to harvest in the fall. Because we just, things went well. How many times do things start to hit your way? And you're like, all right, we're in summer. We're going to skip right over. You know, some of you do like to skip certain seasons, by the way. But don't lose those opportunities to work, put your head down, dig deep, and really plant. because then the summer comes. Look, we've all had summers and summers is when things are starting to work. It's when a lot of people that are not success-minded take their foot a little bit off the gas. We've been working our asses off in springtime. It's time to at least let the foot off the gas a little bit, just a little bit. But the problem is you've got to recognize that summer is when you've got to kind of nourish and protect what you have happening because summertime you're going to be tested. Your discipline's going to be tested. Your mental discipline is going to be tested. You're going to be attacked in different areas because things are going good. People are going to be jealous. People are going to throw out hate. They're going to Troy on social media and all these things. And you just have to recognize that that's going to happen. That's what happens in the summertime. But you've got to remember, all values in your life are going to be attacked. So don't give up. Keep pushing through. Push that momentum as much as you can. And then, you know, look, we're all going to be, we're going to all have those areas of fall in our life where we going to reap our rewards And here the biggest challenge I see with a lot of people When it time to really take advantage and gain the opportunity and results that you planted some of us aren getting much Some of us, we're going to kind of like collect our bounty, right? Like we're out there wanting to get results. We put the hard work in. We've done what we've done. But here's the problem. You don't get what you want in life. You get what you deserve. and some of us are forgetting that we didn't do the work. And so other people are starting to get some great things happening and we didn't. You will reap what you sow. You will get based on your results. And here's the problem. The results you're getting in your life as little or as great or whatever they are, they're based on what you did three to six months ago. And that's just a fact. Too many of us are like, I wanna put this work in for three weeks, two weeks, four weeks. I wanna go to the gym for a week, two weeks. You don't realize it's at eight weeks, at eight, let's say 12 weeks. You will get based on what you put in and what you deserve. So we're all adults in this academy, right? And you've heard me say it before, you create your life. You better take freaking responsibility for your life because the results you have right now are not based on anyone else. Nobody did this to you. Nobody created this for you. Everything in your life was created by you. And the sooner you would adapt to that, the sooner you're going to realize next time you have the opportunity or when it's time. Now, when you adapt to the seasons, when you adapt to the seasons, here's the beautiful thing about it. You can shorten and you can lengthen those seasons when you adapt the right way. Because I can tell you from experience, when you recognize the winner and you accept where you're at, you can push quicker into the springtime. Now, you don't have full control over that, but just understand that we are our own worst enemies. We are self-validating creatures. We extend those winners way longer than we need to extend them. And when we recognize, and it's like I say in the pillars that I kind of pull together, that's not mine, I pull them together. I create my life. I take personal responsibility. I act in spite of my mood. Those are not just cool words that happen to actually fit the poster really well. although I did tweak a couple of them to do that, I'll be honest. But when you take responsibility, all of a sudden that winner can flip on you pretty quick. And when you recognize opportunities, rather than skipping through to something that looks like it's a big thing, you want to jump into the summertime, you recognize it's time to dig down and work, things are going to happen. you

About the host
George Wright III, host of The Daily Mastermind

George Wright III

George Wright III is an entrepreneur, investor, and the host of The Daily Mastermind. Over more than two decades he has founded and scaled several multimillion-dollar companies and built a renowned seminar business that put some of the world's biggest names and brands on stage. With 25+ years across marketing, sales, and executive leadership, he's made a career of turning bold ideas into results — and momentum into lasting growth.

Today his mission is singular: empower driven entrepreneurs everywhere to master their mindset, unlock their potential, and live their ultimate destiny. Through The Daily Mastermind, George shares the Prosperity Principles and strategies that help people create massive change — in their business and in their life.

MORE ABOUT GEORGE