What Would I Tell My 22-Year-Old Self

A lot of times I have been in business situations where I look around and I think: “They must know something I don’t know, because they’re doing it this way instead of that way.” But yet when I would step back and look at things, it didn’t make sense to me – there were always better ways to do things. Each time I would step back and look from one of those situations and scratched my head, it had to be because I didn’t understand what they were doing.

But as I went through life, I began to realize I wasn’t missing anything. It was they who didn’t have a clue to what was going on, or worse – they were stuck in a rut or thought “this is the way we’ve always done it, there can’t be another way that works,” when I could clearly see there was.

Looking back, hindsight is always 20/20. But if I could go back and tell my 22-year-old Hayzlett self anything, it would be this: If it was in my gut, and that’s what I really thought, then I should never give that up. I should never step away from that, and I should keep striving to ask the questions in order to drive the point and to get to where I want to go, regardless of what others were telling me. I can’t tell you the number of times I would sit in a room, “Someone should do something about this!” and I realized the only person who could do that was me.

The other thing I would tell myself? Eat more bacon; it really doesn’t hurt you.