A bolt of lightning sounds a little bit like a mortar explosion at close range. It’s one of those sounds that you can never really brace yourself for, no matter how long you have lived in Florida and how many thousands of smaller strikes you’ve sat through over the course of two and a half decades.

There is something very human about the way people react to lightning. Something that has a lot more to do with the lizard brain that keeps Lions from eating us than the higher functions that keep us reading blog posts and chatting about online communities.

But I digress, back to the show.

First comes the flash, the entire world goes white, and briefly you wonder whether it was a such a good idea to go out for lunch in what you are now convinced must be a tropical storm; an instant later comes the bang and if you’re like me that’s right around the point when the answer to your first question becomes obvious and you jump about ten feet in the air and smash your head against the roof of your car.

What follows this carnage?

Silence.

Why? Because at the end of the day, 99% of lightning strikes are completely harmless — light and sound and fury that as the bard once said, signifies nothing.

Business in all its incarnations is, at its core, a series of lightning strikes. Things break in fantastic and often dramatic ways. You will lose far more often than you’ll win, and unfortunately for your shattered nerves those wins will come far more quietly than the losses.

Knowing this is true, the trick is to avoid one of the biggest mistakes that people make when faced with one of these mini-explosions — panic. If you jump at every sound, you are going to make a lot of bad, knee-jerk decisions (and give yourself quite a headache), if you realize that 99% of problems are solvable with the right application of good judgment and hard work — you’ll be able to ride out the storm and come out the other side a stronger and more capable entrepreneur.

This is a lesson brought to you by the bottle of Advil sitting by my desk.

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