Cherish the time you have. Many of you know this. My father passed away this year suddenly and way too young. This is the first go around for my family and I to go through the Holiday Season without him. I have had many friends reach out to me and ask me how we are doing. I have really appreciated their thoughts and concerns. In many cases I don’t know how to respond when someone asks me how we are doing. The best way I can sum it up is this way: It is weird. Sure I am sad. Sure I zone out thinking about him and my childhood and adulthood memories with him. Sure I cry. I learned so much from my father throughout my life. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without his good example. He always showed up early and stayed until the job got done. He was loyal to people and he was loyal to my mom and our family. I guess what I learned most last week going through Christmas Day and Christmas Eve is that we have to be grateful for the times we get to spend with family. We have to cherish those moments during the moment. We are all too busy these days to spend quality time with the people we should and want to spend quality time with. The Holidays are a great time to spend that quality time make sure you do it.
Don’t overstay your usefulness. There comes a time with almost everything in life that it eventually becomes not as useful as it once was. For example: Go over to your wall in your house. Do you have a place where a landline phone used to exist? Or go into your drawer where you store things in your house and tell me how many chargers or old cell phones you have in it. Or pull out your last CD you bought. These are all items that were awesome at the time, but as technology got better and time went on they were no longer useful. This happens to people as well. It is unfortunate but it is a reality. You are hired to do a job for a company. You do it well for many years. Then things start to change. As things start to change you don’t change or even worse, you can’t change. Maybe it is a physical limitation. Or it could be a competency limitation. It may me something you can change or you may not be able to change it because that is how life is. Michael Jordan can’t play at the same level of basketball that he did when he was in his prime. Is he still capable? Absolutely. However he can’t play with the 20 and 30 year olds that make up the majority of the NBA. He has had to adapt to become a successful businessman and become useful to basketball in a different way. This is what we all have to do throughout our life. Once we are no longer useful the way we used to be, we have to adapt and become useful in a different way, or useful somewhere else in the same way.
When there are too many cooks in the kitchen the food never gets cooked. We have all heard the saying “We have more Chiefs than Indians.” What they are saying in case you haven’t heard that before. Is that we have more people who want to be in charge and not enough people wanting to do the work. It is the opposite of this with too many cooks in the kitchen. When we have too many cooks in the kitchen we have too many people wanting to create menus, cook food, decide on what to prepare and how to prepare it. In both cases you must have balance. You have to have enough cooks to get the job done effectively and efficiently. You have to defer to the people who know the most and have a track record and experience to create the menu and do the cooking. You have to have balance with Chiefs and Indians as well. When you have too many Indians it becomes chaos like it does with too many cooks. You have to have enough Chiefs and enough Indians to get a job done. Too many of either one and things will slow down and may not get accomplished. For my own sanity I am going to only choose projects and partnerships where there is balance.
What did you learn last week?
To your success and your future.
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