A leader said to me yesterday “why are we so tired all the time?” I think back on when I ran a restaurant. It exhausted me, and reflecting back and stepping back, I saw the errors of my way. My goal was to have a successful restaurant, but I abdicated responsibilities to others that I should have assumed and I didn’t give it 100%. So why was I exhausted? I focused on the wrong goal. I wanted to design a cool space and then do the cooking on Saturday mornings and marginally deal with the rest of it … in retrospect; I should have just got a job either as a restaurant designer or a short order cook.
Most of you know my dad was a driver’s ed teacher for 33 years. A piece of advice he used to impart to his students was “don’t focus just over the hood of the car to see where you are going, look further - focus on your destination and go there - otherwise you’ll find yourself in the ditch”. Could our collective exhaustion be that we are hovering too much over the smaller details and not focusing on the bigger goal?
You want your kid to be an awesome human, but you are completely spent and anxious on the fact that his room is messy … You want your relationship to be fantastic, but you just can’t get over the fact that she is a vegan or that she orders her meat well done … You are so concerned with having a great garden/look/hospital - you forget to smell the roses, you don’t think you’re good enough, you lose sight of the fact of that big picture; you’re awesome.
I think it’s time to refocus on what’s right. I think it’s time to welcome and embrace change. I think it’s time to be humble and acknowledge our deficits and celebrate our wins.
