Happy Sunday Everyone (kind of):
Wow, wow, wow….It’s kind of a weird thing when my dad, who has seen a lot in his 75 years, is telling my boys at dinner “you need to remember this boys, we’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetime”. He was speaking more of the global shutdown than the virus itself. He’s not an alarmist or a story teller beyond the facts, so to hear him say that made me pause and take note. I’m sure everyone is in a similar place with school, sports, group activities, work from home memos….the world is crazy right now. With that said I’d like to think in our own ways, we can add to the chaos, or we can somehow, some way, help create some calmness to it all. I fully acknowledge it’s easy for me to say as I currently don’t believe I know anyone that has the virus…but what’s the alternative, to act like everyone around me does? From a quarantine perspective, perhaps, for what I do with the time that I have, no!
Our boys are fired up for this brief moment, school is out, sports are cancelled, and there are a lot of excuses to do nothing, which from my perceptive, adds to the chaos. I know I’m not the first one to mention this but the best comparison is the famous “snow day” that we all wished for growing up. I lived in upstate NY for a few years and when you had a snow day it was a great excuse to do nothing. This whole thing right now is not a snow day. I wish it was…..my adult snow day….get a run in the morning, smoke meats all day, wine sampling, postpone any difficult thought/action, watch movies….maybe have 1 or 2 friends over. As I type, and as I’m sure you read, we’re all thinking “that sounds pretty freaking good to me”, and it does…for a moment.
I was running yesterday morning thinking about all of this. Thinking about the last week, which anyone of us in the mortgage business knows was a cluster of epic proportions, thinking about everything in the world shutting down, and thinking about all of my excuses to do nothing. Thinking also about the week ahead and what that’s going to look like. Then I had a moment of clarity. I was thinking about my run, and the fact that I had skipped running the last 4 days because of my work excuses. I imagined that if I was competing against other runners who hadn’t skipped the last 4 days, and then I wanted to reengage, I’d be 16 miles behind them. 16 miles is a lot of ground to make up when you’re running. So I equated this to my work life, my competition out there and the fact that a lot of them are making excuses to do nothing right now. The thought of the work I’m putting in right now, and the more focused I can be, the more I’m catching up to some and leaving others in the dust. When I think of my allocation of time like this the more I want to focus on the task at hand vs. the ease of the excuse.
The excuses are plentiful right now, for all of us, but I think about how we can collectively push toward some calmness. For me, I feel the most anxiety when I use excuses to do nothing, when I don’t have a plan, and when I’m not prepared. I feel the most calm when I do my life well, when I get the job done well, when I prepare well, when I treat my body well, when I do my morning routine well, when I treat those around me well. This is the thought process that helps me get out of the excuse zone and into some sense of calmness.
This too shall pass. When it does, those of us that stayed in control and continued to get the job done well, will be in a far better position than those that took advantage of the excuses to be stagnant and do nothing with the time provided to them.