Learning

How Overcoming Your Biggest Difficulty Will Launch You to Your Best Opportunity

Yes, I recognize that we are already well over a quarter of the way into 2021. As we consider how to move forward into the rest of the year, I have a simple suggestion for you this week that will pay off for you not only for the balance of this year but many years into the future. As with almost anything worth doing, it is simple, but it’s not easy.

Thankfully, as things begin to recover from a year we hope we will never have to endure again, we can begin to gain perspective on all that has taken place in the last year or so. I realize that many have suffered significant losses of freedoms, jobs, and even loved ones. I am not suggesting we forget about those things and those people. I am suggesting we honor them by how we embrace our future.

Redefining Failure as Merely a Setback with Opportunities

Welcome to the second half of 2020! Ordinarily the first of July allows us to pause for the fourth of July Holiday and evaluate our successes in the first half of the year and plan for how we will endeavor to accomplish even more in the second half of the year. But none of us have ever experienced a year like this one so far.

Matching the frustration and unpredictability of the first six months of 2020, we have no greater clarity into what will happen in the back half of the year from an economic, political, and pandemic perspective, among other things.  

33 Years Worth of Learning, Again

In my last post, I wrote about the lessons I learned from my dad. As I stated, the majority of things that I discovered, or at least the things that stuck, were learned by watching not what he said, but rather by watching what he did.

This week, in Part 2, let me tell you some of the things I did and learned over my 33+ year career working in the same company, in the same industry, and in the same office for every single one of those 10,000+ days that made all the difference in the world to me. Every single day. And it doesn’t end there, because I am still benefitting and learning new things today.

33 Years Worth of Learning, One Day at a Time

Last week, a friend encouraged me, for at least the second time, to write about my experiences and my lessons learned while working my whole life in my family’s business. For those who may not know, I started working alongside my father when I was ten or eleven years old, helping him pack and ship shoes to customers.

As I grew, I worked after school for several years during high school and when home on breaks away from college. I graduated from college on Saturday and Monday morning I was at work where I always knew I wanted to be, working for my mother and father in our wholesale women’s shoe company. I never worked anywhere else for a day in my life for the next 33 and a half years. And never wanted to.