There is nothing like a little deep freeze to
get your perspective in order. This past week, an arctic blast hit much of the
United States. It seems that the jet stream pushed the arctic cold that is
typically kept - well, in the arctic -
down south as far as Florida. I know where I live everything was just cold. How
cold? Let me say that inside my garage, where our cat eats her daily kibble,
the water in her drink container had frozen into a block of ice. On the other
side of my garage door, it was 40 degrees colder than it was inside the garage!
It was so cold that cars stopped working. I don’t mean they slid off the road
and got stuck in a bank of snow. I mean that they just stopped working – in the
middle of the street. Fluids inside the car were too thick to move. Belts and
gaskets gave way in the cold. My youngest son heard about an experiment where
boiling water thrown into the air will turn into snow in sub-zero temperatures.
He tried it and it works!
If you got caught in the deep freeze, I
imagine you had a few days of staying inside and breaking your normal routine.
I have found that when my "normal” gets changed, it is an opportunity to get a
new perspective on what is often overlooked or taken for granted. If you are
like me, you may have come away with a greater appreciation for the little
things that make my life run – like warmth, a good meal with my family, the guy
that plowed snow from our street, running water, a cup of hot tea after
shoveling the sidewalk and driveway, a board game that lasts hours. You get the
picture, right?
At this point in most of my Nailing Post articles, I
would turn this into an equation for business success and say something like, "take
a lesson from this January deep freeze and become the marketer of things that
are essential in times of crisis – like bread and milk.” However, I am going to
go another route here and just say that healthy people need a reality check
every now and then. In my case, it typically takes a major snowstorm to halt
all normal business to make that happen. Normally, I don’t like to slow down. I
am geared to run at full steam unless I am asleep. But if I never break that "normal”
every now and then – or in this case – have normal redefined for me for a few
days, I run past some of the best things in life. So let me offer a little
frozen perspective. You don’t have to stop running at full tilt, but you do
need to break that motion every now and then. Take time to read the comics in
the newspaper and eat a stack of pancakes. Give yourself time to do something
you don’t normally do. Take a day to come at life from a slower speed. Stop
yourself from rushing ahead every now and then. I have known a few successful
people in my life. I don’t mean they were good at their job, I mean they were
successful because they had a life that was meaningful. All of them had the
little things of life in the right perspective. They all took time to ponder
what was happening around them and expressed gratitude for it. Frozen perspective.
Learn a lesson from your change of pace.
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Photo by dmackieboy