As the sun set on Wednesday, December 5, I found myself sitting in a hotel room in a small town just outside of Pittsburgh, PA. I had been here for about two hours, just arriving from a meeting I was in that morning in Elkhart, IN. My laptop was up, and I had been actively making phone calls to existing clients and potential prospects since I had arrived, only stopping occasionally to look at the TV, which I had tuned to Fox News, catching the replayed scenes of George H. W. Bush’s funeral from earlier that day.
When I stood up to take a break and looked out as the last shades of orange were showing over the top of the hills in front of me, the feeling of being isolated and alone hit me hard. It was a Wednesday night, which no different from many other Wednesday nights is one that I was spending on the road out traveling to see dealers and work on growing the company. But today was hard to look out over those hills and not feel the sadness of missing my kids. Tonight was my 3-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter’s choir program at church, and there was just no physical way that I would have been able to make it. It was one of those moments in life where you know where you should be, but the stress and demand of being successful and relentless in your pursuit of excellence causes you to miss something yet again.
As the sun sank and those hilltops got darker I wondered, “Would my kids remember this when they get older – that I wasn’t there, or will they even know?” I then thought, “How much more stuff like this Christmas choir program am I going to have to miss in my life, and will they ever understand the price I paid to build a successful business and provide for my family?”
To me, this is the price tag of success.
There are four children and one amazing wife who understand (or will hopefully grow up to understand) just how much I paid along the toll road to success. It usually is easy to self-justify that I am not home for a couple of nights or gone for a couple of days, but December 5 was a really hard day for me to do it.
As the phone started to ring and I re-engaged myself from these thoughts back into my work and preparation for the next day, the thoughts never really vanished, but they did subside a little bit. I was moving myself toward the end of my day and found the last couple of phone calls were with clients who have also become really close friends. I shared with them the situation about being away while such an event was going on for my children, and they both said something along the lines of, “Oh man, that’s tough– but what you do is very important to a lot of people, so don’t let it get you down.”
I was down. But after brushing it off and pulling myself back up, I remind myself of the price tag and the cost required to create success and chase excellence.