With every end of a year and start of a new year, you find yourself dealing with your own set of challenges. For me, there are always the challenges of which employees are leaving the company at the end of the year, which is a nice little middle finger from them because they always wait to receive their year-end bonus and Christmas present from the company (note: nobody every turns in a notice on December 1 – that would be too upstanding and proper – also known as the “right thing to do”). Yet, they all don’t mind announcing their quest for greener pastures once they have a little green in their hand.
Next is the challenge of me trying to find a little time to decompress and chill out with friends and family, which is a whole other set of challenges. As a lot of my friends are clients and even some family members, you find yourself standing over the Christmas ham talking about the car business and marketing business and it never seems to stop. Then, there comes the last little gas of year-end work that always manages to get done by 12/31 even though, when the bombs start getting dropped on you around December 26, they seem like insurmountable tasks. Also, these year-end mountains to climb generally coincide with you starting to get dealt a whole new set of issues to face in beginning the new year.
Finally, comes family and the guilt associated with thinking you have a lot of time to spend with your loved ones only to realize that it is cut so much shorter than you ever imagined. Every day, it seems like one child isn’t happy or somebody is having a bad day, so you limp through the holidays feeling a little battered and sad that you failed to meet all the aspirations that you had planned for yourself when you started them.
Now that the depressing side of this post is over – you wake up, knock off the holiday hangover and get back to the business of being in business and to your surprise, it is not only raining it is just pouring opportunity. The year has started with an amazement that only rivals a few years in the past with opportunity coming in from all around. Just when you exit the holidays feeling like you have missed something or didn’t accomplish all the goals that you set out to, you end up starting off like a rocket into the new year.
If there is one thing that I love about the stresses and the demands of my life, it’s being busy. To me, being busy is an art form, it is something that has to be worked at and worked at constantly. I am not productive and feel that people around me aren’t productive unless there is constant motion and constant action. This need for constantly being busy can drive some people crazy, or maybe they think that I am crazy, but it is a need for achievement that I feel is important. There is so much opportunity right now and for all the people around me, it just feels energizing. The spirit and will of people who are trying hard and willing to give it their all makes this moment of opportunity pouring be something I hope to always remember.
There are few times in your life when you feel a blessing of opportunity, and there is never a good time that you can plan for it, so you just have to enjoy it while it happens.