It’s times like these when I’m flying around looking out the window of the plane and reflect on the year. The ground is so far down that I can’t really tell where I am as the sun is starting to set on the day, but all I know is that I’m going from one place to another at a very high rate of speed.
The piece of paper is still in my notebook from last week where I marked up some of the company’s accomplishments for the year by going through all departments and figuring out how much work we did in 2019. The numbers are scribbled from one line to another as the information all came in at different times and I was forming an outline with my thoughts, but things like: 2,300 TV/radio spots produced, 200 million marketing emails sent, over $10 million in paid search and over 5 million mail pieces stick out as impressive numbers. But as I continue to fly, it is the search for what this all means that occupies my mind.
The truth is, I have been running this fast for well over a decade. And while the numbers I just read are impressive, they probably excite other people more than they excite me at this point. When I was just starting out, all that I wanted was to grow to have a very large company. With no real thought of what that looked like – it just needed to be big. Then, somewhere along the way as we were growing and probably stumbling over ourselves, despite how fast we were growing, my mind centered around not being big, but being the best. There couldn’t be anybody out there that was better than I was, and I would work harder and burn the road up more to be sure of that.
Then, just as fate would have it, when a few years back I felt we finally clicked and were both large as a company and better than anyone else out there, I shifted my view and the only real focus I had was at winning. Having always been mildly competitive, that started to change to be fiercely competitive almost to a fault. A friend of mine was comparing me to my dad the other day (who knows us both and has followed our careers) and said the difference between you and Mike is that he was more interested in money and you are more interested in winning.
So, as the sky outside starts to turn darker and night is setting in around me, I circle back to the original question, and it was, “Did I accomplish anything?” The numbers look impressive and those around me look happy, but it is sometimes a challenge when you search for meaning in life gone most of the days of the week, traveling at 500 miles per hour, what you are really accomplishing.