This week amid the full speed, face paced life that I live, I took a little break to reflect on a major event in my life. Amy, my wife, turned 40 on Monday. Since we are a couple who, due to my busy travel schedule, spends most of our birthdays apart, I made it a goal months ago that I would be here for this one. With Monday being the big birthday, the weekend prior proved to be valuable time to get everything ready that I needed to for this big day. I had thought ahead and already had flowers ordered to arrive on Monday and a reservation set at our favorite place for dinner, but the little things like the balloons, cards, presents and cakes were items that I didn’t quite have nailed down.

So, the weekend was spent finding these items and enjoying my quest for finding what it would take to make the birthday a special event. While running errands and driving all over town for these, I used it as a time of reflection and made sure to think about all the milestones in life that have already come and looked to ones ahead. We both still feel and act like we are so young that it is hard to imagine telling people your age and the first number you tell them starts with a 4. Yet nevertheless, it is still quite an accomplishment.

It was a great time and a good couple of days as I had no travel on Monday or Tuesday of this week and got to spend my nights and mornings at home without the frantic mindset that I am leaving town and have a large list of materials to prepare in advance of leaving. It seemed easier and more laidback for once, even though the hectic nature at work didn’t seem to slow down at all. It felt great to take a moment out of the business and day-to-day grind to get some time to enjoy this particular milestone that Amy got to enjoy.

Even with all the hustle and bustle of a life that seems to – on most days – be running 500 miles per hour, taking a small break from it was good.

As the momentum of the year has really started to pick up and things are moving faster and faster, I am developing a deeper sense of trust in those around me every single day. As I find myself getting busier and busier, it is easier to let go of things that you otherwise wouldn’t be letting go of and allow others to make big decisions in your place.

Years ago Mike Strong, my dad, told me that people are never going to do things that you delegate to them 100 percent of the way you would do it. But, you have to accept that they will do it about 85 percent the exact way you want it done and be ok with it. Otherwise, you will spend your life trying to do every single thing yourself. This has been my motto for many years now, and my goal has been to become a master delegator so that I can continue to move at a very high rate of speed and not get slowed down by trying to be a person who has to make a decision on everything.

Having trust in others also means that you have unrivaled confidence in those around you who are in positions of leadership. In the case of my team in present day, I have never had more confidence in the people at the highest level of leadership and even a tremendous amount of confidence in the level of leaders who are just under them. This gives me the ability to move very fast and know that the people around me have my trust.

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.

While still gaining altitude – somewhere leaving Texas and crossing the into Louisiana – I am typing this last note of the year while traveling. Today is day 155 of being on the road in some way, shape or form, and unlike a lot of years past, I am not coming home to end the great December travel rush tired and exhausted. Even as the last few weeks especially have seemed really rocky for me professionally, I don’t have the feelings of exhaustion and fatigue that I normally have by the end of the year.

A couple of things that lead to this new state are things like a new diet (which I started back in September) and a new outlook on life and business. A dealer I was with earlier this month said, “This has been the longest/shortest year of my life,” and he meant that while it has been a long and tiring year, it has flown by. I don’t disagree with this statement, as while many things have happened this year in record time. There have also been some big hardships that just flat out make you want to hang your head. But, with a different outlook on life and business combined with a new feeling of power from a healthier lifestyle, I am eager for what challenges are coming next and what great things are to come.

In 2018, I doubled down on my investment not just of money but also of time in helping people. Human capital is the greatest asset that I have and without great people, there is not a great company and a great reputation. Great people truly make all the difference in the world. While spending more time and energy in developing people, I really feel that this has also made a difference in the lack of exhaustion that I feel and the harnessed power. My professional life improves as the people around me improve. My fears are couched as the people are who are around me become better, and life is simply more enjoyable. Even though sometimes my frustration runs high with people, 2018 will end with a sincere sense of accomplishment in the fact that I am better because the people around me are better.

But, just like everything in life, you do have disappointments. While I continue to write this note as the plane has topped out at about 37,000 feet and we pass through Louisiana east towards Mississippi, the thoughts of the ones who didn’t make it along the way and didn’t survive the year are also in front of me. Career Casualties are tough to deal with if you are a leader who is truly invested in the betterment of people around you, but they are going to happen, and you have to accept it and understand not to let it cloud your vision of the future. My dad always says that too many people fail in this world because they focus too much on a small little ripple in the pond that is usually an issue or problem, and they fail to focus on the horizon at all the things they should be focused on. I find myself in the trap of this sometimes, and while he is a constant reminder not to focus only on the negative, I still have to remind myself daily not to let it get to me. Nobody is ever going to do things exactly how you want them done, but you have to accept they will do it at about 85 percent as well as you want it done and allow them to sometimes surprise you by doing it better.

When you have a big body of water in front of you and your job is to watch over it with all your focus and attention, you cannot let yourself get caught up looking at the ripples made from rocks that fall in the pond. The key to success is to be the master of the big picture and not get held up on the smaller stuff.

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.

When I was growing up, I would get so tired of always hearing from my dad phrases like, “attitude is everything” and “you can accomplish anything with a positive attitude.”

Mike started telling me these things as far back as I can remember, and it didn’t even make sense at the time what he was talking about because I was so young. But, from very early on, the word “attitude” was firmly planted in my mind. Then as I started growing up through my late teens and early twenties, when things wouldn’t quite go my way, he reminded me of how having a positive attitude can overpower any negative situation.

Next came the beginning of my career. Then, a few years later, he and I started working together for the first time. As we were just getting the company “re-started” back in 2004–2006, some days seemed so bad and painful you literally wanted to drop your head on your desk and cry. But, by this point, we were reminding each other that “you can accomplish anything with a positive attitude” and once again that “attitude is everything.”

Some people see things today and may think, How could things have been so bad at one point that you felt such despair? But, when you know where you want to go, know you have the ability to get there, yet have no traction and no momentum behind you, it can be extremely frustrating when nothing is going your way.

While doing an interview about a month ago, somebody who had studied the company asked the two of us, “Why do you do the things that you do?”  This was in reference to things like the Big Oak Ranch Christmas, the “Holiday Haul” and other things they had seen online and read we do at SAM, and especially with a focus around the holidays.

Our answer was very simple. It is “An Attitude of Gratitude.”

Over the years, and thanks to so many people who have made this a fun and successful place to work, Mike and I have continued to encourage each other not just for us each to have a positive attitude but have an attitude of gratitude. (Yes, and we planned our phrase to have alliteration).

That is why we work so hard to make sure that everyone feels special during the holidays and at the end of the year can look back on not just doing great work – but doing something great for somebody else, like the children of the Big Oak Ranch.

I hope everyone enjoys their December, and maybe by reading this will help everyone understand a little more about our beliefs toward what attitude can truly do to a person and a company. And also why we feel such a need to have “An Attitude of Gratitude.”

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and this picture will totally sum up the week I have had and serve as a good reminder of what everyone should remember.