While holidays, vacations and family time are some of the best days you will ever spend, they cause my mind to lose focus and it is a real adjustment trying to get back into the full speed of a traveling, working, selling routine. Some people like to tell me my mind never stops working, but that is far from the truth. There are times, especially around vacations and holidays, where I am able to unplug the wires and just let things be.

But this for me can be tough to get back in the swing of things because as things happen so fast, it is hard to jump back aboard a train that is moving at 90 miles per hour. Getting re-focused for me is a process and takes some time to maneuver so it doesn’t immediately lead me to a point of exhaustion.

1. Making a List – The #1 thing to get re-focused for me is making a list. It needs to have every detail or task that I need to complete and needs to be complex enough that I can have a visual snapshot of all that I need to do.

2. Not All At Once – Again, people who know me would think the opposite, but a big piece to getting refocused is not taking on everything at once. You need to spread out the items and do so in a way where you can achieve a lot of small victories along the way to tackling really big things. Especially as you get readjusted, you aren’t going to be at full speed on day 1. But work at a rate that you can steadily increase and feel yourself making progress.

3. Delegate – Even for people who are not good delegators, when you are coming off vacations, holidays, etc., this is a time when sometimes you are forced to delegate. There simply isn’t always time to do everything yourself, so picking out tasks that others can handle will free up your time to be better at what you are doing.

Without holidays, vacations and family time, life really wouldn’t be worth living. They are vital in so many ways that they are needed for you to continue dealing with everything that life throws at you. The ability to refocus and ramp back up after them is what takes an artform to manage.

The last 25 days have been weird. After living so much of my life away from home out on the road, it was refreshing and exhausting to have been at some since the middle of December. I love the holidays and the time spent with my family, but being conditioned to be out traveling and working so much of my life, I do have to honestly admit that it felt good this week to get back out on the road.

My time over the holidays was enjoyable but also had its woes, as I got very sick right after Christmas and it wasn’t until this past weekend that I got to feeling better. With getting older, it also takes a lot longer to recover from being tired, worn out and sick, which is how I started 2020.

But all that is behind me, and I feel fully charged up about all the opportunities that are at hand in the coming year. New clients mean new opportunities and new people to get to know. Also, with new things come new challenges which have their own unique set of abilities.

I’m not sure if this year will hold as many days on the road as did last year, but regardless, I plan on outworking and outperforming the efforts of 2019.

Work it. Make it. Do it. These three phrases represent not just our 2020 agency theme, but the motto that allows many to succeed year after year.

The team at our agency works with the endurance of athletes, the acumen of entrepreneurs, and the creativity of entertainers. Our scientists manage hundreds of data lists, our artists create thousands of graphics, and our authors pen millions of words of content every year. With this level of talent, it is still our day-to-day predictability in following processes that makes us succeed.

We will spend this year studying successful people of all backgrounds. From Thomas Edison to Oprah Winfrey, we will spend time examining what building blocks these giants used to create success beyond what many can even dream of.

It is easy to set resolutions at the beginning of the year. But it takes tenacity and vision to keep this motivation for all 12 months. To quote one of our featured figures, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “We do today what they won’t, so tomorrow we accomplish what they can’t.”

2020 is the year to Start Strong, Finish Strong.

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.

Perhaps the hardest part of my job and life is managing all the different personalities that are in my sphere of existence. The dynamic of having four kids under the age of 7 is a nonstop management of different personalities and emotions. Then you add on it my company which has over 100 team members with different layers of experience, where usually the most experienced require the most time to manage their different personalities and needs. As if this weren’t enough, then there is my primary role of operation, which is managing clients, which creates a whole different level of management of people and emotions. It’s kind of like you run on a hamster wheel at 200 miles per hour, and you find very little time to manage yourself because of all the time you spend to manage the needs and personalities of someone else.

I have to admit that I crave the need to be constantly involved in doing something to stay busy, but I also admit that it would be nice to take a break from dealing with people sometimes. (Going back to the second sentence that even when I take time off and am not working there is still the management of little personalities that are by far the most important to me). But as there is a need of mine to constantly be busy at something which is in my nature to make quick decisions, it is also tested over time that the more I methodically and slowly navigate issues between all the different personalities the better the outcomes will be.

The trick to managing so many different personalities that I have found is to never let yourself get too emotionally involved. When you let your emotions run faster than your own ability to be level is when I find the most problems occur. Catering to so many different thoughts and opinions by those around me can sometimes be equal to a judge that is hearing both sides of a court case. You try not to pick a side based on what you like, think, or your own bias, but you try to remain as steeped in common sense as you possibly can be at all times. (Doesn’t always happen that way). But I find the outcome is always greater when you have time to be level headed and think through all the different situations that these different personalities throw at you.

What you have to remember as you manage all the personalities that you deal with on a daily basis is that everyone has their own agenda and will sell you on why their way is the right way. And what generally happens is people tend to make decisions that favor those who are more similar in nature to themselves. The moral of all this and the situation I found myself dealing with today reminded me that a big part of managing is dealing with all the different types of personalities. And you will only be effective in managing these personalities as you are at managing your balance of emotions and ability to hear and see all sides of a situation.

This is the one time of year when, for a few days, there is actually a chance to sit down and reflect on how thankful I am for everything in my life. As I think through all the struggles, challenges, successes and losses, there really is so much that it’s a shame we only take one day out of the year to celebrate.

When you are constantly moving at a very high rate of speed, it can be hard to take any real time to stop and think about all the blessings that you have in your life. But sometimes, I am just thankful that I am so busy and able to move at such a high rate of speed. It is rewarding for me to be able to go to so many places and do so much and have a family and an organization that allows me to do such.

Even if there isn’t much time in your life on a daily basis. Even if things are so crazy and somewhat chaotic all the time, I urge you to stop and take a few minutes over the Thanksgiving holiday to truly think about how thankful you are for your life and all that is in it.

While traveling earlier this week on business I had such long flights to make that I parked my own plane and flew the airlines. All the flights were direct flights and the times seemed to really work for my schedule so it made perfect sense to travel this way to be more efficient.

On my last flight before I got back home, I was sitting in seat 3B. After boarding the plane, I pulled out my computer to read emails and send some things out before we took off. Working feverishly up until the door closed, I was typing, texting and getting everything done that I could to make the best use of my time. Then the door closed and I put my laptop up and took my AirPods out and sat back in my seat and took a deep breath.

About a minute later, I opened my eyes and the guy in seat 3A reached over and introduced himself and shook my hand. He immediately launched into talking about his travel, where he was from, where he was going, and after about 30 seconds I starting thinking to myself, “oh boy, I’m sitting next to a real talker and this is going to be a long ride home.” So once we got up in the air, I pulled my computer out and started working again. With a laptop on my tray table and a notebook in my lap, it was going to be very hard for this guy to interrupt me. But through the flight, I finished all the work I could possibly do and then put my stuff back up and opened myself up to more conversation from my neighbor in seat 3A.

The guy started talking about his businesses, which ranged from everything from computer software to underground drilling to operating a casino on an Indian reservation. And I have to admit that my bullshit meter was pegged thinking this guy can’t possibly be for real.

Then he quit talking about business and started talking about his kids.

He told me he had three boys ranging from 15 to 25 years old and gave me some of the most profound advice I have gotten in a long time on parenting. He said, “No matter what you do, tell your kids constantly that you love them, and no matter what they do, you will always be there for them.” He talked about how kids are afraid of things and how they are going to make mistakes and that no matter how bad a mistake, they are always your kids and you will always love them. Then he said more. He talked about telling your wife the same thing. That marriage is the most difficult thing you will ever navigate in your life and that as long as you tell your wife constantly how much you love her it will make your life better.

As if that wasn’t enough, he chimed in on the subject about how much time you spend with your wife and kids by saying, “I have made a successful career, built great businesses and amassed a lot – but all of these things have stolen my time. I’m sitting here being very blessed, but the one thing that I have robbed myself of is my time.” That’s when I knew that the guy in seat 3A was put there for a reason. It was a reminder that I needed to hear all of this and hear it at such a busy/important time in my life.

I think that I, like a lot of people, am guilty of taking things for granted. And while being chatty on a plane isn’t something that I can say I like to do, I think this was one of the greatest reminders of being sure you have your priorities straight in life. There will never be a way to get back lost time.

You may think that this picture is taken from one of those Facebook or Instagram sites that shows up from time to time in your feeds trying to sell you motivational artwork or posters (the truth, probably, is you need something more to motivate you because you are looking at social media too much not and focused on the task at hand). But I’ll save my soapbox on positive motivation and brag on my daughter Lilly Grace for a minute. This isn’t something I found on one of those sites selling the flashy motivational artwork and not anything that I created or came up with, but something that 7-year-old Lilly Grace Strong wrote on a Post-It note and taped to the back of the seat that faces her in Amy’s car. She was going to a gymnastics class that was kind of intimidating to her and she came up with this image all on her own and, without anyone knowing, went out to the car and taped it to the seat in front of her.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in a lot of areas, but for this one, I will take zero credit for this act of motivation. While I read a ton of motivational stuff and spend a lot of time working on staying positive, I have never taped a motivational note to my mirror, put anything in my wallet or kept something of motivation on my desk. I simply just have never been one of those kinds of people. My mind wanders so much that I wouldn’t focus on it even if it were right there looking me in the face.

I would never have thought of something like this at age 7 and certainly never put it where anyone else could see it. Like her, I was very shy at that age, but what I lacked that she possesses is a mode of confidence and a way to will herself to stay positive and not have a fear of things that are difficult.

In our Monday morning account team meeting, we had a quote on screen from Henry Ford which said: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” While it was on screen I thought to myself, that would be a great quote to put on the wall in my children’s bedrooms so they could read it every day and develop a sense of confidence at an early age. As I think of this note, that makes me so proud of my daughter I think it is my responsibility from this day forward to always teach my kids the power of something that truly motivates them.

For the last 5 months, I have been dealing with something very difficult. Just in a time when my life feels fully together with a great balance of family time, work and success at an all-time high there has been a snake in the grass that jumps up and bites me periodically.

By now you are thinking, this guy has some type of issue or habitual problem coming to haunt him, but it is quite the opposite. One of my largest clients –and even more, someone who has become a very good friend – has turned into someone so manipulative and calculating that I am not sure I can even recognize them.

I do my best to work 24/7, meaning I’m always turned on and looking at emails and details that it takes to run my business around the clock. There really is no work/life balance. But as I have gotten far better at it this year, there are still moments when you get sucked into dealing or seeing problems that arise. That is when this client always seemed to appear out of nowhere with damning remarks, comments so gruff that your father never spoke to you in this way even in your wildest teenage years. This would place me in a really bad place while trying to enjoy a day off or afternoon with the kids, or even the best yet – an email sent at 9:22 p.m. on a Friday night asking for a copy of our contract because they were so unhappy.

So on Saturday, September 7^th, I took a long walk in the woods at the lake with my son, Hudson. This was the morning after the 9:22 email, and we had a great hour together. We saw deer running across the road. Hudson picked up sticks and jabbed at dinosaur bones (really just a dead deer’s skeleton, but dinosaur bones sounded much cooler) and enjoyed a nice hour together away from the world, ringing cell phones and nasty emails from this client that I will call the dragon.

Well, today, after much anticipation and many days/nights of plotting my next move, I finally slew the dragon. And I did it in a way that was called gracious and eloquent. The dragon breathed a lot of fire for a long time. The dragon was a really good friend of mine – or so I thought before their ego, greed and lack of character took over. The dragon was a source of great revenue, but at the end of the day, I decided it was time to slay the dragon. Nobody is certain of the future and what it holds, but one thing is certain: that living for what you want and need out of life is far better than being captive to a dragon.