STORIES

Ignorance is not always blissful. I, for one, think that we could use a healthy dose of ignorance. I don’t subscribe to the need to know every little thing that happens in the world at a moment’s notice. In fact, if you turned off all of the digital noise for a couple of days, I suspect you would still know if anything really important occurred. Since when did it become everybody’s business to know everybody else’s business? It just seems like we simply know too much . And yet it is possible that we are more ignorant than we have ever been.

We are hearing a great deal about cancel culture these days. I hate that people are trying to cancel others. And while there may be some legitimate reasons in some cases, my hope is that kindness becomes the new order of the day. The world may have changed forever due to this pandemic and we really don’t have a clear picture of how things will look. We can, however, choose to see things in a more creative way.

I’m not interested in writing about what a tough year this has been. There is too much “I can’t wait until 2020 is over” going on these days. The bottom line is that the turn of the year will not magically wipe away the virus or the political angst that has weighed us all down. We cannot simply flip a switch to happiness and joy.

In one of my recent podcasts, I had the pleasure to talk with Michelle Seiler Tucker, author of “Exit Rich” and founder of Seiler Tucker Inc. We discussed the mindset required to build a business worth selling but it was a little expression she shared that impacted me the most. In an effort to explain the difference between working in the business versus working on the business, she said “it is hard to read the label from inside the bottle.”

This pandemic sure has been a lot of fun, huh? It feels like we have been held hostage in our own homes and waterboarded with the negativity and venom spewing from every device. The heaviness of the moment is enough to crush our souls and destroy our resolve.

Note: I wrote this several months ago after Kobe Bryant’s death. The pandemic has taken a great many things away from us, including my ability to share these thoughts with you, but it cannot take away our independent will.

To be great at anything, it takes a remarkable amount of sacrifice and indescribable determination. In turn, the one unique gift that we all have is our independent will. We are not our emotions and we have the ability to choose our response in any situation. In fact, we have the ability to choose how we spend our time each and every day.