It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault

It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault

It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault

Vol. 1 Issue #2

I run across too many people obsessed with the “fact” (viz.: personal belief) that they can’t get a “break.” The theater ticket is too difficult to acquire; the traffic made them late for the start of the game; the tax assessment isn’t fair; the driver alongside them hit the door of their car.

Stuff happens. No matter what your beliefs, I know of no belief system that posits some guy in a green eye shade and sleeve protectors keeping a detailed ledger of everyone’s positive and negative “breaks” so as to ensure a fair distribution. We have “life coaches,” silly enough, but we don’t have “life accountants,” unless I’ve missed a fad du jour.

We can buy tickets far in advance, or pay extra for choice seats if they’re that important; we can leave earlier and plan our time better; we can appeal a tax assessment; we can park farther away where no one is likely to park next to us. In other words, we can reduce the probability of bad stuff happening to us, and attempt to mitigate the seriousness if bad stuff should happen anyway.

Gizillion dollar missions to Mars fail. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is so late you can’t even track it with a Mayan calendar. The wind blows a shopping cart across a parking lot right into your car door. You step in a place recently visited by a dog relieving itself. Stuff happens.

Stop complaining about the breaks. You make your own over the long haul. The harder you work, the more breaks arise. Unless, of course, you’re too busy complaining that you never get any breaks.

“Luck,” said Brooklyn Dodger legendary general manager Branch Rickey, who brought Jackie Robinson into the major leagues, “is the residue of design.” How are you designing  your future?

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.