beBetter 

“Be quick, but don’t hurry.” Those are words from the legendary leader and basketball coach John Wooden. Andrew Hill, author and former Wooden player, also recounts, “Life, like basketball, must be played fast–but never out of control.” Those words ring so true for us today. You see, hurrying tends to cause mistakes. I certainly learned that the hard way on a recent day off…

Growing up, my brother, Mike, and I had a lot of interesting adventures. One summer, we secretly started building a log fort tucked way back in the woods behind our neighborhood. I’m still not sure who owned the land that we were squatting on, but we teamed up with a few neighborhood kids and soon our fort plans started coming to life. We spent several days sawing, chopping and building our fort, and after about two weeks, we had four walls standing.

All I could do was laugh recently as this lady pulled up beside me at a stop sign.  As you can see, her companion has seen better days.  I immediately wondered what she was doing with this full scale skeleton riding shotgun in her car. But at least they had on their seatbelt, safety first! I rolled down my window to ask her what her friend was up to, but she sped off with what appeared to be a little attitude. I guess I was a little too lively for her. 

Full disclosure, this is a combination of both venting and sharing.  It simply drives me crazy when I see person after person allowing email to manage their day and destroy the power of focus and their effectiveness.  Email alerts and checking email constantly all lead to poor time management and reduce our ability to be outstanding. Email has gone from one of the most effective management and time saving tools to one of our biggest distractions.  We have too much of it and no discipline in how we manage it. 

It’s easy to see the sheer joy on my granddaughter, Dabs’, face as she enjoys her first experience snow sledding. She loves for Pops (that's me!) to come see her and I wish I could have been there when she ventured out last week to go sledding. However, I realize she would have had me on that sled too. 

One of our partners sent me this picture of his deck during the blizzard last week in Washington, D.C., where they got over 30 inches of snow in a little more than 24 hours.  At one point, he sent a short video and it was snowing so hard you could barely see beyond his deck. 

He was anticipating a big snow fall so he started shoveling snow early on, hoping he could stay ahead of it. He really wanted to be able to get the cars out if and when they needed them. But the snow was relentless and never let up and feeling overwhelmed, he lost his focus on keeping ahead. I immediately related to this feeling of being overwhelmed, although our weather had been simply cold and windy. You see, I was feeling overwhelmed at work.   

My wife, Cathy, and I had the unique experience of dining with friends at the MiniBar in Washington D.C. I have a serious weakness for food of all kinds. I love to eat. When I get sick, Cathy always laughs at me because I tell her I’m going to eat my way back to feeling good. Just try it, it works!  

To say this dining experience was a culinary extravaganza would be an understatement. The matching of the flavors, temperatures and textures was exquisite. I certainly tasted dishes that I will never experience again and the overall culinary experience was incredible. But this blog is not about food, believe it or not, it’s about service. 

I wish I could say my self-reflection was always a result of careful planning and prioritization.  But that’s just not true. Life has too many surprises - good and bad.  So, this blog is the result of a moment of opportunity that I was not expecting or even really wanting.  Today’s reflection is the result of being stranded on the runway in D.C. on a crowded airplane that is already 45 minutes late taking off. I might also mention that my connection in Atlanta is already very tight, so this could result in lots of additional reflection time.  

You may have read my blog, Why Do We Ignore Good Advice?, where I shared about my mom’s wisdom and how it usually turned out that she, in fact, did know best. 

On a recent trip to Maine, we decided to hike the Gorham Mountain Trail in Acadia National Park. I had planned to do my first Periscope broadcast on leadership at the top, but when we got to the summit, the cellular signal was pretty weak, it started raining and I took the opportunity to chicken out.

Recently, I served on a panel discussing sponsorship and advocacy at the AICPA Women’s Global Leadership Summit.  In this blog, I will share some of what I shared with the women (and a few brave men) who attended this exciting, informative and motivating meeting. 

For years I have heard jokes about how slow the public accounting profession is in being innovative or adopting changes in business practices. Odds are, you have too. My favorite has always been, “When did the CPA buy his/her first fax machine?” Of course, the answer is, “When the client called and asked, ‘What is your fax number? I’m trying to fax you something.’”

This week, I’m taking a quick break from the recent blog series on hard trends in public accounting (most businesses have the same or similar trends). Instead, I want to share about another hard trend: Thanksgiving Day.  It’s a hard trend because we know its coming in November every year.