Sickness, Priorities and Goals

Sept 18, 2010

Dear Hank,

As you may or may not know truly successful people succeed and unsuccessful people (suck?) don’t. The difference is that successful people set goals. Really successful people also set objectives to be able to tell if they are on the road to meeting those goals. This in school of business parlance is called Goals and Objectives or MBO’s, which contrary to what you might think does not stand for My B.O. but “Management By Objectives”, which is the way in which upper management beats the shit out of lower management while smugly believing everything is going along fine.

Today I became a successful person. I know you probably think I am already highly successful, which I may be but didn’t know it, until today, when I set a goal for myself and met it. Yes. I can hold my head up high and smugly say to myself, “I am a successful person.” Why? Well, because I met my objective.

Oh, now you want to get into the nits and nats of what did I accomplish? My goal? My raison d’etre? Well, first thing this morning I set my goal and then I put into action my plan and although there were a few glitches I accomplished it.

What was it? My goal? To be out of bed by 10am. Oh, you think it would be easy but it wasn’t. We were up most of the night watching The Food Channel’s “Great Food Truck Race.” This is a very dangerous thing to do. We had three episodes and were only going to watch one. But once we started we couldn’t stop. Each episode showed these folks making all kinds of big huge sandwiches with grilled caramelized onions and French food that made you want to run up to their window and get some of that. We didn’t get to bed til 12:30 or 1 am. then we couldn’t go to sleep. It was a tough night. Especially considering we were overcoming some ugly nasty persistent summer colds that I blame on certain unnamed little children bequeathing to us. Those colds had us going to bed at 8:30 or 9:00 the last few days.

So today, the dog was really upset with us. His 6:30 am feeding was late then no one wanted to go upstairs and give him his allergy pill - wrapped in cheese.

At 9:39 Ricky the dachshund was whining at me. He had been fed. But the pill? What about the pill, boss? He was asking.

After one failed attempt to complete the roll up and out of bed; I managed to roll up and flopped back. Fortunately another pathetic whine from the mutt caused me to get out of bed with nine minutes to go. By that I mean nine minutes before 10am.

You may have noticed I never said when I set as a goal getting out of bed by 10am. Here’s a secret of Highly Successful People (HSPs); I’ll share with you by example. When I was up and out of bed was - The Moment. The Moment of decision, the moment to decide, the moment to set the goal. I decided right then and there to Set My Goal. Herein lies the secret. Did you catch it? The secret of Highly Successful People is to set their goal after they have already accomplished it!

This also has another advantage. All the business schools suggest making your goals ones that are achievable but should be a “reach.” By setting the goal after struggling to achieve it you have proven that both parts of goal setting have been accomplished and, best of all, you’ve achieved it!

So, Hank, there you have it. Had you gone to business school you would have had to pay $40K a year to learn this but from me it’s free.

Have a nice day!

Thank you, the management :)

B

Hurricane Earl

September 3, 2010

Dear Hank,

My wife was upset the minute they named this hurricane Earl. She knew it was coming for us and as she said, “Who wants to be wiped out by a hurricane named Earl?” I mean let’s at least have some exotic feminine name or romantic Spanish sounding male name, but Earl?

Okay, it just missed us and we dodged a big bullet, but I was glad we got out of town. The experts all said it was going to turn and it did. They just didn’t know when or where exactly that it was going to do that, and therein lies the problem. What if it had moved over a little bit more and we had stayed? Oh, sorry house under water. No, no, no, as Don Juan said to Carlos Castaneda, “If a big man with a rifle wanted to shoot me I would not come around.” Earl was a cannon aimed right at us.

On Hatteras Island there is one highway that most all the traffic gets onto the island. Yes, there are ferries but they don’t bring that much to the island. In fact the ferry station is at the south end of the island and most of the traffic is going to Ocracoke Island. The last inhabited island in this section of barrier islands until you get further south. The highway is North Carolina road #12, NC12. It joins the island via a bridge at Oregon Inlet. Just after you get on the island there is a section of road that has big puddles along the ocean side of the highway. The only thing that separates the highway from the ocean is several hundred feet of sand much of which is piled up into high dunes. There is this one low spot along that stretch that gets water almost all the time: big rain or high tide; the puddle expands.

We knew we were in trouble when The Weather Channel sent Jim Cantori to the island. They send Jim to the area that they think is going to get the worst weather. When Jim shows up you know you are in trouble. Jim was dispatched to Hatteras. If the fact that Earl was a huge hurricane with at times 199 mile per hour winds and the lowest pressure reading I’ve ever heard a hurricane having (830 millibars) then The Weather Channel sending Cantori to within a few miles of where we live on Hatteras Island sealed the deal. We were going.

And what did the Weather Channel report first? That NC12 was under water at Oregon Inlet. Well, that’s like saying, “It’s Saturday and the sun is shining.” And what else do they show? A policeman directing traffic. Did they mention he’s one of the ferry workers who’s motioning people to get off the ferry like he does every day? No, of course not.

At five in the morning when the hurricane was passing off shore Jim was out in the ferry parking lot kicking water. He said there was sound side flooding, which there no doubt was, but the water in the ferry parking lot looked like the typical water that could pool there after a big rain. You gotta love it.

A neighbor called and told us the yards flooded but not too badly; up to the steps at one low lying house. Typical, for a big rain with winds pushing up through the Pamlico Sound that we face.

Gotta go,

Bryce