No Bad Days Allowed
Hello and good day!
My oldest son Isaiah made an astute observation yesterday. He noticed that our housework always manages to get done right before we are going to do something fun.
I asked him why he thinks that is.
He said that everybody knows that if they don't do their work fast and get it done on time, they will miss the fun. When there isn't much time left, we have to work very fast.
A sage lesson.
A deadline always spurs on action. Of course, as you get older, you start to realize that it is very stressful to wait and do everything at the last minute. It is better to do your hard work first thing in the day and chip away at long term projects little by little.
Not to do so creates stress because you can feel that work hanging over you and you won't be free until the monkey is off your back.
But a deadline is a powerful motivator.
So is having a chocolate shop that is legally obligated to be open seven days a week. So is a cacao harvest.
It's funny. You'd think that being busy might wear you out after a while and make you want to just throw up your hands and give in. However, I am coming to believe that it may actually have the opposite effect.
This is purely anecdotal and an observation from my own life, and may not apply to everybody, but there is something to be said for not being able to afford a bad day.
In other words, having your life and schedule set up in such a way that you can't allow yourself to be off. You might feel off or be tired or maybe have a scratchy throat or a headache or wake up in a bad or sad mood.
But if your life requires that you be on, for example if somebody is depending on you, or if you have to go be around customers, you'll find a way.And if you do find a way to persevere through whatever you need to do, you end up feeling pretty dang satisfied looking back on your effort.
On the other hand, if you are tired and want to shut it down, and you have nothing on your schedule preventing you from doing that, you might find yourself overdoing the rest and becoming quite restless.
This happens to me on vacation.
If nobody has planned anything for the day, an outing, or visiting with friends, and you have a whole day with no plans, you may end up just lazing around in the hotel all day. On those days, I find vacation to be quite unpleasant because we went so far and spent so much money just to sit around and do nothing all day.
I can do that for free at home.
Or even better yet, I can be productive and therefor happy at home. That is just how I see it though.
The cacao harvest is about to get up and running and in just a few weeks time, it will be going hot and heavy. The holiday season rush leads right into the cacao harvest. No time to feel off or nostalgic that another year has gone by.
No time to pat ourselves on the back for past accomplishments. We have no choice but to keep moving forward and to tackle the challenges of every single day.
I say this to people all the time in our shops. Nobody told the cacao trees about COVID.
Coming into 2020 our customer base, chocolate shops and high end restaurants, were being closed down due to the pandemic and our market was disappearing. We could have thrown up our hands in despair, but there was just one hitch.
The trees kept growing cacao and we made a promise to our cacao farm partners a long time ago to always buy their cacao.
Despair wasn't really an option. We had pressure to perform. We didn't have the luxury of riding out the shut downs.
So I took courses on digital marketing and my dad built a website with a website designer and we tried our hand at e-commerce. And day after day, we hammered on the project until we learned how to sell chocolate online and ship it.
We had terrible hiccups with fulfillment in the beginning. We tried to outsource it and it was a total failure. The company who we hired was blatantly ignoring our orders. It was a catastrophe.
What did we know about e-commerce shipping? We learned it on the fly because we had to.
Customers were waiting on their orders and we had an obligation to do right by them. All hands on deck.
We couldn't afford a bad day.
The upshot to all that is we were able to create several new jobs and build a nice fulfilment operation and that has been very satisfying.
Anyhow, I am running out of steam a bit now.
Hopefully you have satisfying work to do today and I thank you for your time.
I hope at you have a truly blessed day!
Adam
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