How Fresh Are You?
by Bert Oliva
Last week, I had one of those interesting couple of hours where two completely unrelated instances became completely intertwined and interconnected. On those rare occasions, I often learn something or get confirmation for something I already knew, and this occasion was no different.
Right now in my Miami office, it’s mosquito season. Every evening around 5pm they come out in droves and attack almost every open piece of skin from your wrists to your ankles and everything in between. Mosquitos are just a fact of life in South Florida, for years we’ve just allowed them to dictate when we can enjoy our backyard and when we can’t. However, this year we asked a city mosquito inspector to come out and check our problem to see if there was anything that could be done.
The inspector informed us that yes, mosquitos are a fact of life, but the biggest culprit for bringing them into your area is leaving pools of stagnate water, such as buckets that collect rain water or fountains that are not running. He said mosquitos thrive on that kind of water. Thankfully, we didn’t have anything like that in our area, but it was good knowledge to learn.
Then, right after the inspector left, we had our weekly Friday staff meeting. We went through each department’s list of to-do’s and to see where everyone was. Unfortunately, there were quite a few projects that hadn’t moved at all. I realized that our departments, and a couple people in particular, were in stagnation themselves. They’ve allowed their projects to linger like the buckets of water, to the point now where their projects are so overgrown with negative feelings (like mosquitos and their eggs), that they don’t even know where to start to get the projects on the right track again.
My question to them and my question to you now is, why do you allow things to linger? Why don’t you just get things done when you have to? If you start working on things when they first come onto your plate, they are still fun and not overwhelming or full of negative feelings. They are just exciting new projects.
In all honesty, there are projects I don’t like to do either, but they must get done. When I say I’m going to do something and it gets put on my list, that’s it, it will get done. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. And my team knows this.
Start working on creating your own drive and plan for yourself. Do not allow things to linger on your list more than a couple days without any movement. Keep your list fresh. Otherwise you are just in stagnation.
Live Life,
Bert Oliva
Quote This:
“What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don’t change, you die. It’s that simple. It’s that scary.” ― Leonard Sweet
APR