Adapted from a speech given July, 2007
Not too long ago, I was driving down the freeway and I saw something that made me wonder how we define success. There was a man and his pick-up truck pulled over just past an on-ramp with a large, dented tool box resting near the tail gate. He had apparently lost the tool box from the back of his truck while getting on the freeway. From what I could see he had successfully gathered most of his tools. But there were still sockets scattered across three lanes of the freeway. What this man was doing, as he stood there buffeted by cars passing him at sixty miles per hour, was timing them so that he could run out and individually retrieve these sockets. I began to wonder how he measured success in his life and whether I was any different.This is probably an eighty dollar set of sockets. Even if we give this man the benefit of the doubt and assume it is a really nice set, we are still talking about two hundred dollars for the sockets. Has he basically pegged the value of his life at two hundred dollars? Did he even make the evaluation? I think it more likely that he never equated the two. He has simply seen something he thinks he wants or needs and acted without looking at the cost of getting it or the possible risks. When I was an options trader on the floor of the CBOE in Chicago, we had a phrase for decisions made without due regard to the relative values: “picking up nickels in front of freight trains.”How often have any of us done that in some part of our lives; perhaps our work? We see something we think we want and we never really assess its true value to us nor look at the cost of acquiring it. Our only thought becomes success. We often end up missing our children as they grow or the sun as it sets. We forget the joy of being present and in the moment. Our heads are so buried in the struggle to pick up that two hundred dollar socket set – or that shiny nickel -that we do not see the freight train coming right at us. The moral of the story is this: Remember to enjoy the peace and pleasure of each day. No one ever gets to the end of their life and wishes they had worked more.
Filed under: LIFE THAT POPs , Success
