The Client Letter
March 11, 2013
Way North of Lake Wobegon
Cloudy 27 Degrees
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Yesterday we attended our first ever sled dog race… My oldest girls took a liking to the team you see there in the picture.
If you’ve never heard 30 teams of 8 sled dogs getting excited, it’s quite a sound.
And talking to the mushers really gave me some interesting insight about this whole world I only knew to exist in books like Call of the Wild.
I can’t imagine what’s required to get 8 dogs to stand on a starting line waiting for a countdown, but they do it.
Some are jumping, others are fidgeting or barking or howling… they are clearly excited about doing what they love to do.
Once the countdown hits 0, however, that team is off and the sound disappears. They settle into the zone and they do the work.
We the people are just like this too.
We’re full of energy. Maybe it’s excitement, maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s some flavor of anxiety that’s somewhere in between.
But sadly, a lot of us never move off that starting line.
We say we’re going to, but we don’t.
We have no idea that in that first step out of the gate is where freedom is found. We have no idea what liberation comes from committing to the work.
And so we fidget, and we howl and bark and pace…
We invest a lot of energy getting ready to get ready to go.
The longer we stand the worse it gets. Soon we start making up stories about why we’re just standing there.
People start looking… “Why is he just standing there?” they say.
And still, we stand. The longer we stand, the farther away taking that first step seems to get.
Here’s the truth: You can accomplish more in the next 30 days than you’ve accomplished in the past 6 months.
Want to prove it to yourself?
If you’re ready, there is help available.
No one cares if you do this. But people may suffer if you don’t. Because instead of sharing the value you are meant to share with the world, you’ll be standing there, on the starting line.
In the interest of full disclosure, there was one serious drawback to the sled race over the weekend.
Unfortunately (for me), it provided physical proof to my wife (the dog lover), that in some circles, owning 60 dogs is actually quite normal.
Wish me luck.