How Are You Connecting the Dots?
How Are You Connecting the Dots?
As I sit here composing this month’s submission for the January issue of JDT Unbound, its still early December.
2006 has been an unusual and at times difficult year for me personally. I contracted a serious bacterial infection while on Safari in Zimbabwe, and it took more than a year to finally get the right tropical disease specialist to diagnose the problem. It’s still causing me some grief, but by the time the Chicago Mid-Winter comes around, I hope to be 100 percent recovered.
Being laid up gave me a lot of time to think about things. My family. My friends. My business. My life. While I will continue to drive my business throughout 2007, with the same gusto I have for the past 25 years, I’m also planning on making the most of the time I have away from the lab.
The owners of small businesses, and dental laboratory owners in particular seem to work exceedingly long hours, and take precious little time away. Many of us have found that we are shackled to our bench, and unwilling or unable to delegate away tasks we deem too important to be done by someone other than ourselves. And, I’m afraid I see too many of my laboratory owner friends who forget about the real important things. The things we take for granted until we get some kind of a wake up call. The kind I got.
Like I said, it got me to thinking:
"Don't refuse to go on an occasional wild goose chase.
That's what wild geese are for." Anonymous
"In order for you to profit from your mistakes, you have
to get out and make some." Anonymous
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play
than in a year of conversation." Plato
"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
Tom Robbins, from Still Life with Woodpecker
You look at the picture I drew and notice what appears to be the dotted outline of a sailboat. Instinctively, you connect the dots. Congratulations, you’re the four thousand, seven hundred and seventeenth consecutive person to connect the dots in such a way as to create that same tedious, predictable and boring little picture of a sailboat.
If you had paused to ponder the dots just a little longer, you might have seen how you might connect them to reveal two swordsmen fighting on a mountainside, or the skyline of New York City, or a little boy swinging a baseball bat at home plate.
It’s strange, but some people might actually argue about what the picture is "supposed" to be. It isn’t supposed to be anything! It’s just a bunch of dots. You can make of them whatever you want.
What are you making with your minutes and your hours, the "dots" of your life? Are you connecting them to create the picture that you most want to see?
Or are you just drawing the same old sailboat?
"To live is the rarest thing in the world.
Most people exist, that is all."
-Oscar Wilde
Don’t be afraid that your life will end. Be afraid that it will never begin. Happy New Year, and may you have a bountiful, and rewarding 2007!
