ball dropping

I’ve said before that JBS and I have a lot of things about us, our lives, and our families that make us different. Things that in other times or places might make being good friends kind of difficult. But isn’t it funny how meeting here, in the blogosphere, in this virtual way, can make our similarities so much more striking and magnetic than our differences?

She and I, we both have kids that we tirelessly fret over. We both deal with guilt. We both have darkness in our minds sometimes, and we both fight like mad to stay in the light. We have spouses that have gone with us to hell and back. We have so many blessings, but I think that we both occasionally need a nudge to remember that.

I’m here today at her place to help her out. She’s got a lot on her plate, as we all do, but hers is especially heaping right now. Over the months that she and I have grown to be friends, she’s heard me say over and over “you can only do what you can do. Just take a look at what you’ve got going on in a day and decide which ball it is that you’re going to drop.”

So she graciously gave me the keys to her castle and here I am to help fill her corner of the internet with a word or two. And the ball-dropping thing? That’s what I want to talk about today.

A little story about me is that back in the days before kids, I spent five years working for an educational company where the job was crazy impossible, but where I worked for the world’s best boss. A boss that really invested himself in developing me. A boss that taught me things that even now I reflect on and quote and implement in my life. And one of those lessons is the ball-dropping one.

It’s no secret that I am a total stresscase. Anxiety up the wazoo. And feelings that kind of mimic anxiety? Feelings like excitement or elation or anticipation? Well, they can make me feel really anxious, too. Because the tension and the rapid heart rate and the heightened emotion is all similar. Too similar for me, because my brain just can’t distinguish between the different kinds of intensity. On the one hand, I love flavor. But on the other? Vanilla is delicious, too.

But my work environment for that five years was anything but vanilla. It was one of those places that was one big busy season. And I struggled sometimes to be able to manage it all. To balance my innate need to be an overachiever with my also innate inability to handle anxiety like a normal person.

And my boss recognized it.

And one day he sat me down and he said this:

In this environment, there will always be a million balls to keep in the air. The operational ones. The marketing ones. The sales ones. Every single day there will be people coming at you from everywhere needing something from you. Needing it now. Needing it to be better than last month or last year. You are under a constant microscope and your will always be counted on to produce.

But between you and me, the thing that shows me how valuable you are to this company and to my team is not that you complete every single task every single day better than anyone else. It’s that you have the ability to prioritize. That you can decide, and decide well, which is the ball that can be dropped today. That’s the skill that will take you far in this company.

It’s also a skill that has taken me far in life. It is the single most important piece of advice I have ever received, and pretty much the basis of any advice I have ever given. It’s not about doing everything perfect all the time. It’s about having the ability to decide which things you just aren’t going to be able to get to right now, and going from there.

JBS, you’ve got a heaping full plate. I think I speak for The Blogosphere when I say we’re okay with being the dropped ball for right now. We’ll miss you. But we’ll be here when it’s a good time for you to put us back in the air again.

Until then, I’ve got the keys. And I can let myself in and take care of things here anytime you need me.

*photo credit