You CAN Control Your Day
Volume 12, Number 43,
Issue 590
Recently, I heard someone say, “You can’t control the day but you can be as prepared as possible.” I disagree because I think you CAN control your day.
I believe that I can control my day and it is through detailed preparation and visibility that I am able to do so. The better prepared I am for each day, the better I am able to respond to situations that happen and to anticipate others. Through preparation I can bring about situations that result in my active participation IN events rather than simply allowing my passive participation while I am letting them happen TO me. By actively participating in events by planning them IN ADVANCE of them simply happening, I can start a reaction between related events by being an active participant rather than simply letting things happen randomly and then responding as best I can. I would much rather be a Fire Prevention Officer rather than a Fireman.
One of my least favorite phrases is “bad day.” I never have bad days. That phrase is one of several that is never spoken in either my professional or personal lives. It simply doesn’t exist. I have the mindset that every day is one more than I deserve and to that end, every day is a great day. If I don’t take the attitude that I absolutely and passionately love the challenges that each and every day gives me, I have then insulted the fact that I have been allowed to exist one more day. If I don’t make the most of each and every opportunity that I can in every way in every day, I have wasted that day, and to me “opportunity” means an event that I will create or bring about, rather than just participate “in.”
I have written a lot about “visibility” and “luck favoring the prepared mind.” Visibility means being able to look into the future—just like the weather forecaster. To do this, I gather evidence and then apply ideas and concepts that I have learned over the years through experience received in similar situations. I will also apply the principles of good professional management, but experience and judgment are the keys to success and there is no substitute for them. To this end, I always work to bring about particular desired outcomes rather than simply sitting around waiting for things to happen.
One of the things that works very well for me is planning out many things that I want to accomplish each day. Each morning I lay in bed detailing in my head dozens—often hundreds—of little things that I want to do that day. As I make my way into the shower, I am setting in place a chronology of events in the order that I want to do them. This brings order to a process of serving large numbers of people and successfully handling very stressful situations.
Before he retired, one of my great friends, Fred Campbell of Palm Coast, Florida, had a huge stack of index cards on his desk. Every single task had its own index card—no matter how difficult or involved it was. Fred took great pleasure in ripping up the index card once the task was done.
Many of the successful entrepreneurs that I have the honor to serve carry around with them a spiral notebook with hundreds of things listed in them. When each task is done, it is crossed off and usually two or three are added in its place. Periodically, the “to do” list is rewritten. Constantly writing and rewriting the “to do” list is a good facilitation exercise to prioritize order. If you have never carried a notebook around, try it. Don’t use a computer or hand-held organizer—write things down. There is nothing like the sound of the paper and thinking about every word to provide good thought and judgment time.
As a great entrepreneur makes their way through their career, they will learn to concentrate on “what’s missing.” For me it is often not what I know I need to do, it is what isn’t obvious that’s really important and I try to be intuitive about that. In other words, in addition to prioritizing and analyzing what is obviously before me, I have to think about what isn’t obvious and do that first. Doing this makes me highly successful in being proactive and actually controlling what will “pop-up” unexpectedly. By having the visibility to visualize things that might happen, I have actually controlled what does happen by making sure that it does not happen in the first place. In other words, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
If I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t obvious and interpreting evidence that suggests that something that is not obvious might actually exist, Murphy’s Law states that things will always get worse and what could happen will happen at the least opportune time. To this end, it behooves me to anticipate what might happen and put strategies in place to ward off disasters that make for normal peoples’ “bad days.”
If I work hard at doing the things that I know need to be done VERY efficiently and effectively, I can then spend time trying to anticipate the worst and putting strategies in place to control them. Doing both of these things is the extensive preparation that allows me to control the day. If I control what needs to be done and have done a good job at anticipating what might need to be done, I have, I feel, controlled my day.
To borrow a line from a car commercial “In life, there are passengers and then there are drivers.” If I take the attitude that I can control my day like I can determine the route that I want to take when I drive a car and where I ultimately decide to drive, I can control my day—I just have to map out my route in advance and anticipate accidents that might delay my arrival.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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