Team and Southwest Travel
It’s official - you can ween yourself off your cell phone. Takes about 11 days of vacation and then it becomes less important and always at your fingertips. I’m surprised my phone isn’t calling the authorities due to the lack of screen time and some built in alert/concern setting. By the time I wrapped up the vaca, my screen time was done to about 1 1/2 hours - down from about 6 hours a day.
My brain is a funny thing. It did stop working business 24/7 (or every waking hour) but then it just went ahead and started obsessing over something else that had been pushed off stage due to the workload.
But what is true is the new team I put together is fantastic. I mean, like, Wow. I always hate complimenting someone too much because so often - like 80% of the time - when it comes time to course-correct them, all of a sudden they are like ‘but you said this and that’ (positive) and I’m like ‘yeah, that was yesterday and it’s not like it’s some free pass for the rest of your career and like duh both things can be true!”. It’s actually more true for the field guys than the office people.
But, no seriously, finally, I’ve built a real team, with a lot of overlap. It’s a real accomplishment and might just sit here and blow my own horn and pat my own back and struck my own ego, and shout out a few ‘hails to the chief’ because frankly, wow, that was a journey. When I got back yesterday, office and projects were in such a state of proper oversight I was caught up before mid-afternoon. That included some significant exercises that took real skill like prepping a house for sale, a couple of important punchlists, and a host of other projects. Plus, we had a ton going on across 15 projects and 4 counties, and frankly, it's all moving right along.
Problem is, it increased our annual overhead a lot - so I’ll need to be Chief Rainmaker (since I’m out west on Navajo land I’ll adopt native american title). I’ll know in the next 6 months how much business was slipping thru my fingers like the desert sand over the last few years as I shift my focus from operations to sales, where I’ve always excelled since I know my product so well, and my product is engineered and reversed engineered to meet the marketplace, and its ever-shifting whims and desires (sounds like my girlfriend, if I had one). It's actually a pretty vibrant marketplace for us right now.
This trip out west has checked the boxes- it was supposed to me and 2 long time friends from college but life got in their way so I went anyways. It was a loosely planned and highly successful trip/journey. Santa Fe, NM. Monument Valley AZ. Flagstaff, Sedona then Palm Springs. Such much changing terrain, culture, wealth. Me and my little Toyota Corolla, which zipped along at 85 mph+ on those western highways no problem. I tend to take a lot of 2 lane roads, but when I did hop on the highway wow you can cover some distance at 90mph.
I'm not sure where else in the world you can travel such 'short' distances and experience such a wide variety of terrain, weather and culture, but especially terrain and weather. Snow in Santa Fe, cactuses in Phoenix, 90 degrees in Palm Springs, and everything in between.
All the locations I enjoyed visiting, but Palm Springs was special indeed. As a snow-bird, vacation spot, I know the vibe since thats what I do, but Southern CA is a cool world onto itself. We were there during the week, just before the season really hit, and that seemed like a really sweet spot/time to be there.
You can definitely tell Lulu was spoiled while I was away cause I keep catching her on the furniture and when I left her on the bed (which isn't that common), she snuggled up high, instead of down on the foot end.
My shoulder is getting better. I'm 12 weeks into this journey - 3 months -and I'm still committed to twice a day PT and 'stretching'. I put stretching in quotes because when you stretch, you expect some 'pleasure' and positive feedback, and that just wasn't the case for week 1-10. Total pain and suffering like I've never experienced, and 1/4 by 1/4 progress over extended periods of time. Getting in a pool, and having some weight-less range of motion activity really seemed to help. I've been committed to this recovery, but I can see how a person less committed could really end up struggling to ever exit out the back side of this journey. It's a long process, it's a painful process, it's a fearful process since you aren't quite sure it will all be worth it and how successful recovery will be. But as the pain and discomfort subside, and mobility is back to 60% and trending positive, I look back on the last 12 weeks (the previous 8 from late August to Late October) and just say 'wow' - that was really something to go through all of that and not miss/lose a step - in fact, accomplished more in that stretch than most would believe possible.
But that's just my way. That's how you end up where I'm ending up, on top of the heap- work hard, work consistently, work persistently and never let a hurdle let you change your orientation for long.