Perspective

To start things off, blog posts will be shorter and less edited going forward.  When I try too hard to make every post epic, I end up never having time to write them and the product is no posts at all.

So that is how I want to start this post, with the fact that I am insanely busy and never have time to sit down and write out the many thoughts flying through my head.  I know that most people would rather be busy than bored, but when being busy only allows you to sleep 4 or 5 hours a night, being busy gets old very quickly.  Blame it on my southern tendencies or my desire to take on 1,000 new hobbies, but I have personally always viewed being busy as a bad thing.  Then today my pastor challenged me to try to see God more in my everyday life, and to make sure that I view trials from the correct perspective: with an attitude of gratitude.

My pastor, Pete, told a story today about how we all complain about traffic caused by road construction, but rarely are people grateful that we have such smooth and safe roads to travel on.  This review of perspective struck me, since I tend to be a very critical and not overly joyous person.  I always blame it on the fact that I'm a trained consultant, and that I spend 50 or 60 hours a week trying to find broken things that I can fix.  I've come to realize that is a cop out.

What I am struggling with now is the idea of being busy.  I hate it.  I want flexibility to do the things I want to do, I want to sleep in and spend hours playing with my dog in the middle of the day, but alas, my three jobs don't allow too much time.  Up until now I have viewed all of these jobs as burdens, but my goal now is to see these opportunities as the blessings that they are.  I have been blessed with not only a great full time job that allows me to provide for my family, but also the opportunity to build two businesses on the side with awesome people that allows me to pursue my passions in the long term.

Now anyone who has started a business knows what I am talking about.  It is a terrible endeavor for the rookie entrepreneur.  There is so much paperwork and so many regulations that normal people have never heard of, and you spend so much time doing non-value added work that it is easy to lose sight of the goal.  Changing my perspective to enjoy those tedious tasks seems like a fools errand, until I put it into a much broader perspective.  Not only am I blessed to have the intellectual and financial resources to start my own business, but I also am blessed to live in a country that allows me to own that business.  I am also blessed to live in an economy that, while seemingly eternally sluggish, still is able to reward hard work and good ideas.  There are millions of people who would do anything to be able to start a business doing what they love, and something tells me that they would not complain much about all the paper work, taxes and fees along the way.

My goal is to try to have a bit of a broader perspective on things before I complain in the future, so that I am able to see just how blessed I am.  And the fact that I feel like I am one of the most blessed people on earth is bound to make this that much more interesting of a task.  More to come on how awesome our life is, but feel free to read back in time to get an idea.