small & smart

It's a Saturday morning and a family of four - husband, two sons, and a wife - are getting ready to go to the zoo. They've been planning this the whole week, the boys are excited as only young boys can be, and the whole day is going to be one amazing adventure for all of them. They'll have a picnic lunch, they'll see tigers and there are other things they have scheduled. Everyone is fired up and their good mood is palatable.

A phone rings.

It's husband's job calling.

Apparently there is a crisis in the company he runs and one of the biggest deals of the year might fall through if he doesn't come and fix it.

From here the story can go one of two ways, depending if the husband in question is a small, weak man or if he is a smart one.

A small, weak man will make excuses to the family, he will explain to them that he must, that he will make up, that there's no other way, and that he is doing it for them, for the boys and wife. And he will also think that he did a good job at explaining that. At the end of the day he is a salesman.

The boys will be disappointed for a bit but they'll get over it somehow between seeing tigers and having tuna sandwiches at lunch. In the evening, with sparks in their eyes they will tell their dad about everything they’ve seen in the zoo and on the surface it will all look ok, like there is no big deal. But in the long run those boys will grow up, like their father, small, weak, with no standards, no principles. And just like their father they will continue disappointing their own families in the name of a better future for those they disappoint.

On the other side of town, in a family with a strong, smart man, a man with clear priorities and integrity and standards the story would go differently.

It will go differently because a smart man knows that big deals come and go, none of them is ever really dead, and they're not more important than family. A smart man knows that succeeding at work and everywhere else while filling at home is no success at all.

Smart man knows that his kids don't want his money, they want his attention and time with him.

A smart man, if that phone call would happen to him, would delegate whatever he could, he would entrust the deal to his co-workers, and without a sign of worry or concern about the financial future of the company or his own, he'd spend the day with kids and his wife.

Deals, jobs, money - you can always get bigger, new, more.?

A childhood - that thing happens only once.