I worked with an insurance company for 14 years with a company that was founded and built by a man name Howard Lewis. He started the company when he was 40, leveraged all of his assets, and took out a $17 million loan to start an insurance company from scratch. It was a bold move for a man that grew up the youngest of 8 kids in a home with dirt floors in rural Kentucky. He went on to build a billion dollar company over the next 30 years and recently retired after selling his company to a publicly traded company. Howard was always incredibly humble and treated all of his staff and sales people the same as family. He continually challenged us in our thinking and one of the deeper questions he would regularly ask is: "What is life teaching you right now?" I have always appreciated the depth of this question because it forces you to take stock of recent events, notice your responses to those events, and encourages you to take action. We are living in a time right now that is very surreal, and it's almost like living in a movie. We are all mostly on house arrest, and there is no war or hurricane but yet all of our lives have come to a virtual standstill. There are certainly a lot of things happening right now that we can't control, and the future is a bit unknown. However, we have the power and ability to continue to focus on the things that we can control. Using this time to reflect and learn from the challenges that have been presented to us will be one of the ways in which we come out of the other side of this bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter than we were before. Life is teaching me right now the importance of living day to day. It's teaching me to be creative in how we spend time as a family (we have invested and upgraded our tennis gear and have been practicing each day), to be strategic with how and when we interact with the world, and to be flexible in our schedules--all plans are soft at this point. And no, we didn't go to LegoLand! I encourage us all to let some of the inconveniences of this trying time to instruct us on what we are to learn from this situation so we can all come out on the other side of this situation as better people. I especially encourage to you to ponder the question from one of my wise mentors Howard Lewis and ask yourself, "What is life teaching me right now?"
