Lessons Learned – Part 1

It is painfully obvious that I’m terrible at social media. I’ve touched on my inept ability to blog, Facebook, or Twitter in my once every six-month random blog post. However, from time to time, the thought hits me – someone might actually be interested in what’s going on with me. Then I quietly chuckle to myself and move on with my life.

Either way – while I’m waiting on my Ubuntu 18.04 VM to clone (takes forever), I figured might as well write something. This post is about one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned. We’ve all had moments in our life where a friend, family member, religious zealot, animal, or educator taught us a lesson so profound – that it changed our lives.

I know, we all are the sum of lessons we’ve been taught. Because most folks are self-centered dill weeds so it’s a fact that we always forget who taught us the specifics and why.  Yet, we still exercise these lessons in everyday life. Let’s take a real-life lesson that I learned when I was a young boy. I had a bobby pin and for some reason, in my tiny brain, it seemed like a good idea to put that little metal object into a 120v wall socket. I remember that very painful and traumatic experience vividly to this day.

While that lesson, no doubt very important, it’s not really in the scope of what I’m trying to get across.

Years ago, I went back to school to get my MBA. I was enrolled in one of the core business classes that had only six students. The professor walked in and we started the typical introductions everyone has during the first day of any class. His very first lesson was something of a life changer for me.

His belief was that your feelings are controlled by you and you alone. That if someone ‘hurts’ your feelings – that’s on you. In a nutshell, he believed that if you allow someone to hurt your feelings or get under your skin – then you are giving that person control over you and that simply wasn’t acceptable.

At first, I thought, this guy was a loon.

Then I realized he was right. I was going through a very stressful phase in my life. Like most married families with kids, you worry about everything you can’t control, what people say, think, do, work, school, and news. To be honest, most shit really doesn’t even matter.

I made two life-changing decisions because of that class.

1. I realize that my span of control is indeed very small. I only worry about what’s in my span of control not what’s outside of it.

For example, what’s out of my control is Target creating gender-neutral bathrooms. However, what I can control is where I spend my money. Which, isn’t at Target anymore.

2. Ignore what anyone thinks or says about me.

Now, for the most part – this is almost an impossible task for most individuals. Thankfully, for my somewhat undiagnosed Asperger’s this wasn’t too hard for me to deal with. I just needed to frame it in a more logical manner.

Anyway, I found myself writing several more pages on this topic, which meant anyone who was reading to this point probably fell asleep.

In summary, don’t sweat the small shit.