My daughter is 9. She likes to swim. This summer we signed her up for swim league. It’s legit, they practice daily and on Saturdays there’s an 8 hour swim meet. No joke it’s 8 hours and your kid only swims like 3-5 times for about a minute each. They keep meticulous track of how fast you are. There are 3 timers in each lane and then the middle time sticks. Your kids score gets collected and brought to the proofing table, then it’s checked for errors and signed off on before it’s entered into the computer.
So after several meets with my daughter’s times getting slower and slower she finally had the week. Bested her times in 3 different strokes and in one case was almost 6 seconds faster. She was beaming.
I wanted to tell her how proud I was of her for swimming faster and before it came out of my mouth I stopped.
Why?
I didn’t want her to think it mattered. I didn’t want her to think that swimming faster means something. That ranking 19th instead of 34th was important. It’s not. What matters is that she tried her best, she never gave up, that she didn’t crash into her lane rope and that she had improved her dive. What matters is that she leaves practice smiling; that she made new friends and that regardless of what her rank is what matters is that she has fun being the best person she can be.
You see where I’m going with this don’t you. This isn’t just good advice for raising a strong confident kid, its good advice for running your radio station.
Every month Arbitron is going to tell you where you ranked. Don’t let it tell you if you’re good at your job. Don’t let it tell you if you’re working hard enough, smart enough, or if you have what it takes to be the best brand you can be because you already know you do. I know we can’t ignore it, but you can put it in perspective. You know what you’re doing, just do it.
Tags: arbitron, Kids, leadership, management, Motivate, parenting, radio, swimming
This is brilliant Chris…simple, yet brillint.
Very few people live and think this way. But it is true that if you focus on what you are doing (and do what you do well), you will succeed at a much higher level than if you are alway checking in and measuring yourself against someone else’s measurement.