Things I Learned Tuesday: Cutting Your Losses

If you ever wake up and you don’t have hot water, stable electricity, internet and cable, just go back to sleep. Your day isn’t going to get any better.

You can try to dig yourself out of that kind of bad-luck deficit, but you can’t.

Add onto that a new diet and workout plan and it gets worse.

Then add sources who I’m pretty sure think they’re in the CIA. Maybe they are in the CIA and I don’t know. Either way, some of these Cherokee County folks are about as lock-jawed as the feds.

I start most days with great plans to push forward. I have plans for investigative journalism, tackling my administrative tasks, working harder than the day before and getting those comments I like so much (hint, hint).

And then there are days like yesterday.

I’ve never been a big fan of the minimum requirements for anything. I enjoy going above and beyond standards. I live for that constant climb of pushing harder and harder at any task.

And then there are days like Tuesday.

By 3 p.m. I had been working for eight hours. By “working,” I mean “fighting with anything and everything.”

• My email didn’t work.
• My phones didn’t work.
• My laptop was failing.
• My power was flickering in and out.
• I was getting sick.
• My smoke alarm was going off every time I adjusted the heat (thankfully it was a nice summer day yesterday).
• My hot water wasn’t working.
• My cable wasn’t getting a signal.
• Windstream was down so I had to stay in Starbucks all day.

Do you see where this is going?

A few weeks ago someone told me I overreact to situations. Since then, I’ve been trying to react appropriately to situations. Personally, I think it’s silly for one person to be able to judge the correct level of reaction for a situation. Maybe everyone else isn’t reacting enough. Did you ever think about that?

Then again, that’s another soapbox for another day.

So during my technological failures, I tried to react accordingly. By 3 p.m., I had decided that the most-fitting and least-infuriating reaction would be to finish only what I need to finish for the day, get the first thing set for the morning and call it quits.

Maybe that’s the key to climbing. You can push yourself so hard for so many days but then sometimes you just have to cut your losses and realize that you’re not getting anything done that day.

Maybe I’m just feeling all philosophical because I’m at Starbucks writing this and I always feel a little deeper when I’m at Starbucks.

Don’t lie. You do that, too.