Long Term view on Playing Time (Life)

My son Mike is on his high school basketball team. He serves as the 9th man. That means his playing time is limited. When he gets into the games he gives it his all and plays well but he doesn't make it into all of his games. So far I have never heard him say a negative word about the 3 post players that play ahead of him. I fact I have never heard him say a negative word about the people that are behind him.

On Sunday my wife asked him about a fellow teammate and if that teammate ever complained about his playing time. I won't tell you his answer to that question because it doesn't really matter. But when I asked him for his own views on his own playing time he said,

"When I signed up for basketball as a Freshman it didn't come with a guarantee that if I worked hard I would get a certain amount of playing time as a senior. That just isn't part of the deal. It doesn't work that way."

Wow. That is wisdom. I couldn't agree more.

I am glad my son worked hard. I hope he picked that up from this parents.

I am glad that my son doesn't feel entitled. I hope he also learned that from watching his mother and I.

Life would be much simpler if it worked like a jukebox. Put in a quarter and pick out your song but the truth is it doesn't work that way.

I am sure Mike would like to play more, who wouldn't. But his outlook goes a long ways toward building long term character then quitting or complaining would have.

For now Sue and I will take joy in the fact of son gets it. Praise the Lord.

(As follow up I will likely talk to my children about what the Book of Hebrews has to say about faithfulness and how God is always faithful and that we need to look at the long term rewards. But that might be too deep for this blog.)

Elmo Chapin Day 2015

Today is January 6th. Long term coworkers at Willmar Electric know that today is Elmo Chapin Day. Every year we celebrate our Grandfather’s Birthday by explaining to those of you that didn’t get the chance to meet him what he stood for in life.

Elmo Chapin lived all our core values at Willmar Electric. He was thrifty, he believed in the Merit Shop and meeting our customer’s needs. But most of all he believed in treating others that way they wanted to be treated. He had a great respect for everybody. He want to create an environment that allowed everybody to get and give the most out of their God given talents and abilities.

Going point by point through the core values here is a picture of Elmo Chapin. (If I had been thinking ahead I would have worn his red sports coat in his honor and taken a picture).

• Treating others the way they want to be treated. He would listen to people. Really listen. Try to get an understanding for where the other person was coming from. He had a great concern for his follow man.
• Merit Shop. He thought that construction should be done in an open market where every qualified contractor competed on a level playing field.
• Thrifty. He was recycling before it was cool. Both sides of all paper got used by Elmo Chapin. The lights were turned off in all empty rooms.
• Meeting the customer’s needs. The examples for this value are numerous but I will stick to the simplest one. He always preached that you left a place better then you found it. Even if that meant you cleaned up something that was part of somebody else’s mess.

So again I invite to celebrate Elmo Chapin Day by joining me and be like Elmo. And if you have a red sports coat I suggest you wear it.

I Like Pie

Every Thanksgiving I hold a tournament. Various people bring pies to the party and I eat a piece of each pie. By piece I mean I each an entire piece. Not a sliver or just a taste. I eat 1/8 of each pie. Then I declare a winner and eat a second piece of that pie. There have been years that I have eaten 8 pieces of pie. I realize this means that some years I eat over 4,000 calories in pie.

I like to have these blogs relate back to a life lesson or part of Willmar Electric’s foundational principles. So today my self-imposed challenge is to relate my Pie Tournament to each of the core values, brand promise, marketing slogan and BHAG.

Core Values

Thrifty-Eating this much pie has very little to do with being thrifty but the chances of us having leftover pie is decreased by my eating so much of them.

Meeting Customer Needs-The people that make the pies typically ask me what kind of pies I would like to eat.

Treating others the way they want to be treated-I try them all. All pies get a shot at winning. No pie is left out.

Merit Shop-Every pie gets an even chance but in the end the best one (and only one) is declared as the best and elevated above the rest based on its merit (taste).

Brand Promise

On-time-You need to get started on pie eating right away or the party runs out of pies.

Organized-Eating 5-8 pieces of pie needs to happen in a certain order and at a certain pace. You need to figure which ones might have a run on them (French silk) and eat them early before they are gone. Others (sour cream raisin) can be eaten at any time.

Approachable-During the tournament I am very approachable especially if you are bringing me pie.

Marketing Slogan

Design-Like I mentioned above I often help select the pies that are brought to the party.

Build-I play a very small role in the baking or making of a select few pies.

Beyond-I help with the dishes.

BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)

Choosing the projects we want to do and making money doing them. Every year I manage to get a second pie of the party’s most popular pie, French Silk.

Happy Thanksgiving. Give thanks to the Lord and enjoy the pie.

Brownies and Potato Oles

Last week Tyler Brown and I spent a day giving each other a hard time and mocking the other person. Somebody noticed the trend and pointed it out to us. The person went so far as to say to us “are you treating the other person the way you want to be treated?” We agreed that they had a point.

So we reversed course and started being nice to each other. Not really all that hard since I like Tyler. It shouldn’t be too hard to be nice to somebody you like and respect.

Instead of trading barbs and insults we were civil.

Last night my wife served brownies to my son’s friends when they stopped over. Because I knew that they were Tyler’s favorite snack I brought one to him.

Then at lunch Tyler went to Taco Johns. He even sat down next to me and starting eating his meal. No big deal. The room was full of other people eating.

No big deal that is if you don’t know the Chapin family. Let me give you some background. My family has an unhealthy attachment to Potato Oles, literally. The point wasn’t missed on Misty Lauer. She started to laugh as soon as Tyler sat down.

So what did Tyler do?

He shared his Potato Oles with me. (Sue isn’t going to be happy to learn that she made the bars but I got the Oles).

I am not suggesting that we should live in a world where we keep score and figure that if I bring you a snack you should “repay” me. Neither Tyler nor I were expecting to be paid for our actions. It was just a natural outgrowth of treating people the way we wanted to be treated. It worked when we were mean to each other and quickly turned 180 degrees when we were nice to each other.

Thank you Tyler for the unintended example (and Potato Oles).

Luckily we work at a place that has treating other as you want to be treated as a core value. Now I just need to make sure I live up to that standard.

"Workstyle" Change

It is often hard to notice progress in life and it has always been hard for me to wait for things in life. So I am trying harder to look at the long term more often and recently I noticed a very encouraging sign among my co-workers in the Lincoln office.

Let me give you some background.

People that know me know that I value organization and keeping things neat. I believe it is hard to keep things straight in your head if you can’t keep your surrounding tidy. I have never said or heard anybody else say about another person, “Their office looks chaotic but there are really organized. “ (You can substitute the words desk, room or house for the word office if you like.)

I have worked with people on trying to be organized in their approach to their work space over the years and had some success but during 2014 I have made it a focus. Word organized is part of our brand promise.

So in addition to modeling organization I have been openly talking about it. I have suggested resources for helping people be organized and have even given out books on the topic. I wanted to see organization grow past Sylvia’s desk.

I would have assumed that everybody would see the light and get organized quickly. They didn’t. At least not everybody all at once.

But Justin Jung did. He took it upon himself to organize and maintain an organized office. Eight months later he is still going strong.

Then came Tyler Brown. He took it to the next level. Now I try to match his level of organization.

Now Dan Williams has jumped into the game.

Slowly but surely we are getting more organized. It's fun. I say that not because I want others to be like me but because it works and people are becoming more productive and are easier to work with as they get organized. Our common spaces are 200% then last year and we are continuing to make improvements. Many others not named in this blog have made progress in this area but Justin, Tyler and Dan are completely transformed!!! The have made a change in their “workstyle.”

I realize that other areas within the company have also followed suit. Some examples are:

-The part carts at Camp Ripley and Fort Sill.

-I have been told that the cupboards in the corporate office are labeled and it is easy to find things in them.

-Steve Gardner’s drawers would make Tyler Brown proud.

-But the best example is the Willmar Shop. We have come a long ways in keeping it organized and it is not a coincidence that projects in the area started to save hours (and material) as the shop got more and more organized.

Approachable, On time and Organized. We talk about it every day in our huddles. Tyler, Justin and Dan in addition to Jake, Justin, Ruth and Steve along with several others that are taking being organized serious on a day to day basis. It is great to see.

Three books are very good resources in this area.
-“2 Second Lean” by Paul Akers
-“Take Back Your Life!” by Sally McGhee and John Wittry
-“Getting Things Done” by David Allan

Flowers in the Wall

As I typically do every weekend I mowed my yard on Saturday. While mowing I noticed a flower growing out of a retaining wall in my backyard. Yep, right in the middle of the block wall was a blooming flower.

It wasn’t there the week before. If I would’ve seen it before it bloomed I would have pulled it because it would’ve looked like a weed and I hate weeds.

Seeing the flower growing in a wall amazed me. How did it do grow there? I remember thinking to myself “weeds can grow anywhere but not flowers.” At the Chapin house flowers can be hard to grow. You can plant a flower in great soil, water them and make sure they get plenty of sun light and still they don’t grow unless the condition remain perfect. Miss a week of watering or forget to keep track of the puppy and the flower dies.

Seeing the flower made me think of the entire situation as a metaphor on life.

It is easy to get negative things to thrive. Bad situations seems to feed themselves. All a weed (or bad situation) needs to take root and take off is a small crack.

But getting the positive to thrive takes hard work. Care, nurture and attention are normally required to make the positive take root. So much so that when a flower (or positive situation) takes off without those things is a shocking to see.

How do you Rate?

Last week I had the honor of interviewing candidates for two open teaching positions at the local Christian School’s elementary school. Like all interviews we asked a lot of question in our effort to get to know the candidates better.

One question that we asked was “on a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate yourself in Bible knowledge?” It is a tricky question. Answer too high and you seem like an overconfident show off but answer too low and you likely won’t be hired. It was really a trap. After asking it once we decided it wasn’t a fair question so we stopped using it as part of the decision making process. But we continued to ask the question as part of a social experiment.

During a break I asked the principal that was conducting the interview how he would rate himself. He said about a 4. I said I was thinking I was thinking I was a 3-4. I asked the principal if his self-answer was higher or lower than it would have been for himself 10 years ago. He said he would rate himself lower than 10 years ago. I said

I would definitely give myself a lower score today than 10 years ago.

Clearly neither of us was going backwards or unlearning things from the Bible.

The more I dig into the subject of the Bible I find that I have so much more to learn.

Over the weekend I had the chance to ask my children and some of their friends the same question. Everybody was in the 3-4 range as well. All of these children are high school students at a Christian school. They go to bible class every day and church every Sunday. One of them said “so the lower the score the better you understand the Bible.” He might be right.

I am sure that the same is true of every subject. It seems the more you study a subject, the more you realize how much you don’t know about that subject. Hopefully that realization drive you to keep studying.

Pretty humbling isn’t it.