Pizza and the tyre guy
The two dried-up pieces of pizza flopped into the kitchen waste bin – joint victims of my new determination to be really, really helpful.
Unfortunately this only lasted as long as it took my wife to come in and ask what had happened to our son’s packed lunch.
The ensuing discussion about helpfulness could have left me feeling grumpy – if it hadn’t been for what happened last night: Browsing on Networkerplus, I discovered that “The Last Lecture” is available on YouTube. I had no idea it had ever been filmed. It was certainly my all-time favourite book.
If you don’t know about this phenomenon, search for Randy Pausch The Last Lecture. Believe me this is one of the most powerful stories you will ever experience and it certainly changes your view of the day ahead.
And today it did that for me. I put the pizza behind me and set out to do my wife a good turn by getting her balding tyres checked. But no sooner had the guy in the tyre centre started looking up delivery times for new ones than the phone rang. He then spent the next five minutes talking to someone else. Meanwhile it turned out I had left the car blocking the entrance. Would I move it? Would I have needed to move it if the guy hadn’t been talking to someone else for the last five minutes???
But I had a new view of the day. Of course I would move it.
And what goes around comes around: The van that needed to get into the tyre bay had a mobile phone number on the side. Instinctively I started to send a text but then I thought: “Why not go and talk to the driver? He’s probably gong to be hanging around as well – after all the tyre guy is still talking on the phone.”
So I went over and got started on the script I learned on Monday’s Advanced Leadership course.
And guess what, the driver said he was always ready to look at new business ideas.
In fact, what he said was: “Actually I was thinking of giving up the building game. There’s no money in it any more and quite honestly I’m fed up with the hassle.”
“So how soon will you be able to watch that?” I asked him, refusing to let go of the DVD until I had an answer.
“This afternoon, ” he said.