Good Morning,
This past Saturday I manned the Scottish Society of Louisville’s information table. There we help people find out if they have Scottish Ancestry. For some folks it is a passing fancy, while for others it is an answer to lifelong questions. One lady who came to the table had me look up four names, the last names of her grandparents and four for four they were all of Scottish decent. Then after thinking for a moment, she asked if she could look up another name. A name of a great grandparent. I suggested that she is already more Scottish than most people, but she decided to look further and went from a 100% hit to 80% when her fifth ancestor was found to not be of Scottish descent.
While this, in itself, is of little consequence, it does illustrate a point about knowing when enough is enough and when we are taking something too far. It is these times when we have what we need and get a little greedy, looking for something more that we can enter ourselves in to world of confusion and hurt. Like gambling, where we enter a winning streak and bet it all just one more time and lose it all, we have to be careful when things go our way. We can get caught up in the moment and not think everything through as we should.
Looking a bit deeper, there is another concept of success we often overlook. This is understanding what we have done to succeed in the first place. When we fail, we find it easy to stop and reflect on ‘how did I mess up in the first place?’ Seldom do we do the same reflection when we succeed, much less then we have a winning streak fueling our egos.
This lack of understanding of how we succeeded can act to blind us to the pitfalls in continuing forward full speed ahead. It is like pushing the pedal to the metal down a foggy road at night when we can’t see beyond the edge of our car’s hood just because we have successfully navigated the last few roads the same way in the same conditions.
Eventually our luck runs out.
The ironic part is that there is little to do with luck. If we take the time to understand how we succeeded and reinforce it, as well as research our failures and correct our mistakes and update our knowledge, our ‘luck’ increases mightily. In reality, skill and experience are more powerful than luck. Without them though, all we have is luck.
As Kenny Rogers once sang, “You’ve got to know when to hold them, and know when to fold them..”
Knowledge is power when applied correctly. Without this knowledge, we take silly chances and push our luck, and we all know how that often ends up.
Enjoy!
Sanford Berenberg
Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net
http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
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