A Little Reminder About What’s Really Important in Life

Like most businesses, at Hardworking Capital we have regular meetings to ensure that everyone is on the same page and focused on the same goals.  We have a weekly touch base that we call our “Friday Huddle.”  We also have monthly sit downs we call “Chalk Talk”….yes, I’m surrounded by women who are raving football fans.   Two times a year we have planning meetings that revolve around checking our progress against our goals and prioritizing work for the next six months.

Last week, we had our bi-annual planning meeting and invited a college student from our local community college to attend.  His name is Pablo and he’s a great kid from Spain who has a very bright future ahead of him.  An avid tennis player, Pablo has dreams of a career in business and finance.  We asked him to sit in on our planning meeting so that he could get a feel for how these meetings go.  Gregg Kuperstein of Exceed Growth was there to help us formulate our plan.

After spending a few hours hashing out our road map for the next six months, Gregg asked each of us to grab a scrap paper and write down our answers to a few questions.  Once he collected them, he set Pablo’s aside and read aloud our responses.  We’d set out a series of goals in our meeting and our answers all seemed to reflect that our individual plans were in sync.

And then, he read Pablo’s responses.

When asked “At the end of the year, what will need to happen for you to consider it a successful year?” Pablo wrote “for me a successful year is calling my dad at home in Spain, telling him what I did over the last year, and having him say he is proud of me.”

After we all took a deep breath and held back tears, we realized that he had summed up everyone’s hope for success: to do something worth calling home about and deserving of our parents’ pride.

Sometimes you need a reminder about what’s really important in life.