Blog 458 – 11.07.2016

It seems I remember hearing President Lyndon Johnson when I was a boy on several ocassions when he was about to deliver some sad news to the country saying, “My fellow Americans, I come to you with a heavy heart.” Do you have a heavy heart?

Intent Number Ten of the rules that I try to live by says, “…I enjoy gathering with light hearted people… Nobody seeks out the company and encouragement of people with heavy hearts unless it is someone so miserable themselves that they are looking for someone to commiserate with them in their misery. The old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together.” comes to mind.

If you are experiening a heavy heart perhaps it is because you are carrying a load that you were not meant to carry. A favorite Bible promise of many over the years has been, “The Lord will not lay on you more than you can bear.” and its companion, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” The next time you are carrying a heavy load I hope you will remember the following story from my youth.

When I was fifteen, over fifty years ago, I had an after school job as a sack boy in a grocery story just a couple of blocks from home. I wore a white shirt, a red bow tie, and a long green apron (even bag boys had a strict dress code in those days.) My job was to stay busy bagging people’s groceries, and to follow the customers out to their cars with their bagged groceried in the cart and to load the bags into their cars. Some of the customers would tip the sack boy a nickel or dime and the more generous customer sometimes a quarter. All the bag boys would go out after work for a burger, fries, and a coke at a nearby drive-in restaurant on their tips for the day. I began to notice that the other boys would hang back if they knew a particular customer did not tip and let ole Dave handle that one.

Our manager’s policy was first come first served and if you didn’t have an order to sack you were to help the one who did to keep the customers moving through the check out lines as fast as possible. In those rare moments when there were no orders to sack we were to pick up a broom and sweep. Stay busy or at least look busy was the by word.

My tip conscious fellow workers were not following the rules as I understood them and so I was soon working with a pretty heavy heart. A retired man who lived in the neigborhood and worked the early part of the evening shift with us noticed as I passed him coming back from the water fountain that I was not smiling, that has always been the default mode of my face. He gave me a piece of advice I have remembered all these years, “When the load gets to heavy, Son, just put it down.” My Jewish friends might say, “From God’s lips to your ears.”

I followed his advice, laid that silly self imposed burden down, put my game face back on, and went back to work sacking the orders as they came. Some of the guys who waited for the big tippers may have gotten more quarters but I always had more money than they did in nickles and dimes.

I have found that to be a truism in both business and life that if you concentrate you efforts on the big fish, the big tippers, the rich clients you will miss out on the real profits that life has to offer . Many a struggling person in business or otherwise has a heavy heart by choice when all they need do is put that heavy load down. Light hearted people have so much more fun and are more fun to be around.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White