Wow, it’s been a crazy January already and we’re just halfway through it! Our country rarely faces so many serious challenges all at once and so it feels like whiplash, turning my head to hear about one event or crisis after the next. And then jerking it around again when I actually hear something positive in the midst of it all. My teenagers think adults have let the country down and they’ll “do it” so much better when they’re older.  Hmmm - makes me wonder if that’s a very true statement.

Often times seeing failure, really experiencing failure teaches the best lessons. We’ve all heard that saying “we learn more from failures than successes”. I find that to be pretty accurate. Significant emotional experiences stay with us and this pandemic, the economic fallout, and the insurrection at the Capitol will be forever engraved in our minds and in our history books. The really sad thing about all of this is our failure to communicate. With so many ways to communicate better, it’s hard to understand how we’ve gotten worse at it. Failing to understand the urgency of the pandemic restrictions, failing to communicate that the country has to pull together to get through it and failing to bring the country together at every opportunity when you have the voice and the means to do it. Even failing to acknowledge a failure can be costly or worse, deadly.

When we fail or make a mistake and have to redo something at our sign shop we talk about it. We just have to if we want to avoid making the same mistake again and losing money. Our livelihood depends upon our team communicating - listening, sharing, being flexible in our thinking. Sometimes we do it well and sometimes tensions are high and the conversation is strained.  At the end of the day, we acknowledge the failure, we communicate with respect for one another and we redo the work. Then we do what we can to mitigate its recurrence. If only we operated this way as a society like our livelihoods depends upon it.