the editor talks with you

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com started his company in his garage. As he sold books online, packaged them on tables he built with hollow-core doors on saw horses and drove them to the post office, he says he dreamed of one day being able to afford a fork lift. Now Jeff can buy all the fork lifts he will ever need. His company last month was valued at more than $1 trillion and he was valued as the world’s wealthiest individual.

How does he do what he does? “I go to bed early, I get up early, I like to putter in the morning,” he told a crowd of 1,400 in the nation’s capital recently. He reads the newspaper, drinks a cup of coffee and eats breakfast with his children. He schedules “high IQ” meetings no earlier than 10 am and tries to finish making his toughest decisions by 5 pm. His job is to make a few high-quality decisions each day. That means getting 8 hours of sleep because he thinks better, has more energy and his attitude is better, he said. ‘Everything I’ve done started small. Amazon started with a couple of people.” If he slept less, he could make more decisions. But it wouldn’t be worth it. “If I have 3 good decisions a day, that’s enough,” he said. “They should just be as high quality as I can make them.” All of us may benefit from his example.

At 4 am it was still dark outside and my family slept peacefully. Where was I? Glued to my laptop, a man with a restless soul. Have you done that kind of stupid thing to yourself and those you love? The first email I opened was from our friend Bill Edmonds, a former financial adviser who now helps fellow entrepreneurs. Bill wrote that Harvard Business School professor Thomas Delong has found the busyness trap afflicts many of us in his book “Flying Without a Net.” He told how in his early career he was guilty of the busyness sin. He would come home from work exhausted, having given everything to the school, its students, other faculty and his own projects. “My wife was just as tired, having managed 3 young girls, helped them with their homework, worked in her counseling practice and managed our farm,” he said. When it was time to read to the kids, he would cut corners to get them to bed. What was important, was maintaining his self-perception as a busy guy, as someone who must be doing things because he didn’t have time to read to his children.

The Gospel writers indicate Jesus was busy during his earthly ministry, Bill Edmonds wrote. But Jesus was not caught up in the busyness trap. He modeled how to avoid busyness by valuing rest. “Because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’” (Mark 6:31) If you are burning your candle at both ends, as I am often tempted to do, think about how this affects your relations with your family and your colleagues. Do you consider what you’re doing more important than what our most influential teacher and our world’s richest man do? Maybe you do. Sometimes I do, too, or I would not be up at the crack of dawn. Maybe you and I need an attitude adjustment. Take a break. You deserve it.

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Jerry Bellune shares insights, inspiration and stories from his motivational book, “Your Life’s Great Purpose.” You can email him at JerryBellune@yahoo.com