Rolling with the punches

In Chicago, both at work and in my personal life, my life is planned out. It is controlled, or at least that is the illusion. I wake up and stumble to make the coffee and feed the dog. Off to exercise and then back to the house. Breakfast, shower, and go to the office. I make calls, go to meetings, and drive around. Then I come home and run with the dog. I eat dinner with my wife, Leslie, after which comes an hour of work and maybe even focusing on writing. So it goes in different variations day after day.

During the Patagonia trip, a valuable lesson was that there was no controlling things—and certainly not by me. What happened just happened. Forty mile-per-hour winds were routine, but the winds came on some days and not on others. In Patagonia, the most powerful thing to do was choose your reactions to events, not try to control the events themselves. That is an insight worthy of taking into my life. How about yours?

Another example, at the end of February 2010 while I was about to leave Chile an earthquake struck. The Richter scale measured 8.8 for Santiago and its surrounding areas. 562 people died. My tour group was supposed to be headed home but in an instant our flights got cancelled. We then had to figure out how the heck we were going to get home. “Where will we spend the night?” We wondered. “Where do we cross back to Argentina?” Read on and you shall see.

The people in my group dealt with being out of control in very different ways. Gertrude became scared, bordering on hysterics, and immediately got on the phone with her sister from the States. Two of the burly boys took it in stride—no big deal. For them, rolling with the punches was the best plan. The third burly boy, however, became frantic, as he was scheduled to go to Europe the next day with his wife. I, being a business executive, found myself absolutely focused. I walked up to the front of the line and asked the attendant what to do.

Luckily Martin, our guide, and REI, the tour company, got us out of Chile and into Buenos Aires. This was no small feat given that all the other tourists trapped in Chile had the same idea. Martin demonstrated being responsible for us and taking that responsibility quite seriously. He and REI worked tirelessly to get us out. They swung into action both from Argentina and the United States, working with the airlines to get us from Bariloche to Buenos Aires and then beyond. We had partners and felt supported. From a business perspective, the way REI acted in this tumultuous time made me a raving fan.

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