Minute With Mallon: Will Rain Stop Them?

Welcome to Minute with Mallon!

Something I Taught:

You ever stop to wonder how much people actually care?  I mean, really care. Here’s something I came across from Jeff Olson in The Slight Edge—and it hit me like a ton of bricks.  I've shared it with a lot of my clients, and it never fails to put things in perspective.

At the average funeral, only about 10 people cry.  You go through your entire life, spending years enduring all those trials and tribulations and achievements and joys and heartbreaks—and at the end of it, there are only ten people in the world who care enough to show up and cry?

And once those ten (or fewer) people have pulled their hankies out and dried their tears, and the funeral is over, the number one factor that determines how many people go on from the funeral to attend the actual burial, is…… the weather.

The weather?

Yes‼️  If it happened to be raining, 50 percent of the people who attended my funeral would decide maybe they wouldn't go on to attend my burial after all, and just head home.

So you're lying there dead.  Your whole life is behind you!  All the work, all the people you've met, all the toil and effort and people's lives you've profoundly touched—and half the congregation checks out halfway through because it's started to rain???

So if people aren’t even guaranteed to stick around for our burials if the weather’s bad, why in the world would we waste time worrying about what they think of us now?

The truth is, we spend so much of our lives caught up in other people’s opinions—when in reality, most of them won’t even be there when it counts. So maybe, just maybe, we should stop living for the approval of people who won’t bring an umbrella.  Instead, let’s focus on living a life that actually matters to us

So what’s the moral of the story?  Simple: if you want a solid turnout at your funeral, start making friends with people who love bad weather.  Maybe join a storm-chasing club or hand out free umbrellas as party favors. 🤣

Just a thought. Anyway… moving on! 👇🏻

Something to Ponder:

"You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." 

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Something I Learned:

A very good friend of mine has a son in elementary school who did a violin recital over the weekend.  During his performance, he messed up a section.  I saw it on Facebook, and to me it wasn't a big deal, but when he got home, he melted down.  Poor little guy.

Dr. Cal Botterill, a sport psychologist, said this:

“The biggest obstacle to peak performance for most performers, in my thirty years, is over analysis—the tendency, for the right reasons, to start overanalyzing things, which interferes with having a total focus when performing. The second-biggest obstacle is caring too much, getting almost obsessed with having to be successful—caring so much that it interferes.”

The real problem here is that our minds trick us into this thought: My worth is entirely dependent on my results.

The key is to do your best—NOT TO BE PERFECT!  Improvement comes with repetition.  Doing your best doesn’t mean winning—that’s competing with the world.  Doing your best means striving to be better than you were yesterday.  Compete with yourself only, and as you get better, you will automatically win!

Something I Saw:

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Hope you have an incredible week!

Robert