Do you really have the right priorities?

Some of you may know that Alan Weiss has been a long-term mentor of mine. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletters, you can do so here.

Here is an example from his Monday Morning Memo today. It’s a worthwhile read.

“We’re sitting at the pool at the W Hotel South Beach (Miami). A few feet from us, a girl about 8 years old is calling to her father, who’s sitting behind us with his wife and older daughter. The girl is pleading with him to come into the pool to play with her.

He tells her, “In a few minutes.” But he never enters the pool. This goes on periodically for a couple of hours. The father keeps saying in a few minutes, and the girl begins to remind him that he’s kept saying that but doesn’t join her. “I told you it would be soon!” he tells her harshly.

Finally, my wife and I turned around to see who could be this cruel to his child. We see a guy, perhaps early 50s, and his wife, perhaps mid-40s. The wife is asking him meekly to go to their daughter, but he’s busy writing in a book, making notes in the margins, and harshly telling her that what he’s doing is more important than joining their daughter in the water.

At this point, the girl has resorted to, “Please, just for a few minutes,” and “Just once, I won’t ask again.”

Not only is he impervious to his daughter’s pleas, but he’s also oblivious to the reactions of a dozen people around him having to listen to his daughter’s imprecations.

I’m assuming this wasn’t an exceptional episode but a common reaction that tends to remain in a kid’s psyche through the years.

You could make a case this guy had important work to do. And that’s true. And he wasn’t doing it.”