When I turned 16 years old, I tested for and received my driver’s license. Then almost immediately my father had plans for me to drive his truck to Syracuse, NY at times-not just to give him a break, because he loved being in the city and dealing with all the different vendors, but mostly because he had been waiting to have an operation and there was no one else to do the driving or buying for him. Now…even though I was very excited about the challenge and the responsibility…I was also scared! I was just a 16-year-old country boy, driving a truck into a big city. (There were no GPS or cell phones in those days!) Plus, I’d be dealing with seasoned businessmen who were my father’s age or even older! But you know what happened? When I made those trips, I learned so much more than I ever could have imagined. I don’t know if it was the friendly respect those vendors had for my father, or they just wanted to help out “the kid”! But almost all of them were nicer than I’d ever seen them before and they gave me incredible tidbits of business knowledge, that would be beneficial to me when I later started my own business!
But one thing that my father always stressed to me was how to load that truck! Sometimes we would be driving home with a lot of weight on the truck, and it was critical that the weight was distributed evenly. He also warned me about how differently the truck will handle with a heavy load on board…I still remember him saying to me in regard to a heavy load: “If you think you’re going slow, go slower. It’s better to get there 15 minutes late…than never.”
Years later, I had my own manufacturing business and parts were being machined according to the “cycle time” or how many seconds it took to make the part. You can try to run any part as fast as you want but the maximum speed will always be controlled by certain things like: type and size of material, tooling, capacity of the machine etc. Well, one time we had a young employee with good intentions who “set a job up” in a machine that normally ran good at a 12 second cycle time. He decided that he would speed it up and reduce the cycle time to 8 seconds! There was soon a fair amount of smoke coming from the tooling area of that machine, so I asked him about all the smoke. He was really proud that he had found a way to increase productivity (the only problem was, he hadn’t found anything, except he was about to experience more problems and down-time). I told him: “You’ll get more parts if you slow it down.” He looked at me like I was from another planet! He said: “No, I cut 4 seconds off the cycle time, we’re going to get more parts then ever!” About 15 minutes later he came up to me and the machine was down, and he was setting it up again at 12 seconds, all the tooling had burned up at 8 seconds…Lesson learned.
Each of us in our own personal lives, find times where we just need to slow things down a little. The way you like to relax is probably different from mine. I can relax by just being outside and observing nature, the seasons, wildlife etc. God has put a beautiful world out there for us to care for, but also to enjoy!
Then Jesus said, “Let’s go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest awhile.” He said this because there were so many people coming and going that Jesus and his apostles didn’t even have time to eat. Mark 6:31 (NLT)
What’s your hurry?
Till Next Time…..
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