When a dog is hunting, he is focused on one thing. Whatever it is he is chasing. When that same dog is laying up on the porch of the hunting cabin, he yawns, sleeps and scratches at his fleas. The difference is when he is at idle, he is focused on his problems. The dog that is hunting never stops to scratch his fleas because he is fully engaged in the hunt. In fact, if he is chasing something, he doesn’t even know he has fleas.

Hopefully, you see this story as the metaphor it is intended to be. I am talking about life, jobs, businesses, relationships, finances, church etc. etc. I am talking about how we are in life.

I have hired and trained many hotel brokers over the years. Many of them could have been great, but they never could figure out how to get off the porch. They were always complaining about something that wasn’t going the way they thought it should or they would come up with a 12-step program and form a committee to begin exploring how to fix the problem, all while they were still on the porch scratching and licking themselves. ha

You can see this porch mentality in every office environment that has ever existed. There are doers and then there are whiners. Don’t get me wrong. Some meetings are very important like when the Army wants to meet and go over the strategy before an attack. If you on the front lines, you need to be at that meeting! What I am talking about is the need to meet for meeting sake. John Galbraith said it so well when he said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Put yourself in the hound dog’s mind. He is the happiest when he is doing the thing he does best which is hunting and looking for birds or squirrels. He is the unhappiest when he is at idle and laying up on the porch with nothing to do. We as humans are a lot like dogs in that we need to be doing something to be happy and something we can feel a part of. It can be a job or volunteer work but we all need to be involved and to be in action mode versus porch mode. KT