An Interesting Question…

“Gratitude Makes Sense of Our Past, Brings Peace for Today, and Creates a Vision for Tomorrow.”

Melody Beattie

I love these pictures. There’s just an awful lot to take in there from over the last 7 years and this year as we march towards the end of June, still waiting on consistently good weather to venture outside, is no different. Creating new adventures with friends, new and old, and making a difference in varied ways still excites me.

This year has, with some help of a grant, gotten us to some goals rather quickly. Once we deposit our next batch of dollars into the grant, we’ll be over approximately $5,700 raised for the Dee Family and this is awfully weird to say but it feels rather ho-hum. It’s not a satisfied feeling but a feeling of this is where we are meant to be and a feeling that’s well beyond that.

It is a more pervasive feeling which remains and that’s how high can we push this? I still feel very strongly about what we can do here and I think nothing less than our all time high is acceptable now. In 2019, we raised $7,443 to benefit NeighborLink Fort Wayne. In that year, we had business sponsorship, matches, and a much larger team and we were able to get it to nearly $7500.

It was a monumental feat and yet, I feel like we’re in a spot where more is certainly possible even despite zero sponsors, zero businesses involved, and a team that’s 3/4’s the size of our previous years. I just happen to believe in our team more, our mission more, and the impact of good people doing good things.

None of this is new, however. Those believes have been there but I had an interesting conversation that spawned a question that was posed to me in the last 2 weeks that has stuck with me in a significant way and I thought I’d share it with you.

It had the opportunity to interview for a job that I had a good bit of interest in. I wasn’t chosen but that may end up being a blessing. That revelation is for another day but one of the interview questions really put me on the spot. I had been told that questions within this interview would be different than anything I’d ever faced in prior interviews and this person was more than right.

The question was: “If you weren’t doing this job for the next 20 years and were maybe not even with our company, what would be your ideal job for the second half of our career?”

I could have picked anything. I loved working in the lumberyard before I began the job I’m in now. I truly did. Running a forklift was a blast and I could have been perfectly happy doing that if I made a good enough wage. I also love sales and have proven to be good at it as well. I could see myself latching on to something else within the industry I’m and approaching it from a different angle and seeing where that takes me. Again, I could have picked anything but do you know what I said?

I said, “What I do with the running team already.” They asked me to expand. I told them that I could absolutely see myself within the nonprofit sector. It’s not the running, per se, that I was enamored with but the networking, the recruiting of runners, the solicitation of sponsors, and the impact of tackling something epic with the purpose of doing something good for a worth cause, organization, or individual in need. The personal impact has greatly affected me over the last 7 years and this year is no different.

We chit chatted a bit more beyond that section of questioning but it’s not left me. I have made no secret of wanting to grow this beyond its current state. There are more impacts to make and in bigger ways.

So with that, I will be writing a Part 2 to this post that will explore about what this all looks like, if in my ultimate Pipe Dream, this all comes to fruition. Most likely, reality falls a considerable distance short of that, however, if you don’t aim for the stars, why are you aiming at all?