This past weekend, I hit a deer.
It sucked. I feel super bad about it, but it ended up being a pretty good reminder.
We were on a road trip to Oregon for my son’s birthday. A few hours into the drive, we’re on the freeway going about 65, and out of nowhere a deer jumps out of the trees. It was one of those moments where you don’t really have time to think, you just react. I checked to my right and there was a car there, so swerving wasn’t really an option, and by the time I looked up to see if I could hit the brakes, it was already too late.
We hit it.
The truck was pretty messed up and had to get towed.
As things calmed down after it happened, I was frustrated. I sat there replaying it in my head, feeling guilty, wondering if I could’ve done something differently, thinking about how it was going to impact the rest of the trip, the hassle of getting a rental, the cost, all of it. That was where my mind went right away.
I started texting a few friends to figure out what to do next, and almost every single one of them asked me the same thing first:
“Is your family okay?”
I told them yeah, everyone was fine, but that’s when it hit me.
I had a steel bumper on the truck that took most of the impact, and it was a big deer. Things could have gone a completely different direction, and I was sitting there focused on the inconvenience instead of the fact that my wife and kids were totally fine.
It was a quick shift, but an important one.
Nothing about the situation changed. The truck was still messed up, the plans were still off, I still had to deal with all of that. But my perspective on it changed immediately once I zoomed out and looked at what actually mattered.
And I think that’s something that applies way beyond hitting a deer on a road trip.
Stuff is going to come up. Things aren’t going to go your way. Plans get disrupted, things break, you get frustrated. That’s just part of it.
But if you can catch yourself in those moments and take a second to step back, more often than not you’ll realize that the things that matter most are still intact.
Your people are good. You’re good. And that’s what counts. Everything else, you can figure out.
If you’ve had a moment like that recently, reply to this email and let me know. I read them.
Keep that perspective as you go into this week.
Keep training hard.
— Jason
