You really know what you want when you have to wait for it

Our DVD player died a couple of weeks back and we have been watching DVDs on Marie's laptop - not bad, but definitely not good! Why the delay? They've been trying to repair it.

By "repair", they mean making us wait while an optical receiver - a tiny piece of equipment - travelled on a slow boat from China. It was agony!

Thank God for Tom. He's the guy in the stockroom at the store where we returned the player. While everyone else gave me indifferent service, Tom took a commonsense approach: three weeks is too long to be without as vital a piece of equipment as a DVD player.

While policy dictated the vendor had to approve a refund or repair blah blah blah... Tom knew that we, the customers, were getting withdrawal symptoms. Enough already.

So, he organised a refund. He shot the donkey for us, and I'll always appreciate it.

Why am I singing Tom's praises on Leadership Issues? Just to give praise where praise is due, really.

But the real reason for this post is the lessons learnt while waiting. With the refund we went and got a totally different DVD player than the one that was in repair. We'd learnt over time what we needed (as much as your whims for home theatre can be classified as 'needs').

The bottom line: sometimes life makes you wait, and you can either sulk, or learn from it.

For example: most of us don't have millions of dollars, so we have to choose carefully what we invest in, whether personally or in business.

For the lottery winner, they have no such luxury of time. The money - the opportunity - is all theirs, all now, and the urgency to use it somehow is overwhelming. (I imagine!)

How many lottery winners have you met who made very sound decisions with their winnings? Sure, there are a few, but they usually learned from experience before they won. They learned through limited resources, so they could handle virtually unlimited resources.

It's the same with any limitation we experience: time, energy, health, technology. The limitations give us a chance to explore the possibilities, and discover the best path ahead over time.

Have a great weekend!