By Ryan Gray
Spring is my favorite season and March is my favorite month. It always has been. My birthday is in March. Growing up March meant spring break and the start of little league baseball. March means March Madness and the end of the school year in sight. It means looking forward to summer vacations, InfoComm and finally getting to those long-planned summer projects.
For many, spring is a symbol of new beginnings.
I love spring where I live now. March is when the trees bloom and the flowers show their colors on my front walk. New leaves bud on my grape vines and the trees start sprouting their leaves as well.
Spring is also a new beginning for my beloved New York Mets. It promises the possibility of a new season. It’s a new opportunity to start with a record of 0 – 0 and to imagine with hope the possibility of a championship. But… I’m a realist…
The attempt is more important than the success.
Quick change of subject: I’m not a weightlifter. I leave that work to folks like @AVPhenom. However, stuck in my brain is the weightlifting term “Clean and Jerk”. Imagine the weight lifting you’ve seen in the Olympics, a finely tuned athlete steps up to a bar with an unimaginable amount of weight added to each side, and through a series of movements, carefully practiced over years, they lift the weight to their waist, then shoulders then over their head. That moment of triumph shows on their face as they drop the weight to the floor. That’s the clean and jerk.
But, the “clean” is the move that gets the weight to their shoulders, and the “jerk” is what gets it all the way over their head. So in this case:
Cleaning does not mean full success, it means a meaningful effort.
So for this March, I would ask you all to remember, you can’t get the weight over your head until you’ve got it up to your shoulders.
What are the things you know would be helpful for your colleges? For your departments? For your family? For yourself? What are the efforts that you don’t start because you don’t think you can bring them to full success? What do you put on the back burner because you can’t see the path to getting it all the way to the finish line? I have to remember this constantly, I will delay the start of something new if I don’t have the plan to full fruition. That often means great ideas are left unattempted.
We can’t ever reach full success until we decide we’re willing to start. Sometimes we pick the weight up off the mat and can’t get it higher than our shoulders. That effort is worth it because once we’ve reached that milestone we can see the path it will take to lift it higher next time.
My beloved Mets know this. Only one team can win the World Series but we start each spring with the hope we will be the ones lifting that weight (or that trophy) all the way over our heads.
Spring means looking forward to the glory of summer. So if all you can do in spring is to clean, do it, because the summer will mean you can finish the full clean and jerk.
As spring means the promise of something new, we must meet it by starting.
Don’t let the fact that you don’t know how it will end lead you to leave successful actions on the floor. For me, spring cleaning means starting something new, not knowing if I will be able to find full success. But I know I’ll never succeed if I’m not willing to just start.
What are you not starting? What do you know that would be beneficial but you’re not sure how you can lift it all the way over your head? This March don’t worry about that, pick one thing and start with spring cleaning.