You all know that I love my puppies—Lily and Maya. They light up my life. Today, as I was preparing breakfast for my son Shaan, the puppies also wanted some eggs. Shaan loves to get these egg bites that are made at Starbucks. Costco now has them as well (what doesn’t Costco sell????). I usually buy a box and bring them home so Shaan will eat eggs in the morning. For all those mothers out there, you know the struggle is real, trying to get our kids to eat eggs is a challenge. So, I make these egg bites in our countertop grill, and they come out wonderfully crispy. Shaan loves them—and so do our dogs. They start sniffing around Shaan in the mornings and want to have some.
Now I know, dogs always love food especially the stuff they can’t have, but ironically, our Lily is actually very particular about food and will not eat many things. Hence, when even she wanted some egg bites I was quite surprised. I sent Shaan off to school and I could see that the pups wanted some. I went upstairs, got dressed, came back down and they were still looking at me with mournful eyes. They didn’t want the blueberries—no, it was the eggs. Yes, I’m weak when it comes to my pups, so I put two egg bites into the fryer and went to my desk to get started with morning calls. Lord those dogs could smell the eggs. I was halfway through my morning leadership meeting when Maya starts to paw at me—and some puppies have really sharp nails. She knew that the eggs were done. She had heard the machine bell Ding.
I went into the kitchen to take them out of the range and put them on a plate. They were piping hot. Now we are a Punjabi family, and in our home we are multilingual, speaking both English and Punjabi. My puppies know Punjabi. So I told them it was “garam” (hot), and to wait. That lasted a whole 10 minutes. They stood in that kitchen, did not follow mom, and just watched the eggs on the counter. They waited and waited. Finally Maya gave up and came over to my desk again and started pawing at me. Every time I go to pick her up she’d move out of my reach, wanting me to get up. It was her way of communicating—Dang it woman, give me my eggs already! I went back into the kitchen and got the plate and sat on the stairs, that’s our usual sitting place, each dog takes a step and I sit in the middle and then I can feed them.
I had to be careful to make sure that I give each one their own since Maya scarfs down her food, I had to break it up into small pieces so that she keeps up with Lily or Maya finishes all of her food before Lily can even get halfway through hers. She was so eager. It made me laugh and start to think that patience is definitely a virtue, even in dogs. Ironically, I was also listening to a quote on Instagram at the same time, it was by Steve Jobs and it was a portion of an interview about the learnings that he had while he was at Apple. He spoke about how he learned to have patience with people. Yes, work needed to get done, but rather than trying to fix the problem for today alone, he would think about how he would have to grow and invest in the people so that they could be the leaders he needs tomorrow. What growth they needed, and what patience leaders needed to embody, in order to build the teams that will accomplish what is needed today, but also grow the organization for tomorrow.
Patience. As we move into the end of the year and start to build a strategy for the next year, let’s look at those people in our organizations. Do they have the skills we need for tomorrow and simply require more coaching and growth, to accomplish what we need today? These individuals will become the team of both today and leaders of tomorrow – if we simply practice a little patience and invest in their growth. Happy Thanksgiving everyone ???? ! I am truly grateful to all my readers. You make me smile.
