Businessman Multi-Tasking

Being a father has taught me a lot of things.  One of those things is to avoid using the phrase “I’m busy” or any similar expression that includes the word “busy.”  The truth about the word busy and its application in our lives is that 99% of the time none of us – not you, not me, not one of us – is that busy.

To put it mildly, the word busy is overused.  The word busy is so overused that all it does is serve as a verbal expression of a self-inflated opinion of ourselves.  I hate to tell you, you aren’t that damn busy – you know it, I know it, and most of all your children know it.

Egomaniacal

I know that at least one person is reading this who completely disagrees with me.  I can almost hear you saying “Nate, well excuse me, I am busy.”  You’re excused!  And I still hate to tell you; you aren’t busy.  What you are is an egomaniac.

I know I’m not a doctor so psychological diagnosis aside, you are free to disagree with me.  Be delusional if you will.  Keep telling yourself that you are busy.  It matters not how much you protest.  My belief about you and any of us for that matter who routinely extol how busy we are, remain the same, you are not busy!

What you are is needlessly egotistic.  In other words, more often than not, when you tell someone, you are busy, including and especially your children, you do so because you think the people whom you are saying you are busy to matter less than you.  Moreover, you declare to people that you are busy because you are trying to convince them that they are less important than you.

Most Famous People In The World

Here’s the truth about being busy.  Busy is just like most things in the world, busy is relative.  For example, if one of the world’s most influential or famous people (and by most important or renowned, I’m not talking about your inflated ego) called and asked to meet with you on a day that you believed to be a hectic day, you know what you would do?  I’ll tell you!  You would change your calendar in a heartbeat to meet with that person.

There is no way that you would let the words “I’m busy” or any derivation of the phrase “I’m busy” come out of your mouth.  If Bill Gates, Oprah, Pope Francis, Barack Obama or anyone of that ilk asked you to get out of your bed in the middle of the night, you would get out of your bed and meet with them.  You know why you would stop whatever you were doing, change course in midstream, or take leave from work?  You would do so because you aren’t that busy.  You would make an influential person a priority because you are as I described earlier – self-serving.

So if you aren’t too busy for Bill, Oprah, the Pope, or President Obama, then you aren’t busy.  Like I said busy is relative.  Perhaps its time you stopped trying to boost your relevance and discontinue your habit of trying to diminish the value of others.  It’s time for you to remember that before anybody is somebody including your children, they are first people you are “too busy for” – they are nobody.

Don’t be so busy that you miss out on the opportunity to get to know the nobodies before they become the somebodies.  Never forget that turnabout is fair play!

Get Your Priorities in Order

When Naeem was home for Thanksgiving, I sat on the couch with him for hours as he played Spider-Man on PlayStation 4.  I never touched the controller.  I never played the game once.  I only moved to go to the restroom.  I sat and shared the couch and the moment with my son.  I watched him decompress from his first couple of months of graduate school.

Sure there were lots of other things that I could have been doing.  Of course, I could have done something else – work, finish writing an upcoming book, plan parenting workshops, prepare next year’s podcasts, etc.  Just like you, I could have gotten off the couch and told Naeem that I’d be back later; that I was busy.

When I asked myself two critical questions, I quickly realized that there was nothing else I needed to do nor was there any place else that I needed to be.  First, if today was my son’s last day on earth, how would I feel if I didn’t spend it with him?  Second, is it possible or reasonable for me to ever expect others to consider me important If I routinely declare myself to be busy and discount the value of others?

How many times recently have you used the words “I’m busy” absent consideration for the needs of your children? How many times have you spoken into existence a self-inflated perspective of yourself?