How expensive is happiness?

I get a kick out of now former White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, but some of the comments he made upon his departure last night are just sad.

"I want more money. I don't work here for years. No, I want more money. Years -- what, I'm going to die poor with the White Sox? Hell, no." Guillen continued, "Life is about money. People don't believe that. People are happy after they make money."

This coming from a man already making around 2 million per year to manage ballgames.  It begs the question, if you can't buy happiness on a 2 million dollar salary, just how expensive is it?

Friends, I'd submit to you that there will come a day when Ozzie won't care a lick about what he has in his bank account, but rather would trade it all for just a little more time with family and friends.   Don't believe the lies the world tells you. There's nothing wrong with money, but life really is about so much more.

Your relationships are what matter.  Your relationship to God, your spouse, your kids, your parents, your other family and friends.   I don't mean this to say that I don't believe Guillen values these things.  Guillen is an emotional guy and speaks without any filter whatsoever.  I think his comments just show how easy it is to get caught up in what we do and the rat race for material "success" that we lose focus on what our priorities should be.

Stuff is nice, but the greatest thing you can leave behind is a legacy of character.  What kind of legacy are you building?

What can you learn from a piece of tape?

I love NASCAR.  I know that it doesn’t seem to be the most cerebral of sports to some folks, but believe me when I say that there is a lot more to it than guys driving fast and turning left. 

This past Sunday I was down in the Sprint Cup garage area waiting to take my family and some friends to the pre-race chapel service for drivers and crew members.  We watched as the teams pushed their cars through the final technical inspection area before they would put them on the starting grid.  There was a slight mist falling but not so much that we were uncomfortable.

Several cars were in line including the cars of Hendrick Racing teammates Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

As we watched, my friend Gary Hogue noticed that Johnson’s car had a piece of tape covering the exhaust pipes that point out from under the side of the car.  Being an engineer by education, Gary surmised that the tape must have been placed there to prevent any moisture from entering the engine.  Gary also noticed that of all the cars in line, only Johnson’s car was taped in this fashion.  Not even his own teammates were taking this precaution.

If you follow NASCAR racing at all you know that Jimmy Johnson’s team has won the last 5 Sprint Cup championships in a row.

I thought about this for the next several hours.  (There ended up being a rain delay so I had plenty of time to think)  I came to several conclusions about that little piece of tape.

1)  The value of associating yourself with people with different views and perspectives is immense.  I’ve been attending NASCAR events since I was a boy, but I never would have noticed the tape or considered its purpose if I hadn’t been standing next to an engineer.  Nothing in my legal or seminary training had conditioned me to see things that way.  If we become too homogenous in the people we surround ourselves with we will necessarily miss out on some things.  Nobody sees everything.  A wise leader will understand where his blind spots are and seek out people to help him in those areas.

2)  It is cliché, but those who excel at the highest levels are those who pay attention to detail in ways that seem odd or obsessive to most of us. The chances of rain getting through those pipes and getting into the engine of that racecar were probably miniscule, but they weren’t taking any chances.  You have to wonder how many other things that Johnson’s team is doing on areas of the car that can’t be seen or in their shops away from the track that their competitors don’t do.  I bet it’s a lot more than putting a piece of tape over an exhaust pipe. Details make the difference.

3)  Don’t allow pride to cause you to become hard headed.   The most amazing thing to me in all of this was the failure of Johnson’s competitors to notice the tape and implement it themselves.  Johnson has won five consecutive championships.  You’d think his competitors would be studying him intensely given his success yet that didn’t seem to be the case.  Why would these other teams miss such an obvious thing?  It surely isn’t laziness or a lack of educated engineers.  Every NASCAR team works super hard and has lots of smart engineers.  The most reasonable explanation I could come up with is pride.  Sometimes smart folks with a lot of drive let pride and ambition cloud their minds.  It’s not just that we want to excel, but we want to do it our way.  We hold to doing things our way sometimes even though others around us are continually having better results doing it differently.  We don’t just want to win.  We want to be vindicated.  Pride can bias our vision and our judgment. Wise leaders will recognize and guard against this tendency.  It’s much better to be an adaptable winner than a hard headed loser.

Now, maybe I’m reading too much into a small piece of tape.  Or maybe I’m not.  After the race concluded Tuesday (it had to be rescheduled due to rain) there was a new driver leading the Sprint Cup point standings.  His name was Jimmy Johnson.  Go figure.