Be like Bamboo

When my wife and I went house shopping for the first time, we fell in love with a charming colonial on Yuma Street in Washington, D.C.

It checked all the boxes on our wish list, except…

After finishing the open house, the agent was salivating because she knew she hooked us, and then she shared, “The Post made a mistake with the price; it’s actually $100,000 more than the listing.”

Say what?!? There goes our budget. (for the record, I didn’t believe her)

So before Pause Breathe Reflect was a thing, we caught our breath and came back to the mantra, “everything is figureoutable.” Then we bought the house.

It was perfect and we ate a lot of mac and cheese to make our budget work.

And then…”Houston, we have a problem.”

We realized we had a bamboo situation that we didn’t notice a few years back when we bought the house, but now we could hear it growing. It was out of control.

Like innovated NASA engineers, we handled the problem and eventually moved from D.C. to N.J. to start my HQ life a couple of years later.

Within months of starting, my mentor told me, “Michael, be like bamboo.”

He was a little like Ted Lasso before Ted Lasso, and, at the time, he didn’t know I was dealing with PTBD (Post Traumatic Bamboo Disorder), so I looked at him like a puppy looks at its confused owner.

Be like bamboo? What does that mean?

The answer is the theme of this week’s video. In it, I share three awesome sauce qualities of bamboo and they could help you reach your definition of success.

And until next, if you have a challenging moment or two, come back to the breath. You got this! We got you!

And don’t forget to have fun storming the castle!