Hello, Hamai Kakos, and welcome everyone to Bumbai We Learn. As you may know, Bumbai is a Hawaiian pigeon English word for later or some other time. As such, this podcast is about the lessons learned from our mistakes, our failures, and just our overall life experiences. Things that help us get better and move forward, Imua. June is the beginning of hurricane season here in the Pacific. And while this year they are predicting a low number of storms, the weather team almost always ends their predictions with the statement, but it only takes one. My question for today is what are you doing to prepare? And not only for the emergencies that may come, but for the opportunities in our lives as well. So hopefully it's not too late, or else it might be Bombay, we learn. As an Ego Scout and former Scout Master, I'm much aware of the Boy Scout motto of be prepared. The idea to be ready for any situation that may come up, whether it may be first aid related, how to camp for wood in survival, or leadership skills, the whole gambit of things that may come up. In my old Boy Scout handbook, it has a quick story of someone asking Lord Baden Powell, who founded the scouting movement, be prepared for what? Baden Powell responded, why? For any old thing. The idea was for scouts to be prepared to become productive citizens and to give happiness to others by being ready in mind and in body for anything that may come the scout's way. Okay, I grew up with that. I helped teach that when I was a scout master. But there's many different things to be ready for. And not all of us get the message or are on the same page. As I mentioned in the introduction, the hurricane preparedness people at the weather services and stations tell us about upcoming storms. I constantly see commercials telling us what we need to have in stock. Hawaiian Electric puts out a book every year. They have it at City Mill on emergency preparedness. But when do we really start preparing for that oncoming hurricane or tsunami? When do we see those really long lines at Costco wanting to buy water and the ever-important toller paper or cans of spam? When do we see those long lines at the gas station that crawl out into the streets with people filling up their tanks? It's right before the hurricane, isn't it? It's right before the storm is supposed to hit our islands, right? We've seen this too many times. I think for me, the first time I really saw it was in 1992. I was working at Safeway through college, and at the 10 o'clock news must have just finished. At a time when we're stocking the shelves and getting things done, except for on this particular night in September, it got really, really busy in the store about 10:30, 11 o'clock. People were responding to the announcement that Hurricane Iniki, that was on its way south of the islands, was taking a northerly turn and that the Category 4 hurricane was going to run right over the islands, coming straight up from the south through Honolulu. I have never seen rice fly off the shelf as fast as I had on that day. People were in the store stocking up because in 1992 there weren't many places where you can go to see a 24-hour store except 7-Eleven. And if you can afford to buy your groceries at 7-Eleven, you must have just won the lottery. But Safeway was one of these stores. And we were having a midday rush at 11 o'clock at night. It still amazes me. I'm just saying that there were a lot of people in the store at a time that it was very late for something that they should have been prepared for because the news was talking about this hurricane for days. The storm turned a bit later than some forecasted, which was good for Honolulu, but not for the alien of Kuwait, which the storm ran right over. Iniki did a huge amount of damage to the island, as well as some of the people in homes and businesses on the west side of Oahu. Now this was almost 30 years ago. Not to mention a missile scare that we had a few years back. These were the things that happened that caused us to run to the Costco's and the Walmarts, to the gas stations, or wherever we had to go to get rations needed to make sure we were taking care of our family and loved ones. Our last-minute preparations. I hope we're all listening to this podcast and thinking, hey, spam's on sale this week. I'm going to go pick up a few cans and make sure I stack it away somewhere. Or make sure I have my toilet paper rolls and things I need just in case put aside for emergencies. But there are other types of things we need to prepare for. And these aren't necessarily disasters, but opportunities. Opportunities in our lives give us the ability to change. It's something that either we've been waiting for or hoping for and comes along, or something just totally out of the blue that we weren't expecting. Something that moves us in a different direction. It actually causes us to change. If we take these opportunities, we tend to think things may get better, like an opportunity for a new job or to get married, an opportunity to have kids, or an opportunity to go back to school. These are things that help us grow and to better ourselves. Opportunities, most of the time, are a great thing. But are we prepared for these opportunities? The great UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, said the time to prepare isn't after you've been given the opportunity, it's long before that opportunity arises. Once the opportunity arrives, it's too late to prepare. An example I have as a hiring manager, I had many times come situations where I've gotten into conversations with the human resource team about trying to hire someone who I felt was going to be a good fit for the organization, but didn't have the minimal requirements that were required for the position. And in most times, this meant a four-year degree. If I know a job has a requirement, or a job I want has a requirement, most often it's going to be a degree or certification. Then I better be working towards gaining that certification, gaining that degree. This way, when the opportunity comes up, I'm ready. Better yet, I don't actually have to wait for an opportunity to come to me. I can start pursuing the opportunity myself. It's very difficult to pursue an opportunity when it's not something you're ready for. If you're ready, if you're prepared, that gives you the motivation to start pursuing. But it's painful. It's a painful thing to have an opportunity come up and you're just not ready for it. If you want to buy a house and someone's going to give you this great offer, something you normally wouldn't have expected to participate in. You know, since you're a good family friend, you know the owner, and they know you, and they want to give you a chance to make an offer on the house, but you don't have any money set aside for that down payment, or you're not able to get a mortgage. That's a hard lesson to learn. That now that you have an opportunity, you can't move on it because you're not able to, you're not prepared. If I know I wanted to move into a house eventually, I should be making those sacrifices and preparing all along the way to get me ready for that opportunity when it comes. It is the same deal with education. If I know I'm gonna need it, I need to be ready to do it. Hey, we may have times where we think we're gonna get lucky and just gonna have things happen for us and we don't need to prepare, you know, but we need to think about what is luck. Luck is equal to preparation plus attitude plus opportunity plus action. If something happens, if we get lucky and have an opportunity come up, and the timing for that opportunity is right, and we are prepared for it and able to take action on it, that's when we have the intersection of things that make luck happen. I've heard a pastor tell a story of this man who's praying to God about the lottery. Every week he's praying that he wins. And this man is completely devoted. He's constantly praying really hard, and he's telling people that he's praying to God that he's going to win the lottery. People wish him luck, but he still doesn't win the lottery. Finally, after many, many months, he asks God at the end of his prayer, why haven't I won the lottery yet? Just then he hears a voice come to him saying, You need to buy a ticket first. Now, this illustrates a point that we need to get ourselves prepared for luck to happen. For things to happen, we have to take action. That action is getting prepared and stepping up when opportunity presents itself. Preparing ourselves, like in the story to buy a lottery ticket, is doing the things that need to happen in order for us to be ready for when opportunity comes. We need to be prepared. And question, what do we do to get ourselves prepared for the opportunity? I used to joke with my friends and peers that I had an idea when they were about to start looking for a new job. And that was when I saw their LinkedIn profiles get updated. The only time we updated our LinkedIn profiles is when we're about to look for a job and go on interviews, and we needed our online profiles to be up to date and looking good. But this brings me back to the John Wooden quote. The time to be prepared for that opportunity of a new job is we always need to be prepared. Like the Scott motto, be prepared. It's continual learning, a mentality that we need to develop. And that means taking time, reserving that time in our day to ensure that we're doing the things to help us with our continuous improvement, to help us with our personal and professional developments. Some of you may be aware that there are professional licenses and certifications that require its members to have a certain number of continual education credits to be applied to their certification in order to keep it current. These organizations realize that they're not only just experiences that we need to maintain for our skill sets, but we also need to make sure that we're constantly training ourselves, looking for educational opportunities to better ourselves and to keep ourselves abreast to new things that are happening in our industry. Now, not to pick on or promote LinkedIn here, and they're not a sponsor, but if they want to be, they can contact me. But I do see a lot of people on LinkedIn over the past few, I'm gonna call it COVID months, posting their certificates of completions of courses they took in Lincoln Learning. They're about leadership or medical records or sales. And these people are getting themselves ready for an opportunity. And better, they're letting people know that they're ready for this opportunity. I go back to my experiences as a hiring manager and how difficult it was to have conversations with individuals that I thought had great potential, but because of whatever reason of company policy had, I was not able to give them an advancement in their careers or to give them a job because, and I'm gonna say it of a piece of paper, but not to belittle the effort it takes to earn a degree or a certificate. Please don't be wrong with me here. I know there's a lot of effort and there's value in it. But in thinking back, the explanations I got was that there was an honest lack of preparation for the candidate to prepare themselves for the position. I unfortunately see a lot of younger people making the assumption that if their mind feel they're ready and qualified for the job, regardless of what the minimum requirements are, they feel they should get it. Unfortunately, not all the world works this way, not yet. But if they're able to find an opportunity that's set up like that for them, more power to them. But the hard reality is that a lot of people out there are competing for these higher paying positions. These jobs that will serve as our careers, these more often than not have requirements on us that we must be prepared for. Whatever they may be, we may have to go through certification classes or take night school. These are things that people expect of us to have as a baseline for them to know if we're qualified or not for the position we're applying for. I've been in that catch 22. When I first started out in my IT career, it was with an associate's degree. But in order for me to advance, I needed to have that four-year bachelor's degree. I was lucky to find an organization who would hire me as a programmer while I still continued to go to school to finish that degree. But going back to my Safeway days, where I was a journeyman clerk, I was making good money for a young fellow. But I also realized I was still living with my folks. I didn't have opportunities to afford a place of my own, so whatever money I had was for me to play with. And I felt I could live it up. But there was another part of me that I would see the long lines and how people were sometimes. Side note, please be nice to your cashiers. But some of the people in line, they would take out their frustrations at the end of a long day on the cashiers on the other side of the checkout counter. I got lucky realizing that I didn't want to do this for the rest of my life. I was young. Even though the money to me at the time was good or what I thought was good, and there are people who are able to make careers for themselves in these stores, don't get me wrong, God bless them. But for me personally, as only a part-time worker, I knew I wanted to do more. That means I had to finish school. Once I got my associates, I found that job that would let me work while I continued my education. I was lucky to have people around me to push me to make sure I did it. And I was a bit ambitious. I was trying to do as much as I could, as quickly as I could, to make up for lost time. Once I finished that bachelor's degree, I got my first opportunity to be a manager. It was pretty much as soon as after I graduated. The vice president from the company who helped me get my degree, the department head, Kathy, calls me in and mentions they're thinking of re-orging and would like me to run the computer operations team. That was my luck. Because of the fact I was prepared with a degree at the right time, with the mindset of wanting to do more, I was able to take advantage of this opportunity. Had the re-org been a year or even a few months before, I wouldn't have been ready. And it would have gone to someone else. I don't know where I would be at this point in my life had I not been prepared at that point. And because I worked towards it, I was able at the time to take advantage of the opportunity. By definition, I was lucky. Well then, what does this mean for us? Well, unfortunately, some of the things that we need to do to get ready for in life, we're not going to be able to wait last minute and stand for in lines at Costco to get ready. Some of these preparations take time and some of them take money. We need to figure out what we are going to sacrifice. We need to get out of our comfort zones and stretch ourselves. It is important that we focus on continual learning and that we're constantly doing it. We're building on our skills. We're building on the things that help us get better so that when opportunity comes, we're ready. So that Boy Scout, you know, is able to make the fires for the barbecue on Sunday. Or when the opportunity comes up, hey, we know first aid or CPR, so we can help someone or maybe save their lives. We want to focus on moving forward. Emua, continuing to get better and have progression. That means we need to be prepared. Tell yourself, say it out loud now, I'm going to get prepared, and I may not know for which situation. Get out there, join a class, go and do your YouTube thing, download something that you're interested in, other than cats doing funny, weird things. Spend some time investing in yourself because that investment will always give you a positive return. I've mentioned to some of my clients that we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in the short period of time, such as months or even a year. But we underestimate what we can do in a long period of time, such as three to five years. There's so much that we can do to better our situations, but we need to take that first step. We need to start and realize that things as they happen, we gain from those experiences. And in dealing with these experiences, they teach us something. And as long as we're learning from it, it's all good. Whether or not it's a win or a loss, they're lessons. And lessons move us forward. That's how Bombai We Learn. I know you have options on where you spend your time, and I am blessed that you have shared some of your precious moments with me today, allowing me to share my mana'o, my thoughts with you so that Bombay We Learn. Bombai We Learn is a weekly cast with your humble host, Harlan Matos, as an independent certified coach, trainer, and speaker with the John Maxwell team. Please visit Matosconsulting.com for more information on our services. Mahalo Emma Halo to John Bartman for a performance of just having a beatbox.