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What is your gut reaction to a mistake? What is your 5 min reaction? How do you feel about it years later?

Friday nights are pizza and movie night at the Corella household.  Boys were rabble-rousing, setting up the dinner trays, and arguing over which movie we were going to watch...as usual.  The wife and I were cleaning up the kitchen and setting the table.  Door knocks, pizza guy hands wife the pizza, wife hands pizza guy the cash tip (she’d already paid for the pizza online), movie commences.  All is well.

Next day the family is out on one of our usual weekend trips; be it to the park, the museum, adjoining city herbal garden, etc.  We stop to get some coffee and chocolate milks.  As we get to paying, my wife grabs her pocketbook and begins exasperatingly flipping through the various bills and receipts looking for the $100 bill that she wants to break before we continue on our weekend jaunt.  She can’t find it.  Uh-oh.  

We pay the cashier and go on our way.  My wife is visibly frustrated.  Did she give the pizza guy the best cash tip of his life?  You guessed it.  After a few moments of silence my wife finally speaks, “well, we certainly made his night.”  Exactly.

Can you picture the pizza guy’s reaction when he got back to his car? The cynical types would probably say, “the pizza guy was a thief! he should have gone back and asked if you really meant to give him a monstrous tip.”  The mean types would probably say, “You guys are idiots, you got what you deserve.”  I prefer to think that we gave that pizza guy a great story. Maybe he called us morons, maybe he laughed, maybe he cried.  Maybe he really needed that extra bit of cash to complete his weekend or pay his bills.  The catalyst in the whole event was my wife’s final reaction. She realized the futility in holding on to the anger associated with the slip up.

So now whenever we stumble, at work or in our personal lives, we pause and ask ourselves how could we react? Anger and martyrdom are easy. Humor and perspective are harder and what we strive for: what kind of story will we be able to tell 1,5,10 years from now?

Off to create more stories.