Better Safe Than Sorry
I am going to share a gem of wisdom with you today. It may seem counterintuitive, but hear me out:
Don’t try to be accurate when guessing your arrival time at home.
I can’t tell you how often this has come back to bite me. Each day my wife emails, IMs, or calls me to find out when I will be leaving work. Most of the time I get this call around 4:30pm. I look around at work and realize people have already begun to go home. I notice that my phone isn’t ringing as much and the emails aren’t coming in anymore.
“Looks like I will be leaving no later than 5, so I should be home around 5:15,” I say confidently.
But what happens every day? Something. Anything. Someone comes in, my boss calls me into his office, I’ll see someone on the way out and get delayed, and I’ll end up coming home later than I told my wife. And how does my wife take this? Terribly. She has been counting down the minutes for her tag team partner to get into the ring, tag her hand, and take over.
My wife’s demeanor begins to worsen with each minute that I am late. I realize on the way home that I am in trouble and think, “Why did I tell her I would be home at 5:15?” Several months ago I decided a new approach: I would completely over estimate how long it would take me to get home. One day my wife called to ask the question, and I responded, “I’ll be home at 6:15.”
“Wow, that’s late. Work must be busy. OK, see you then.”
I was shocked. She didn’t seem mad at all and I just added another hour to my normal response to her daunting question! I tried to hurry home fearing that it was a trap. Of course I got held up for a while, but I made it home at 5:45pm. I opened the door and saw my wife’s surprised face. “You’re home early,” she said happily.
Early? Really? I am 30 minutes later than normal, and yet she seems happy? As the night continued on I thought about the paradox I just stumbled upon. My wife gets extremely frustrated when I don’t meet her expectations, but I have 100% control over what her expectations are. What incentive is there for me to provide an accurate approximation when asked when I will be coming home? None whatsoever. From that moment on I have overestimated my arrival time every day, and it has paid off. Instead of an angry wife, I come home to a happy wife who thinks, “Man, this guy comes home early for me every day.”
Don’t forget: Overestimate every time. Seriously. Try it out if you haven’t already learned this secret. You’ll be shocked with wonderment. What a brilliant realization. I have a little more admiration for guys like the founding fathers when they drafted the Constitution because they too had their minds opened to a moment of brilliance.
Photo by: Darren Hester
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