3 Huge Lessons We Have Learned This Year

It’s only February. Wait. It’s only February?!

We feel like we have learned a year’s worth of life lessons already in 2015. To be honest, we are actually excited by that! We know that the only way to get better is to learn. Sometimes we learn the easy way, buuuuut usually we learn the hard way. Although, that’s just us right? You can decide if you think we learned these 3 lessons the easy way or the hard way, but hopefully our experiences will be a small encouragement to you wherever you are today, friend!

Own your mistakes

Mistakes happen. Popular business speaker Denis Waitley said, “Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what we call experience.” We are definitely hoping to find that to be true because we have made our fair share of errors already this year. And Waitley is right. Mistakes are incredibly painful. But how we handle our mistakes says a lot about who we are as individuals and as a business.

We recently made what we felt like was a huge mistake in our photography business. We promised something to a client and we couldn’t deliver. There really were no words to express how we felt about that in the moment. No words. It seemed like the end of the world to us. We always set out to make our couples’ wedding experience the absolute best it can be. And when we fail to do that in even the smallest way we feel the pain of that very acutely. Alyssa shed tears. That’s how much we felt it. You know the feeling. Your heart races. You feel sick. You wear a hole in the floor pacing back and forth. Yeah, that feeling.

24 hours later, the world was still turning. Life went on. We made it right. We were upfront and honest and they were truly understanding about the whole thing. But we really believe that’s because we humbly owned our mistake. We are thankful that we have a life full of people who have more wisdom than we have and who share that wisdom with us when we need it most.

Mistakes happen. It’s painful. But own your mistakes. You will be the better person for it.

People Matter

Obviously we knew people mattered before this year. But maybe this classifies as more of something we needed to relearn this year. We did a funnel test earlier this year in which we wrote down the things we are most passionate about in life (not even in business, but just in life). The list included things that we would still be passionate about if we could do anything we wanted to in life. Then we attempted to narrow those down to 3 main things that together we are most passionate about. As we looked at that list we had created, we were struck by how many items had something to do with people. “Building relationships. Marriage. Fellowship. Helping others.” It was a bit of a revelation to us in the sense that we hadn’t really sat down and discussed that people were such a big part of what we cared about.

The theme of people has continued to come up throughout these first two months of the year. We attended a workshop in Arizona and one of the main things we took away from that was how much we needed to do even better at loving and caring for people. When we have come across some tough situations this year, we have been able to turn to people who have more wisdom. We have realized that fellowshipping with people and playing games with them has been one of our favorite things in the last year.

We have relearned that people matter. The way you treat them matters. Love and serve. It’s the right thing to do and there is nothing more rewarding.

It’s All About Perspective

No matter who you are or what you do, you have days where everything just seems to go exactly the opposite of how you planned it to go. We all have those days. But what we have learned is that on those days, you have a choice to make. You can make the best of it or you can quit. Just the other day we had one of those days that we would just rather forget. You wake up on the wrong side of the bed. You put your shirt on backwards. You accidentally pour water on your cereal. And it’s always those days that life chooses to kick you while you’re down, isn’t it? We were down. We were feeling sorry for ourselves and wondering how life could be so terrible. Stop us if you’ve been there before.

And then we got a call. One of Ryan’s grandmothers had faced cancer about 10 years ago and had beaten it. But now it’s back.

That’s perspective. That’s when your day that you thought was so terrible 5 minutes ago takes a back seat to something that matters far more in the grand scheme. We know Grandma is going to be ok. She’s one of the strongest people we have ever known. But what we learned was that when you take your eyes off of yourself and put them on someone else who is struggling more than you, you are able to put your tiny problems in perspective.

Shift the focus off of yourself to someone who is struggling more than you today. Find perspective.