I Already Went Camping

At some point you stop having first times. Nobody sends a letter about it. You just notice that most of what you do now arrives pre-chewed, already sampled by some version of you sitting in a chair with eyes half closed, running the whole thing at double speed.

I am thinking about taking the family camping. So far I have made dinner, gotten the girls to sleep, played a hand of Uno to kill the hour before the fire got good, and burned two marshmallows. All of it in my head. On a Tuesday. In a kitchen.

It was a beautiful trip. The good chairs were in it. The bug spray was already sitting in the bin by the door, the cooler had ice that never turned to water, and the fire caught on the first strike, which is the detail that gives the whole thing away.

Running that simulation costs something, and what it costs is the first time. When we actually get out there and the fire finally catches and starts throwing that smell onto everybody’s jacket, I will not be having an experience. I will be running a comparison. The real campfire has to audition against the one I already built… and the real one has bugs (literally and figuratively).

The girls will just be at a fire.

Both ways teach you something, which is what makes this hard to settle. Pre-living everything trains your gut. You stack up outcomes until you can make a call in four seconds that used to take four days, and that is real, and it is most of what people are actually buying when they hire experience.

Going in cold trains a different animal. No map, no rehearsal, learning to stay comfortable while uncomfortable, which might be the more expensive skill because you cannot get it from a chair. Only one of those two muscles keeps getting used. The simulator gets faster every year. The tolerance gets slower.

A launch works the same way. By the time the thing goes live you have read the headline four hundred times. You have run the demo in your sleep. You have pre-experienced the reaction so thoroughly that you have no access left to the reaction itself. You spent every first impression you had on rehearsals, and the only one that mattered was the one you cannot get back.

The newest person in the building still has theirs. They ask the question that makes everybody shift in their seat, the one that sounds naive, and it is not naive. It is the last unspent first impression on the team. Standard practice is to train it out of them inside ninety days and put it on a slide called onboarding.

If you believe the team feeds the customer and the customer feeds the company, that is the asset you are supposed to be guarding. Not their eventual competence. Their current inability to see it your way.

I am still going to plan the camping trip (I know myself). But the fire starter stays home, dinner is undecided, and if they want to swim at the exact moment I have scheduled s’mores, we are swimming.

In a few years the girls will remember a trip. I will remember two stories stacked on top of each other, and I will not be able to tell you which one had the better marshmallows.

Stay Positive & What Muscle Are You Working This Week?