The Mirage of Getting Ahead - When Scarcity Sneaks In

While the challenges we faced in navigating Matt’s seizures and school changes were nowhere close to resolved, we did build systems for dealing with both. And modest pay increases came with each new professional opportunity we earned. I’ve often heard folks comment on how much better everything will be as soon as they get that next promotion, or how much their finances will improve with their next raise. To this point in my life, I can’t think of a single time where we’ve achieved a goal or arrived at a certain destination along our career paths and things automatically got better.

As I was starting to travel more frequently, supporting other locations’ behavior-based safety processes, things appeared great from the outside looking in. I had a company credit card to pay for my flights, meals, and other expenses. What wasn’t as obvious was the scrutiny I faced in booking each trip or the tight per Diem covering my meals ($33/day for all three as recently as 2011, and that included anything the host facility paid for).

For many people, sticking to that per Diem could have been an insurmountable challenge. For me, though, $33/day was substantially more than I ever spent in those days when I wasn’t traveling. I often joked with my grandmother that I had eaten around 15,000 peanut and jelly sandwiches since graduating high school, and that may have been a low estimate. Before Cindy and I got serious, I was far more interested in spending money on beer and concerts than everyday food. That thought process carried over nicely when we had to tighten our belts to accommodate for Cindy’s reduced hours while paying Matt’s tuition. I packed my lunch every day for more than fifteen years; four PB&J’s, two for morning break and two for lunch. I got the cheapest generic-brand supplies I could find, usually all for less than $10 per week. Our mornings were always a whirlwind so I drank a protein shake as I rushed out the door; those also totaled around $10 per week. And we rarely ate out. Back then, we could usually splurge on Ci Ci’s Pizza once each month as long as we all drank water instead of soda (the buffet was $3.99 for adults then and my friend managing the restaurant occasionally didn’t charge us for Matt).

Looking just at the promotions, travel, and company credit card, one could easily get the perception that we were outrunning scarcity; that was most certainly not the case. Fortunately for us, even though we didn’t see it that way at the time, bad situations disguised as minor inconveniences are exactly where leadership lessons in resource awareness begin. Scarcity rarely announces itself with drama; spotting the early illusion of “fine” lets us extract seeds of purpose before the grind intensifies. Next, I’ll share how one relatively minor breakdown left me feeling completely helpless. First, though, I want you to list one area of your life or work that currently feels “stable” but might be hiding a slow-building resource strain. Note one early warning sign you’ve been ignoring and an immediate step you can take to address it.

The First Major Breakdown

I previously mentioned receiving a call from Cindy while I was in Cozad, Nebraska, telling me about yet another car issue. I can’t remember what the problem was that time, but I don’t remember it being significant - at least not mechanically. At that point, though, even the most minor issue created a tremendous strain on both our budget and our mental health. Interestingly enough, that car was reliable overall. The sunroof was a tremendous pain, but only when it rained. Even with me being such a cheapskate on my breakfast and lunch choices, our finances then would have had to improve before we could have referred to them as just scarce. We were so broke we could barely pay attention! Replacing wiper blades or changing oil required planning ahead; getting a new battery bordered on financial ruin.

While I can’t remember the conversation, I remember the feeling it created. I remember where I stood, in the hallway of the town library - because the plant I was supporting didn’t have a viable space to host the training session I was conducting. In most cases, that would have resulted in renting a conference room in one of the local hotels. I was staying at the Best Value Inn, the only motel in town. There wasn’t even a McDonald’s; the one that had operated there previously shut down years prior and was converted into a used car dealership. I share that specificity not to knock Cozad, the people were wonderful, but to detail how that phone heightened my awareness of everything around me in that moment. My lodging and the re-purposed McDonald’s were leagues above the feeling of helplessness I felt from not being able to do a damn thing to help Cindy.

When a single breakdown happens at the worst possible time, the real adversity isn’t the car - it’s realizing our resources (time, money, presence) are far more limited than we thought. I’d love to say this was the only example I could share. There were dozens, and they weren’t isolated to car issues. At one point, I started calling our lawnmower a “Fred-bilt” because my dad had done far more work to that thing than Troy ever did. Replacing belts, sharpening blades, and the occasional weld to keep it all together were each cheaper than buying a new mower, but even those small costs added to the strain. And God forbid a dog got sick…

The Pattern Emerges

Had the Best Value Inn I was camping out in been in a town even half the size of Harrisonburg, the casual observer could have easily justified sending me for a reasonable suspicion drug screen. Since Cozad, NE may have had a population of around 2,000 people at the time, I was thrilled that I didn’t have to get a place in the closest town nearby; Kearney was about 30 miles east and didn’t have many more options to choose from. 

While my lodging choice wasn’t necessarily terrible, I can’t say the same for many of the decisions I made back then when it came to our vehicles. Buying a crappy car was one thing; we did what we could with what we had to work with. But routine maintenance and repairs were a completely different story. We’ve been blessed to have access to trustworthy mechanics, but they still need to be paid. With our finances so tight, we kicked the routine maintenance can down the road as far as we could - every single time - which usually ended up getting done when we had to take the car in for something else more urgent. Even then, it was always a question of what would be the minimum we could do to keep the wheels turning. There are so many stories I could include here. I won’t with hopes of maintaining some credibility (and to avoid the post-traumatic stress it would likely cause me).

Had the breakdown Cindy called me about while I was in Cozad, NE been the only one, we may have been able to write it off as back luck. It most certainly was not the only one! That was part of a repeating pattern, and that pattern should have served as a leadership classroom. Unchecked scarcity, which drove each of my decisions to slap a band-aid on every car (and other) issue that came at us then, turns minor failures into a daily grind that tests every ounce of purpose we claim to have. I distinctly remember standing in the hallway of that library in Cozad thinking, “What the hell is the point…?” and feeling completely helpless. It’s tough to focus on training someone to work safer when you’re thousands of miles away from the person who needs you most and you can help them in a time of need.

In that same time period, though, my behavior-based safety role led to me being involved in nearly every incident investigation at my home facility. In every one, we applied various root cause analysis tools to be sure we identified the driving factors. It’s easy enough to point fingers at the injured individual, but that rarely prevents recurrence. Discovering the primary issue gave us a chance to eliminate similar or worse scenarios in the future, in our plant and others doing the same kind of work. Had I thought to apply that same approach personally at the time, specifically to the glaring patterns in car breakdowns, it may have dawned on me that those band-aid fixes weren’t saving us time or money; the long term costs were much greater.

Cumulative resource failures (should) force us to stop reacting and start tracking every detail - planting the seed of mastery of detail. Thankfully, my professional experience helped me initiate this in my personal life - eventually. Once I did, the results were immediate. That skill set served us well in 2020 when the complete care facility we were paying nearly $12k/month allowed my 96 year old grandmother to fall more than twenty times in 90 days but couldn’t seem to identify why it was happening. More on that later, though. Before that, we’ll dig into how the ripple effects of scarcity spill over in every aspect of our lives. First, I want you to think about one “leaky” resource in your life (a budget item, a time drain, or some repeated small failure) over the next week or so. Note any hidden costs you may not have noticed before and one thing you can do to change the pattern.