Growing up, my house was surrounded on two sides by pasture fields with dairy cattle. It was always fun to wake up some mornings with cows right outside your back door because they escaped the fence. Another benefit of the location was having a wide open area for sledding in the winter. The pasture fields were not only wide open spaces, but they were large rolling hills perfect for some serious speed for sledding when winter rolled around.

When our family would gather in the winter, sledding was always top of mind for all of the cousins, aunts and uncles. Even my grandfather would participate in the festivities and in many cases would be the one seeking the most speed down the hill. In those times safety was an afterthought. We would use hard plastic sleds that we would wax to produce more speed or use sleds with razor sharp running blades and hard wooden frames. We also worked under a hypothesis that stacking bodies like a sandwich on the sled would produce more force and therefore more speed down the hill. Again safety was never a concern it was all about who could boast they completed the run without crashing at the highest rate of speed.

Now as I referenced earlier in this post, we would sled in a pasture field, besides the safety risks I outlined above, we also had to contend with unknown risks that lay hidden beneath the snow left behind by cattle that roamed the fields. While this was not necessarily a risk of bodily harm, it could certainly make for a difficult day of sledding when you hit one of these “potholes” then smelled like cow poo the rest of the day. Lastly, we always had to balance the risk/reward of completing the run because at the bottom of the hill the field abruptly ended which included barbed wire fencing all around. If you didn’t stop in time or quite frankly eject from the sled in time, you were met with barbed wire that would create an entirely different set of risks and injuries. My grandfather tested those limits several times and though stiches to the face probably would have been advised, he chose to power through because he knew these days with family, snow and sleds where limited. We all cherished those moments at an early age and now cherish them even more as memories later in life.

Leadership takeaways:

1. Sometimes you need to look at the goal and the experience and not focus on the risk at hand. We never once worried about bodily injury, crashing or barbed wire, we just focused on being together as a family and going fast down the hill.
2. Sometimes there will be bumps in the road and sometimes they will soil your day, week, month, year, but if the goal is worth it you press on. We all hit the cow poo in the field but the moment and the experience was too important to let a little “stink” get in the way.
3. I have mentioned this many times throughout my posts, focus on the moment, experience and the people around you, that’s where memories are made. To this day when I see a sled, snow or a pasture field it takes me back to memories of my family and the experiences we shared together.