Wayne Gretzky is arguably the greatest hockey player who ever played the game. His nick name is “The Great One” and for good reason. When he retired in 1999 he held forty regular-season records, fifteen playoff records, and six All-Star records. Upon his retirement he was immediately inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame and his jersey number (99) was retired by the NHL for all teams. (Source: Wikipedia) His abilities and accomplishments as a hockey player were fantastic. If you get on YouTube and watch a clip of his highlights you will see a series of fantastic plays and a level of skill and athleticism that is jaw-dropping. I said all this to set up the following quote from Gretzky.
Gretzky once said, “Great hockey players don’t skate where the puck is. They skate where it’s going to be.” Gretzky should know.
In other words, great players are those with the knowledge of the game and innate sense of the game that tells them where the puck will be. They skate to the place where the puck is going to be so they can take advantage of what is going to happen in just a second or two. They prepare ahead of time. They help their team by advancing the puck or by scoring because they know where to be before it occurs to others. In a word they anticipate.
So much of life is anticipating. How often have we failed to anticipate a little thing and had a problem as a result? We go on a trip without our keys because our spouse took us to the airport but we did not anticipate the fact that they would be gone when we got home and we would be locked out of our own home. Or, how often have people failed to do a big thing to prepare for a reality that was coming? They didn’t anticipate the effect of almost all kids having cell phones and using those phones to check the time and therefore not buying watches and therefore watch sales falling through the floor. Or, they didn’t stop to think what life was going to be like when the last child headed off to college and therefore did not prepare for a very different relationship with their spouse. Or, they did not anticipate $5 a gallon gasoline and therefore their long commute in a luxury SUV becomes three times the expense it once was.
My uncle was in the construction business for much of his adult life. He had to leave the construction field long before he was able to retire because the kind of work he did was completely discontinued. He was a “lather.” “Lathing” is a wall finishing method which involved stapling hundreds of small, parallel boards (called “lath”) on a wall and covering those boards with plaster. It was a popular interior wall finishing method before sheetrock and texture became the new technique. Lathing simply died as a construction technique. Early in my uncle’s career he could not keep up with the work. Later on he literally could not get one job. The puck had moved and my uncle did not see it coming. (Or, in the modern parable, someone “moved the cheese” on my uncle.)
I am more and more convicted about the need to anticipate in all areas of our lives—to know “where the puck will be” next year in our marriages and our vocations and our ministries and our finances and our relationships and our energy levels and our abilities. People with wisdom (skill in living) look down the road a year (and more) and anticipate the likely new realities in the various areas of their lives. They see what is likely to have changed. They see what is likely to be obsolete. They see what new actions will be needed by themselves in order to be successful in the future. There is a popular business book out right now called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter). This is a book about anticipation and about recognizing that the “new locations of the puck” are going to require new actions from each one of us.
Try a little exercise. Take a blank sheet of paper and on the left hand side make a column with the heading: “The areas of my life.” Then list down the left hand side page “spiritual life” and “family life” and “vocational life” and “financial life” and “fitness life” and “ministry life” and “relational life” and “recreational life” and “continuing education life.” Label the middle column of the page “where the puck is now” and write a short description, one to three sentences, of the current realities in those areas of you life. Then label the right hand column with “where the puck will be in one year” and again write a short description of where you think things will be in each area and what you need to begin doing differently in order to be “where the puck is going to be.” If you are honest you will find that writing an accurate description of “where the puck is going to be” is a pretty challenging exercise.
As a leadership team at CBC we are trying to be intentional about understanding where the puck is and where it will be—that is the whole point of our recent planning process and our ongoing ministry efforts.
For your life I hope you will take an hour to do the exercise I suggested above. There is hardly anything more disappointing than to see the puck glide through a place you could have been and thus either miss an opportunity or create a problem for yourself and your family. Happy skating and keep your stick on the ice!
