Best Day Ever

My dog Mocha has a great tail — her fur is fawn-colored and her tail has a white tip. My wife and I call Mocha’s tail the Happiness Meter. You see, you can tell how Mocha feels based on what her tail is doing. She has multiple wagging patterns:

Mochas Tail Patterns With Positive Energy

Every morning, when I wake up — Mocha is there with her tail going in the helicopter pattern. Yes, this means that she is extremely happy to simply be waking up to another day. She does this every day — to her every day is the BEST DAY EVER. The one thing to know about Mocha is that she’s getting older, she definitely has stiffness in her joints, she has a bum knee, and she suffers from bouts of mild pancreatitis. Even if Mocha went to bed not feeling well or wakes up stiff — her outlook is always, this is going to be the BEST DAY EVER.

We’ve all heard of the power of positive thinking — heck, there’s probably a couple hundred books on Amazon written about or referring to the power of positivity. But since we are humans, it’s difficult to squelch down the trials and tribulations of day. In the software development world, we talk about “the death march.” This is that project that drags on, is considered a failure before the first user even sees it, the one where the management tells folks to work on the weekend, the one where for every bug fixed someone finds two more. If you work in information technology, then you’ve been on one of these projects.

Now since you are reading an Agile blog, you are probably waiting for the Agile Punchline or to hear about the Agile Secret Sauce to help over come the challenges of these projects. Well, the reality is that Agile generally will expose problems earlier and maybe make you realize that this project is going to be painful and heading for certain doom. We hope that we course correct or try something different, but sometimes we are simply just in a bad place and cannot get out of the rut.

So while working on these projects, people come dragging in for another day of drudgery. Another day of running on the hamster wheel and not getting anywhere. Another day that the project is dragging us down — in fact, today just may end up as the worst day ever.

Remember, today didn’t start out as the worst day ever, it started as the BEST DAY EVER.

Today is the day that no matter what happens we will find something positive and see how today is better than yesterday.
Today we will find that our small failure is just that, a small failure — and we learn from it, and have a piece of knowledge that we didn’t have yesterday.
Today is the day that we celebrate finding defects, because those are defects our customers did not find.
Today is the day that we find joy in having to refactor some old crappy code, because we know that when the next developer visits that code — they’ll get to enjoy changing it, not dreading the fact that they are likely to break something.
Today is the day that we move one day closer to getting the project out the door.
Today is a great day to laugh with a coworker.
Today we admire what has been accomplished versus what is remains.
Today is going to be the BEST DAY EVER.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask Mocha.

Matt Badgley

I am a consultant, coach, trainer, facilitator, speaker, husband, dog dad, food smoker, beer fan, sports fan, podcaster, and, sometimes, a writer. I love sharing what I've learned, insights and observations, every once in a while an opinion, and, mostly, things that I think others might find useful. I'd love to connect, so please hit my LinkedIn.

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