One day this summer, while driving between Brainerd and Nisswa in Minnesota, I read a
billboard. The billboard said something
that caught my eye. It was an
advertisement for a resort in the area and said that the resort was rated fifty-third best in the world. My first thought was,
"Who cares." But then I begin
to consider that if no one cared then it wouldn't be on a billboard. The people at the resort evidently care or
they would not have spent the money to put it on a billboard. Then I wondered, "Why do they care?"
I think they care
because fifty-third in the world is good.
It is not best, but it is good.
In fact when one considers the number of resorts in the world it is very
good. Something does not have to be the number one best to be very good.
After digging a little deeper I found that fifty third in the
world means twenty-first in the U.S., and it means first in Minnesota. Not too bad huh?
One of my earlier posts in this blog was titled "When To Retire" posted on April 16, 2015. In that post I wrote about a survey that indicated only about 38 percent of persons who retired in 2014 retired about when they had planned to do so. In fact, about half of all the survey respondents answered that they retired before they planned. Then there was the group who retired later than they planned to or who had not given any thought to when they planned to retire. "Sometimes
things in our lives go per plan, but more often than not they do not. We
may plan to retire early; we may plan to retire late; we may plan to retire at
sixty-five; or we may plan to not retire at all. It is highly likely
that life may push us toward an outcome different than what we planned.
But, that does not mean that life is not good anyway."
I am thinking that
when we retire, we don't have to be the best of anything to have a very good
retirement. We can be way down the
list. Maybe even 53rd, and still be very
good. According to their published information Madden's resort has been in business for over eighty-five years. What if the owners had waited to open the resort until they had a plan that would insure they would be in the top ten resorts in the world, or even in the top fifty? If they had waited, they would probably still not be open. I am glad I did not wait until I was the best at something before I retired.
