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Life lessons learned from a four-year-old. How Audrey taught me to notice the details and how it is helping me strengthen relationships.

Dear

I wanted to share with you a lesson that my daughter Audrey recently taught me during an exchange we had.

“Daddy look it’s your girlfriend!” Audrey says to me pointing excitedly at a group of people in the swimming area of Highland Glen Park.

“Audrey, mommy is my girlfriend,” I told her.

I was confused, I’m sure you’re confused as well. Tavia and I have been married for 9 years. We are at a park my family frequents often but we are still surrounded by people we don’t know. Audrey my sweet, sharp as a whip, extremely excited daughter is telling me that my girlfriend was in a group of people that I have never seen before. She keeps yelling and pointing over to the swimming area. I swear her arm was about to fall off her body. In fact, this could be the most excited I have ever seen her and for Audrey that is really excited.

None of those people were my wife, I don’t have a girlfriend on the side. But Audrey was adamant that my girlfriend was over there and Audrey couldn’t understand why I was not as excited as she was to go run over and see her. Audrey must have thought someone over looked familiar to her I didn’t know what was going through her mind. I had no idea who she thought my girlfriend was.

I will get to the mystery person in a minute but I wanted to highlight more of what I learned from Audrey. To help, I want to share a story I heard about Gary Vaynerchuk. Most of you probably don’t know who he is but I’ll give you some background. Gary, or GaryVee, as a lot of people know him today is a serial entrepreneur. He started as a young kid employing other neighborhood kids to sit at one of his many lemonade stands during the summer. Then as a teenager selling sports cards on the weekend, sometimes making thousands of dollars at a time. When he was old enough he started working at his father’s liquor store in New Jersey bagging ice. When he was 16 he was able to be on the floor and interact with customers. He quickly learned that people collected wine the way others collect baseball cards and learned as much as he could to better sell whatever they had in stock.

After, Gary ended up going to college because that is what you did once you graduate. During college he still came home every weekend to work at the liquor store. After college, he came back and took over a lot of the operations of the liquor store and quickly turned the store from a 2 million dollar a year company to a 65 million dollar a year company. He used a lot of emerging marketing tools at the time to accomplish this, mainly selling wine online and using Google Ad Words. For a number of years he hosted a YouTube channel where he would drink wine Monday-Friday and describe it to the viewer, often panning the wine he was drinking. Sometimes even describing it tasting like sweaty gym socks or smelling like racquetballs. Today he runs a very successful multi-million-dollar digital advertising company and is a frequent keynote speaker.

During Gary’s time at Wine Library he would frequently do things for customers that were above what any normal person would do, including driving hours in a snow storm to make sure a customer received their order in time for Christmas dinner. There was a customer that ordered a few bottles of wine and for whatever reason Gary decided to do something special for him. Gary had his staff digitally stalk the customer and found out he liked a specific player for the Chicago Bears. An autographed jersey was acquired and sent to the customer as a thank you for ordering wine, an order that was worth a lot less than an autographed football jersey.

Months went by and there was no communication from the customer about the jersey. Not on social media. Not a thank you note. Nothing.

Wine Library received a large order with the instruction to please not send the wine for a few months because it would be going to Texas and it was currently really hot. Further communication said they had found out about Wine Library from the Bears Jersey customer. Oh, and by the way, this new customer in Texas was a big fan of Bruce Springsteen. 😉

While not as grand as an autographed football jersey or driving in the snow to deliver wine I have started to pay more attention to what people say around me and I am working on being more aware of other people’s life situations. Because I am a gift person, what I have been doing frequently comes in gift form. I frequently gave buyers and/or sellers a thank you note after a transaction and with that typically a Home Depot gift card or something like unto it. Now I try and notice something else, something not as obvious. Maybe a favorite restaurant is mentioned or maybe a popcorn machine would fit their family. Maybe I have recently read a book that I think would be a good fit to what they have going on in their life. I have really enjoyed picking up on the details, and then strengthened connections by surprising people.

I share this to help illustrate my life lesson learned from Audrey. Life and relationships are all about the details. In our busy lives, sometimes we gloss over the details. It could be in our relationships with our family. It could be in our relationships with friends. It could be at work. It could be a hobby. Or it could even be when selling a house. It’s all about the details. Sometimes a four-year-old reminds you to look at the details.

Remember Audrey pointing out my girlfriend? Well it turns out my daughter picked up on the detail that I will sometimes call the dogs in my life my doggy girlfriends (most of them happen to be female dogs). She was pointing out a dog that looked like a dog we had met a few weeks before. You can’t get anything past Audrey. I hope one day to be like her.