This is the 10th Leap Day of my lifetime, and the 9th of Lani’s. And as it happens, we’ve been having some pretty intense conversations about our business, and our vision - not just for Epiphanies, but our own personal passions as well.

And for a while there, it wasn’t all fun. The energy Lani spent to cheer me up brought her down, then trying to bring Lani back up took a toll on me, and so on and so forth in a little vicious circle.

On top of all that, when you’re in business to create results and you spend the morning talking about things that have no seemingly direct tie to “deliverables,” it can get even more frustrating.

And then it hit me, and I finally said to Lani, “You know what? Today is a Bonus Day. This day doesn’t exist three out of every four years.”

To which she lit up and said, “Yeah! It’s like Brigadoon!” The reference was lost on me (that Wikipedia link helped), but this absolved a lot of guilt about what we “could” or “should” be doing today…and brought us both out of the muck.

Instead, we decided that, to honor the day, it was imperative that we do something awesome. And…we haven’t figured out what that is just yet, so I’m taking this little interlude to blog.

Back to the original point, though - what would YOU do with a Bonus Day? What if you were dying, and God came down and said, “You know what? Here’s a Bonus Day. Do with it what you will.”

So far, Lani and I have gotten our baby to roll over from back to front for the very first time, and dissected our wedding vows in geeky detail (we have them framed, with photos of us on our wedding day, hanging on our brick fireplace).

We’re talking about going to the planetarium (Lani’s never been, and I haven’t in two years), visiting Lani’s Aunt Joyce at her camp in Epsom (Joyce, born on a February 29th, is celebrating her Sweet 16 today), and eating at the Japanese restaurant where they turn food preparation into an acrobatic feat.

We may do all or some or none of this. And I’m totally okay with that.

More important, for me, is that I’m going to come out of this Bonus Day having decided, having chosen for my life, that I’m just going to have fun. I haven’t been recently. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the company of our clients, our partners, or our allies - it just means I haven’t been finding (or even looking for) the joy in our circumstances.

I read an interview with Jerry Seinfeld in GQ recently, and he described his career simply as an assiduous pursuit of fun. (Full disclosure - I had to look “assiduous” up in the dictionary.) And if that’s good enough for one of the most successful comedians in history, it’s good enough for me, too, especially as the co-owner of a company that preaches the power of “Bold Insight PLUS Joy-filled Action.”

It’s Bonus Day. Whatever you do, for love, money, or both, please: Have fun doing it today.

Posted in Lessons Learned |

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Lessons Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.