My daughter bakes some great cookies.  She really does.  This year, she sent chocolate chip cookies into the office for the team and everyone thoroughly enjoyed them!  Of course, she hasn’t been baking very long…and tonight I came home to a batch that had been slightly over baked.  In this batch, some of the cookies were a little hard and stuck to the baking stones.

At one point earlier this evening, I tried popping the cookies off the “tray” with a spatula, but it just wasn’t happening.  So I was left with a choice.  Give up or find a way.

I didn’t want my daughter to be sad that the cookies were left out.  I can deal with her being sad, and she is emotionally stable enough to deal with the batch not being perfect (that means she gets to bake another batch, right?), but it didn’t seem right to just leave them out.

So I decided that I was putting the cookies away.  Now all I had to do was figure out how to separate them from the tray.  And I did.

You see, adversity popped up.  None of the usual methods worked.  And yeah, the cookies were a little hard.  Built in excuse.  But I had made a decision.

Put.  The. Cookies.  Away.

It didn’t matter that the spatula wasn’t working.  Find another tool.  No, that thin metal spatula didn’t work either.  What mattered was my attitude toward the job.  It was going to get done.  It didn’t matter how.  It just needed to get done.

And so it is in business…and just as often…in life.  We need to do something.  We know where we are going.  We are tired.  We are faced with adversity.  Our knees hurt.  Or our backs.  Our eyes can’t say open.

But we don’t give in.  We go that extra mile.  That extra minute.  That extra forbearance.  We just push through.  We get it done.

And we end up with a container of mostly whole cookies that, with half a slice of bread for moisture, might be nice and soft tomorrow.

PS: In case you were wondering, I used a chef’s nice on edge to get under the cookies and pop them up.