Asheville always feels a little colder, a little wetter, and a little quieter in February. I’d say I like the month of February the least, but it does have some positives! It allows for March to roll in! Flowers begin to bud, grass begins to turn a slight shade of green(er), and most importantly, baseball season begins!

We are a baseball family. I played at TC Roberson High School and at UNC-Wilmington. Our son, Thomas, currently plays for TC Roberson High School, and Heather has had to endure hundreds and hundreds of baseball games over the past many years.

Heather and I inter-weave baseball with our parenting strategy. Baseball is a game of failure. It’s a game of strategy. It’s a game of continuous preparation, planning, and pressure. Sounds a lot like life! We teach our kids, that it’s how we respond to our failure and our struggles that makes us resilient to this world. To be good at baseball, you must be prepared to fail and accept failure as being one step closer to success. Succeeding 3 out of 10 times is a monumental success in baseball. Failure in baseball is often.

Failing so much of the time, is difficult on the mind and the heart. It’s how we respond to this failure that separates the great in baseball (and in life). We teach our kids to practice verbalizing positive thoughts to themselves. It reinforces positive outcomes to the brain. We, practice the difficult conversation, practice the vocab questions, practice reading that passage out loud, and practice what a successful outcome looks like. Visualizing success leads to more successful outcomes.

For many, baseball is a slow game to watch. It can seem boring and un-impressive. To the purists, it is an ever evolving chess-match of strategy and talent between two teams. Amazing things happen in what appears to be the mundane.

Heather and I prepare and plan like crazy for the shops. We strategize, we implement, we evaluate, and we evolve in a constant state of movement. We firmly believe that you tackle the mountains in life, one small step forward at a time. We make an effort to take one small step forward everyday with our shops. We plod.

To plod: to proceed along slowly. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plod) The good baseball players plod. The good businesses plod. They develop a strong foundation and then slowly take small steps forward, everyday, towards their organizational goals. It’s slow. It’s boring. It’s sound. You only realize how far you have come when you turn-around and look down the mountain from where you started.

We have made great progress over the past few years with Provisions. We have a long way to go to meet our goals. We will continue to plod. We will continue to fail. Join us sometime at the shops and come along for the ride. At worst, you’ll get a big genuine smile and a hello from us both.

Batter up,

Matt