Brilliance

I am a big CBC Radio 2 fan. I listen whenever I can. The morning program is one of my favorites. I listen when I wake up and it often really gives me a boost for the day. Great music will do that to ya! The host, until recently, was a guy named Bob Makowitz. His banter and stories also made the program worth listening to. One story from a few months ago really stuck with me. It also made me smile.

Bob told about this health food store in a small town in Prince Edward Island. This store had farm fresh eggs for sale in their establishment that had never been government inspected. Who doesn't love farm fresh eggs? There is something about them that makes every other kind of egg seem very institutional. Anyway, this store had been selling their customers these lovely eggs for years. The farmer was happy, the customers were happy, the store owners were happy. Everyone was going about their merry way, until some government official caught wind of what was going down at the health food store.

Farm eggs need to be inspected before they are able to be sold in a store. This little kink was putting a major kibosh on a very happy little community. This is where the brilliance comes in. The store owners sat on this problem for a bit, thinking about how they could continue to provide eggs for their customers. This is what they came up with: eggs are now free at their store, but if you want something to carry them home in you have to purchase a carton for $2.75. Isn't that utterly brilliant? I cheer for the ingenuity of the human race!

I relate this story, not to promote 'beating the system', but to applaud great problem solving skills. So often problems get the better of us. They seem so insurmountable, so enormous, that we would rather just crawl back into bed than to face them head on and come up with solutions to them. Sometimes the answer is so outside of the box. Sometimes the answer takes creativity. Sometimes the answer comes in one of those 'ah-ha' moments. However they come, don't be afraid to look those challenges in the eye and come up with solutions that work. The solutions may not make sense to others, that's alright. They need to work for you and your circumstances. Be brilliant and remember this little story about eggs!