To say that time flies when you are a small business owner is an understatement.

My daughter is going to be 8 years old this year. She was just an infant when I began this journey. My sons, will be graduating from grad-school and college in May. They are ROTC cadets who will become commissioned officers in the United States Army… all within 2 weeks of each other. Who knows where they will be this time next year.

In the blink of an eye, kids grow up.

If you've seen the movie "Cars", released by Pixar in 2006, not only it is very funny, (gotta love Mater) but the message and inspiration for making this movie is something we all need to pay attention to. If you haven't seen the movie, you should.

For many of us, the reason we decided to work from home is to spend more time with family and friends, to not miss those "first baby steps" or to be there in the afternoon when they get home from school. It's hard sometimes to slow down, especially when more of our society has become a nation of "gotta have."

I'm not in this for the "stuff" and yet so much of today's marketing messages is all about the "stuff."

What will kids remember when they are adults? The time you spent with them. That is what they really want.

John Lasseter, creative genius at Pixar, discovered that the journey is the reward and says it best in this interview > >

"During this time, I also had four of my five sons. By the end of Toy Story 2 where we started to go into this period of me being this creative executive working with these other guys, my wife Nancy, bless her heart, was so supportive, and she kind of thought she was getting her husband back, you know, after this. ‘Oh, you’re not going to be directing now. She thought, ‘Be careful, John, one day you’re going to wake up and your boys will have gone off to college and you would have missed it,’ and she was right."

As we start to prepare for the end of the year and make our business plans for the new year, consider a plan to slow down. Take some time for yourself, your family and just enjoy. The computer isn't going anywhere and neither is your business. It will still be there and you'll be refreshed and better for it.