National Health Blog Post Month, Day 13: Open a book. Point to a page. Free write for 10-15 minutes on that word or passage. Post without editing if you can!

Presently I’m in the midst of a couple of books, magazines, and academic journals at one time. That might actually explain why I am such a slow reader these days. My reading adventures are as varied and overbooked as my daily schedule. The top book that I’m reading at the moment and getting the most joy out of is “How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life” by Pat Williams.

I am presently about halfway through the book, and I absolutely love it. I have deliberately taken my time with this book, savoring it in small portions, because it is a joy to read and I find it so interesting. It chronicles the life of Walt Disney, both from the personal perspective of Walt, but also by the people that he worked with and inspired throughout his life. I’m a fan of Walt Disney to begin with, but I really appreciate the details and stories surrounding Walt’s life, ideas, and inspiration.

You can find something interesting and thought provoking on just about any page in the book you turn to. I can’t say that about most books I read. To honor the spirit of this blog prompt, I opened the book up and turned to page 154, to a section titled “The plus factor.”

Sometime in the 1940’s Walt Disney coined the term “plussing,” a verb meant to give people more than they expect.

Sometimes we get in the habit of only giving people what they expect, and not much more than that. I don’t think we do it intentionally, but we just get accustomed to a certain level of performance and we ride that wave for as long as we possibly can, until events force us to swim back out and seek the next big swell.

I think of my life with diabetes, and how sometimes I don’t want to do the work required to exceed the expectations of myself (which are impossibly high), my endo, or my CDE. I do only enough to get by, and hope that I get a lucky roll of the dice when it comes to my weight, my A1C, or my blood sugar graphs.

Walt would say that sort of behavior is ludicrous, and won’t ever allow me to grow and be my best. I don’t have to be perfect, but “plussing” is saying that I can always do just a little bit more in an effort to exceed expectations, even if those expectations are my own.

Walt was never satisfied with “good enough,” and that is how our life with diabetes is a lot of the time. We always want to have a little bit better blood sugar numbers, a little bit lower A1C, a little bit less weight, a little more exercise, a little bit less carbs. So much of what we deal with is just data, but it’s hard not to assign emotions to all of those numbers, especially when those numbers keep us from achieving something that we want.

“Walt Disney was adamant about quality. He always found new ways to ‘plus the experience.’ He wanted to give people more than they anticipated.” – Dan Viets, Disney Historian and Coauthor, Walt Disney’s Missouri

Dare to plus your world. Even if you have to take a step backward to move forward, always aim for a bit better than where you are right now.

 

This post was written as part of National Health Blog Post Month (NHBPM) – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J