Mentor Blog 3

Given that my mentor, Mike, is a general manager of a minor league baseball team, it was hard to get a few minutes to talk to him. We are almost a month into the baseball season right now, and things are quite busy for him. Therefore, we were only able to email last week, but we were still able to catch up. Unfortunately, it’s been a frustrating year thus far for Mike’s team, as well as most of the teams in the Midwest League. The weather has been completely terrible over the past few weeks, and that has had a bad effect on attendance for games. Also, lots of games have been postponed, which is obviously not ideal. In the minor leagues, lots of a team’s revenue comes through ticket sales, and when the game time temperature is 30 degrees, not many people are going to come to games. So, teams have to wait it out until the weather gets better and try not to lose too much money. Although this is tough, like anything else, there are lessons to be learned from it. As much as Mike loves his job, and as much as I love mine, there are times when it is super frustrating and it feels like the worst thing in the world. We all have those times when our jobs seem terrible. Even in the hard times, though, we have to have the fortitude to gut it out and look forward to better times. In our line of work, things can get especially frustrating, such as when something as trivial as the weather can negatively affect your profits. Nonetheless, Mike left me with a good reminder: that even though we go through stretches of difficulty and frustration, we must keep our heads up and look forward to better times. As Mike has said, one of the biggest marks of maturity is when someone can faithfully work through the difficult times in life, and actually be thankful for the maturity that we gain in the process.