When I was a kid, maybe 5 or 6 years old, my parents decided that I needed to take swimming lessons. They had friends with kids about my age and thought there would be safety in numbers, so they signed up the lot of us with a local instructor who taught out of her backyard pool.
Let’s just say it didn’t go great.
At the time, I had no interest in swimming. The thought of leaving the relative safety and comfort of solid ground for the deep end of some random pool at the urging of a stranger didn’t make any sense to me, so I decided I wasn’t going anywhere. As the rest of the kids got into the water, I stayed planted on a bench at the side of the pool, not far from where my now slightly mortified parents were watching on.
After a few sessions of me reprising my role as a benchwarmer, my father had had enough. Tired of paying good money to watch his son not learn to swim, he decided I was getting into that pool, one way or the other. As the third session drew to a close, he grabbed me off that bench, walked to the edge of the pool and tossed me in.
At least that’s how I remember it. To be fair, the whole episode was probably far less forceful than I recall — my dad was a mild-mannered guy, so him choosing the nuclear option in this situation seems unlikely. But the end result was that I was in the water, and I returned there for the remaining sessions.
I was never super happy about it, but gosh darn it, it worked. I eventually learned to swim. I’m no Michael Phelps, obviously, but my fear of the water is a long-distant memory, and now, some of my favorite recreational activities involve the water (although I’m not sure drifting on a pontoon boat with a cooler full of beer counts).
This story resurfaced recently during a conversation with my younger brother about my first few weeks on the job with Landscape Management. He asked how I was adjusting to the new gig, I referenced the well-worn cliché about drinking from a firehose, and soon, we were talking about getting thrown into the deep end of the pool as kids.
And as successful as it ultimately was when I was a kid, my metaphorical leap into the deep end with LM is proving equally effective. My colleagues who are still dragging me through new processes and procedures might disagree, but I’m starting to feel like I’m sort of, kind of settling in, thanks largely to a few interactions with some pretty big initiatives.
First was a trip to Louisville to spend some time with our friends at the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, which owns and manages Equip Exposition, mapping out educational sessions that LM will be presenting during the 2024 event in October. I already knew about the great partnership between the show and the magazine, and I’m no stranger to the event and some of the people who run it, but getting a full-fledged crash course into everything that goes into it was invaluable.
Then there was our work on this issue, which features one of our biggest undertakings of the year, the annual LM150 list, sponsored by Aspire Software, John Deere and Weathermatic. Being thrust into work on this year’s list only a few weeks into my tenure gave me the same sink-or-swim vibes that I had in my youth, but now that we’ve come out on the other side, there couldn’t have been a better way to learn more about the industry and connect with actual practitioners in the field. I’m largely still treading water when it comes to all of this, but I can honestly say it beats the alternative.
One final note: I couldn’t let this column end without welcoming another new face on the LM team — Nathan Mader, our new associate editor. While his arrival means I was only the new guy on the team for a few weeks, I know he and I will both be on the lookout for opportunities to learn more about our readers and their businesses as time goes on.
