Smoky Mountains Leadership

Ann Venkataraman
Great New Reads
Published in
2 min readMar 28, 2024

--

Unexpected insights

Image taken by author on vacation

I found an old draft about our Fall 2023 trip to the gorgeous Smoky Mountains. Long drives offer ample opportunities for self-reflection and deep thinking, and of course fun! Made me realize that our recent Puerto Rico trip also offered food for thought, aka Leadership Lab Lessons!

Insights:

  1. Keep your mind open to opportunities. There were fall colors that changed within 2 days dramatically.
  2. Don’t cram too much into your schedule or you will NOT have time to accommodate unexpected items that life throws on you! And life does that, a lot!
  3. Planning is critical. But so is #2.
  4. Companions are important. The best vacations were not the most exotic locales or resorts, but the people you made memories with! Build your team carefully!
  5. Take Vacations! Collect life stories. My 3 year old still gleefully recollects a crab digging its way out of sand at a local (rather ugly) beach and how she and her cousin chased it! She also loves remembering adventure of watching a real mama bear and two cubs walking majestically less than 6 feet from our car! Loading the kids to the car for daycare takes us 25mins — that day, it was under 47 seconds from the time someone yelled “Bear”! One mundane activity, one vacation spot — but…

--

--

Ann Venkataraman
Great New Reads

Techie, Manager, Blogger & Mom. I write about Leadership, books, productivity, and how to use them to fast-track your career.