Thanks for checking out my latest blog series, “Lessons I Learned from the 80’s.”  For those of you who don’t know me, this is my favorite decade of all time, hands down.  By offering up such gems as The A-Team, He-Man & The Masters of the Universe, Wang Chung, Donkey Kong, OP Shorts and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  (just to name a few), how could it not be?

I had a lot of fun in the 80’s and also learned a lot of lessons that I still benefit from today.  That was the beauty of this era.  In a time before the Internet really became mainstream and you couldn’t Google information or ask Siri for answers, there was a lot more hands-on learning that took place.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love modern technology and how far we’ve come.  Without these advancements, you wouldn’t be reading this.  Blogs didn’t even exist.  But I do sometimes miss the age before instant-gratification.  Which leads me to the first lesson I’ve chosen to share with you.  The 1980’s taught me patience.

Patience is a lost art.  One of the main reasons is that we don’t need to practice it as much as we once did.  We are a consumer-driven society and if we have to wait too long for anything, we’ll simply take our business elsewhere.  And I’m not judging here…I’m just as guilty as the next person.  In fact, I have a Chipotle app on my phone so I can order ahead of time and walk straight to the front of the line to pick up my order.  Because really…who has time to wait in line for 10 minutes?  Of course, I don’t make eye contact with anyone else in line I’m cutting in front of.  That would just be rude…and I sense a lot of hostility from the other patrons.  And truth be told, I haven’t been in a fight since 1994.  And I very decisively lost that one.

But once upon a time, a simpler time, a time when Atari and Rubics Cubes were kings, patience was taught and practiced on a daily basis.  And never was this more evident than when trying to record your favorite song off of the radio.  For anyone half my age that may be reading this, allow me to explain.  We didn’t have iTunes or mp3s for any digital music for that matter.  If you wanted to have a certain song that you could listen to over and over again, you had to buy the entire album that the song was on.  And playing the song wasn’t as simple as pushing a button.  You had to manually rewind your cassette to listen to your song again.  Then you would repeat this cycle another 97 times until you were sick of it.  But for those of us who were young and broke, there was another option.

I would sit next to the radio with my Casio jam box and wait for my favorite song to play.  And when I say ‘wait’, I don’t mean 10 – 15 minutes.  I’m talking hours.  I once remember waiting for Steve Perry’s song, “Oh Sherrie” for 3 hours.  3 hours!  That’s time that could have been better spent honing up on my sweet Pong skills, but I chose to wait instead.  I really wanted that song.  Then came the adrenaline rush when you heard the first few notes of the song you were waiting for.  It was a mad scramble to hit the ‘Play’ and ‘Record’ buttons simultaneously to begin recording.  Then, when the song ended, it was a delicate balance of trying to record to the very end, but not getting any of the annoying D.J.’s voice, which always chimed in right before the song was complete.  Oh well…that was a small price to pay for having the song you wanted at your disposal for life…or until your younger sister recorded over it.

As tedious as this process was, I sometimes miss it now.  I’ve been accused of throwing around the term, ‘Character Building’ way too much.  But once more won’t hurt.  That’s exactly what this was.  And I’m not alone in this theory.  In the Book of Romans, Chapter 5, Verse 4, the apostle Paul tells us, “And patience produces character, and character produces hope.”

Patience produces character.  And character produces hope.  And without hope…hope of a better tomorrow…what’s the point of life?  We all hope things get better in our lives.  And they ultimately will.  Until then, continue practicing one of the greatest gifts we’ve been given.

And if you’re looking for one more example of how the 1980’s taught us patience, remember this: We also used to have to sit through commercials during our TV shows!