I had a call from my daughter, recently. She lives four hours away from me in Nottingham, and was in the process of moving house.
I rarely get calls from her - she’s not a big one for phoning people, and that’s OK because I’m much the same, so when I see her name come up on caller ID it’s reasonable to expect she needs some kind of help.
But, this time was different. She was bubbly and excited and squeaked, “I have to share something brilliant with you!”
(Phew! She wasn’t in the middle of a crisis!)
To give you some context, she works from home designing video games for a living, and she also spends much of her leisure time gaming online, so as you can imagine, having a good internet connection for her is very important.
It’s more than important - it’s like oxygen!
When she was living at home with us, we had an extra internet line installed because work from home, too, and there wasn’t enough bandwidth for her to live with two other people.
Anyway, she told me of her horror when she was told by various internet providers that she’d have to wait 2-3 weeks to get an internet engineer out to their new house.
(If you’ve watched the addiction based drama “Painkiller” on Netflix recently, you’ll get a good idea of the panic she was feeling at the thought of living offline for three weeks!)
However, there was one DIY option from Virgin Media, where they send you a box and you connect it up yourself.
She jumped at this option - she’s been building her own computers from scratch since she was 14, so she wasn’t fazed at the thought of connecting a box up.
However, when they got the box and looked for the socket to connect it to, it couldn’t be found.
They searched high and low, and she was starting to lose her sh*t, so they decided to head out for a lunch break.
On the way back up their street, they spotted a Virgin Media van.
“Imagine if there was a person in that van who could help us…” she said, longingly.
And guess what? There was! He was eating a sandwich, so they had the good grace to go back into their house and stalk him from the shadows until he emerged from his van, and then her boyfriend dashed out and told him of their plight.
I’m not sure how he persuaded him to visit an unscheduled house, but I can only imagine something along the lines of “Dude, my bird is like a full-time gamer, and we’ve got no internet! You’ve gotta help!”
Thankfully, the Virgin man was able to trace the cables to a tiny cupboard at the top of the house, and helped them get up and running.
My daughter was ecstatic, like she’d had some kind of spiritual experience.
We joked about how it was the Universe helping her out, but the lesson here is all about the Reticular Activating System - the brain system that gets to work when you have a goal in mind and you suddenly see things around you that can help you towards it.
There are Virgin engineers all over the place - she’s passed thousands of them in her life - but never really noticed them until she really needed one.
And the same principle will work for you when you set goals for yourself. People and things will appear as if by magic.