I wish you only First-world problems

I found myself complaining recently about being given an upgrade, on an international flight, only to have it taken away because they double booked the seat. In reality, I would have preferred to never haven gotten the upgrade, as I lost my original exit row seat in the process. While expressing my dissatisfaction with how it was being handled, I realized how ridiculous it was to be complaining about this, truly a first-world problem. I started thinking about how many of our other daily “problems” would be really hard to justify to someone in a developing nation.

Listen to this new, 6-minute episode for some perspective, not to make us feel bad, rather to make us feel really good about what we already have.

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- I wish you only first world problems. Listen to this episode, find out what I'm talking about. Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I was thinking about the idea of first world problems the other day and thought I'd share some thoughts here. If you don't know what I'm talking about, a first world problem is something that someone in a developed world like the US or the UK or Australia or someplace like that might have an issue that someone in a third world country cannot understand. It would be something like oh, I can't read my book because my Kindle e-reader battery died. Well, you could just open a book, read it. No I can't or my electric toothbrush died, I can't brush my teeth. Yeah, you can.

Or one that happened to me the other day, I was flying to speak at a conference and to attend a conference in Ireland and I was lucky enough to get upgraded from coach into first class and then have that taken away from me because they double booked the seat in first class and put me back into coach and I was complaining about it and I stopped myself and said hang on a second. First of all, you're flying in a metal tube and going across the Atlantic to another country. That's a privilege right there. You were moved from the back to the front and then back to the back where you would've been anyway so what is the problem here? And that's a first world problem.

And I started thinking, how many of the things that we run into on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, are really just first world problems, just things that you would have trouble explaining to someone in a third world country. For instance, try to explain to someone what an appetizer is if they're worried about eating at all today, and you're saying oh that's the food we're going to eat before we eat our main meal or a dessert, oh that's the food we're going to eat after we eat our meal when there are people that don't have a meal at all today. You can't explain that to them, that's first world country, first world problems. So what are the problems that you're running into on a daily basis and how many of them, if you step back, you're like, really I have nothing to complain about here. And I'm not saying we don't have problems.

We definitely have problems. We have a lot of staffing problems in the wedding and event industry because of what happened during the pandemic. There are supply chain issues, there are inflationary issues and things like that, definitely things like that. But in the big scheme of things, if you have a roof over your head and food on the table and you're healthy, then you don't have any big problems cause I always say the first thing, my first priority is my health because without my health, I'm not good to anybody else. And then it's of course the health of my family and my friends and going down the line there. But a good friend of mine, unfortunately who passed, Andy Ebon said when you're healthy, you have 100 problems and when you're not, you have only one and if you've been there like I have and many people I know have, then you know what it's like to only have that one problem that you're worried about, which is your own health.

So thinking about these first world problems and I know, maybe it's a little bit of a funny topic here, but when I hear people complaining about certain things and sometimes they step back and like, really? Is that a big problem or is that just a little bit of an annoyance right now cause we can make it into more, we can make these things into more and that's where a lot of problems do happen in relationships, business relationships, personal relationships, within your business, with your employees and people that we work with and then families and friends and so forth, we make them into bigger things than they are. I've said and those of you that get happy birthday messages from me, I say that you can't help how people and things make you feel, but you can control how long you feel that way. Like the day that a deer ran into my wife's car, you heard me right, she didn't run into the deer, it ran into her car and it was a new car at the time like two months old and she was mad at the deer. She was, but you know what? The deer did its damage and ran away. I don't know if it lived or died because it wasn't by the side of the road, she was mad. Now how long you hold onto that is up to her.

That's what it comes down to. We have stuff that happens, somebody cuts you off in traffic or somebody's late on a delivery or whatever. It's how you handle it and how you feel about it, it's up to you to control that. But most of the problems we have, we can handle and they will get handled and you do handle them on a daily basis. Something that bothers you a lot today might not have bothered you yesterday because of other things that are happening. And these are first world problems. So I wish you only first world problems, only things that you couldn't explain to someone in a third world country because in the big scheme of things, they're really minor and we really have nothing to complain about. And as another year comes to a close and another crazy year here, I wish you next year nothing but first world problems. Thanks for listening.

I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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I wish you only First-world problems

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