My sister called and told me that our mom is stomping around the living room, shouting,

"I don't even know why I even bothered to put the Christmas decorations up in the first place if Björgvin isn't going to make it home for Christmas!"

That was last week.

This morning I got a phone call from her. She sighed through the phone, "They canceled your flight..."

"I know mom, I'm trying to fix the situation."

We had planned to come home for Christmas for months. But this week the Icelandair mechanics went on strike. As far as leverage goes, striking around the holidays is the labor dispute equivalent of stabbing a knife into your thigh and twisting the handle.

If it didn't affect 10,000 passengers every day they stay on strike, I'd be weirdly proud of how bad-ass that move is. Even with a distressed mother and a canceled flight, I'm rooting for them to get the best deal they can get.

But it left me with a problem to solve.

Since flying out of Denver was out of the question we managed to persuade Icelandair to pay for our tickets on a different airline out of a different airport.

Hell...we might even arrive earlier than previously anticipated, making the entire family have to wake up way before dawn!

But it made me think of how many different paths there are to solving a problem.

Even with this massive problem on our hands, we could still find a solution. It forced us to adapt to the scenario and take the best way out. Our original plan was to fly out of Las Vegas to Denver to board our Iceland flight. With our Icelandair flight canceled, we actually had more options to choose from. We could fly from Vegas, from LAX or even Phoenix.

Long story short, instead of waking up obnoxiously early to fly to Denver in the morning, we'll be flying to LAX to catch a flight back home. We might even go up early and take in a Vegas show and eat some gross American buffet food!

Sure,  we could've freaked out and yelled obscenities at the customer service staff but what good would that have done?

There was a problem to be solved, and it was in everybody's best interest to find a solution instead of helplessly playing the victim.

I'm sure you encounter problems of all shapes and sizes all the time. It doesn't have to be a last minute cancellation of your holiday flight home. It can just be a frustrating day in the studio where the musicians were under the weather and couldn't perform.

How you handle those problems is incredibly important to your future well being. You can react adversely to the situation and bring everybody's energy levels down with you, or you can respond with a level-headed, solution-focused mindset.

Focus on finding the solution, not on blaming people for your problems.

Have a great rest of your week,

Björgvin

P.S.

I get emails from home studio musicians like yourself all the time asking for various audio solutions to their problems. When a particular product of mine can help them, I usually steer them in that direction. However, I can't always solve everybody's problems with my products.

That's why I like recommending the training from the Pro Audio Files. They focus on the genres I don't do, like Mixing EDM and Mixing Hip-Hop, and they have various workshops and advanced mixing tutorials that I haven't created yet.

So if you're looking for simple solutions to your audio problems, I highly recommend their courses.