I left my cell phone in a cab in Singapore the day before I came home. I realized it when I got to my hotel room. I slipped my hand into the right front pocket of my jeans and found it empty. Immediately, I felt naked. My heart started pounding.
A million jumbled thoughts rushed into my mind. How will I get to the airport? What happens if the gate for my flight changes and I don’t get a text about it? Do airlines even give out paper tickets anymore? If they do give them out, how much do airline employees look down their noses at people who use paper tickets to get on the plane??
I imagined a Japan Air rep taking my ticket in two pinched fingers as if he was being asked to hold a used tissue, and then sadly shaking his head as I made my way onto the jetway.
I burst from the elevator and ran through the lobby in the vain hope that the cab would be sitting outside for some reason. A pair of young, energetic bellhops followed me out and asked if they could help. “I left my phone in a cab!” I blurted. The two bellhops surprisingly sprang into action. A small notebook appeared in one of their hands. “We can find it!” the other said.
“What kind of phone was it?” the female bellhop asked.
“An iPhone!” I replied.
“Good,” she said. “What’s the model? Is it an iPhone 16? 15?”
“It’s an iPhone 11 with a cracked screen!” I exclaimed.
I immediately saw the urgency drain from these young people. The bellhop with the notebook slowly closed it and put it back in her pocket. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll… let you know if anything turns up.”
Needless to say, nothing turned up. I suspect the gen Z bellhops thought it was probably a good thing for me to lose the digital relic I had been carrying, and maybe they weren’t wrong. The next day, I made my 30-hour trip back around the globe without any significant problems.
(And yes, paper airline tickets still exist for old folks and prime-of-life folks who lose their cell phones.)
The point of this story is not that losing my smartphone was terrible. It was annoying, but I just sucked it up and bought a new phone the day after I got home. All my apps and documents magically populated onto the new device within 20 minutes of me purchasing it, and life miraculously went right back to the way it was before my brain fart in the Singaporean cab.
The point is how quickly this inconvenience became the conversational centerpiece for one of the most amazing trips of my life. Singapore itself looks like Disney created a city, the veterinary leaders I got to work with came from across Asia and were uniformly fascinating and impressive people, and the program we launched went better than I had even dared to hope.
Every time we took a break, our hosts would roll out a culinary surprise from one of the veterinarians’ home countries. When they did this, a veterinarian would recognize the dish, laugh, and then volunteer to show the rest of the group how the meal is traditionally assembled and eaten. It was an incredible cultural (and foodie) experience!
Still, when I got home, I found myself answering the question of “how was your trip?” by first mentioning that I lost my cell phone. Sure, I would go on and gush about the experience in some cases, but only when people showed an honest interest in what I saw there. For everyone else, I mentioned the one bad thing that happened (and possibly how jetlagged I was feeling at the moment) and then went on with my day.
Why do we do this? Why do we allow the most negative part of an experience to become its defining feature? Perhaps it’s because we know people will immediately empathize if we jump into telling them about hardship. Maybe we feel guilty about the fact that we got to have a special experience that others did not, so we mask our joy with a story of frustration. Maybe it’s because deeply moving experiences are hard to explain, but irritation is simple, so we just stick to what is easy to share.
Regardless of the reason, I think this habit is a problem. Our lives are defined by what we focus on, and I realized that I do not want my trip to Asia to be defined for myself or others by a minor headache. So, the next time someone asks me “How was your trip?”, or “How was your week?”, I’m going to challenge myself to lead with the joy, the wonder, and the things that I truly want to define my life.
Remember, our stories shape our reality – let’s make them positive.
