It is time for a shout out to my Meatingplace bloggers and colleagues. Thank you for teaching me new perspectives. I have had the pleasure of meeting many of you this year and I am hoping to meet the others one day soon. I follow your blogs and I learn so much from each of them. I love that we all have a certain expertise we can learn from each one of our talents. It takes a team to learn, understand, and make a difference.

Many people I speak to really don’t know why I blog. After all, it does take a lot of time, talent, and energy to be a blogger, and it is always a humbling experience. Someone always has a comment and while I love comments and discussion, sometimes we get the occasional disrupter either through a post or an email. It takes some guts to blog, and I want to say thank you to my colleagues for doing such a great job.

Blogging is a form of expressing passion about our life’s work. We are all experts in something and have dedicated many years to learning people, process, and the science and data behind our industry. We have spent countless hours understanding the pain points and the highlights of our passions and our industries. Do we know everything? No, we do not claim to know everything. For this reason, we have an open mind and ability to learn, listen, discuss, and focus on solutions. Our job is to be objective and state the facts and stimulate healthy discussions.

Blogging is more than sitting down and jotting a few thoughts together. It is more than a 30-minute block on the calendar. It is time and energy spent on reading, looking up facts and analyzing data. Our jobs are our passion, and all the work we do up front is why we can discuss in detail about our respective industries. We know the people, the processes, and the good, bad, and ugly. We have lived it, continue to live and breathe it, and we still love it.

To understand what we do or why we do it, think passion! Passion to learn, discuss, and focus on solutions to make things better for our industries and our consumers, which include each of us. We have a drive to learn, to have healthy discussions, and to educate.

So please be kind to us bloggers. We are putting ourselves out in the public eye each week. We do not have the luxury of hiding behind fake names or initials in the comments. We work hard to discuss educated facts and even our opinions are backed by science. Please feel free to disagree, as we enjoy different perspectives and even challenging questions or comments. I love questions and comments as it helps me learn different perspectives. But please be kind. We are all in the same sandbox, and we want to be able to discuss without condescending tones. We are all in this together.

Time, talent and energy

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