When I adopted my son in February 2008 in San Diego, both of our lives changed forever.

A few weeks after our adoption, during spring break, we celebrated in what felt like the most magical way possible. We flew across the country to Walt Disney World. Up until then, he had barely been outside our county. To an nine-year-old who had spent much of life with limits instead of opportunities, the idea of flying across America and spending a week at Disney was almost unimaginable.

To me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

If you know anything about CliftonStrengths, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Achiever is one of my dominant strengths. I don’t simply like to make plans. I like to maximize experiences. If we were going to Disney, then by golly, we were going to do Disney. Every park. Every attraction. Every opportunity.

I had the week mapped out – not only which parks on what days, but every meal, and even maps of the order in which we would maximize getting on the rides.

Saturday evening we arrived. Then came park after park, ride after ride, memory after memory.  We got up early every day for the early opening park, and stayed to the night time fireworks were over.  We barely spent 7 hours a night in the hotel because we were maximizing the Disney experience.

At least that was the plan.

By Thursday, my son finally reached his limit.

“Dad,” he said, “I just want to swim in the hotel pool.”

To me, that made absolutely no sense.

“We can swim when we get home,” I replied. “We’re at Disney! Let’s go experience the things we can’t do anywhere else.”

A hotel pool was just…a pool.

I was standing with my son in front of Spaceship Earth at EPCOT, excited to take him on one more iconic attraction. He was standing there wanting absolutely nothing to do with it.

Then, in one unforgettable moment of childhood frustration, he punched me square in the face.  In that moment I realized that I was trying to a create an experience for him in the way that worked best for me – instead of in ways that were best for him.

So we left the park early. I quietly let go of the attractions I wanted him to experience, and we headed back to the hotel so he could spend the afternoon doing the one thing he had been asking for all week.

We made it into the pool.

Five minutes later, lightning rolled in.

“Everyone out. Pool closed.”

I felt terrible. I had finally listened, and now even that wasn’t going to happen.

Trying to salvage the afternoon, I suggested we head over to the resort arcade instead.

As we walked there, lightning struck somewhere nearby. The entire resort lost power. Guess what – the Arcade closed.

At this point, I honestly wondered if the universe was laughing at me and trying to teach me a lesson.

The next morning we were scheduled to fly home, so I promised him we would get up early and spend our last hour at the arcade before catching the Disney bus to the airport.

When the arcade finally opened, the employees had to restart every machine after the previous night’s power outage, so we had a bit of a delay getting inside. We were the only people there, which made it feel like we had the whole place to ourselves.

Normally, my son could burn through arcade tokens in record time. On this particular morning, though, he was taking his time, carefully choosing each game and enjoying every moment. Meanwhile, I was watching the clock with increasing panic. We only had about five minutes left before we needed to head back to our room, grab our luggage, and catch the Disney bus to the airport.

My Achiever strength kicked into overdrive. Since he wasn’t spending the tokens fast enough, I grabbed a handful myself and started dropping them into machine after machine, hoping to use them before we had to leave.

Then one machine hit the jackpot.  Tickets started pouring out. Not a few hundred tickets, but thousands. Somewhere around 10,000 of them. The only problem was that the machine dispensed them one at a time, and we suddenly had only a few minutes left before our bus departed.

Of course, anyone who has ever won tickets at an arcade knows they don’t come out all at once. They slowly spit out…one…ticket…at…a…time.

We had three minutes.

The tickets just kept coming.

Since they were coming out in one long continuous stream, I couldn’t simply wait for them to finish. Instead, I grabbed the growing ribbon of tickets and stretched it all the way down the aisle to the ticket-counting machine. As the jackpot machine continued spitting out more tickets, I was feeding the other end into the counter as fast as I could. For a few frantic minutes, I was literally standing between two machines with a long chain of tickets connecting them, desperately hoping we wouldn’t miss our bus.

“You watch the tickets!” I yelled. “I’ll go pack!”

I raced back to our room, stuffed the last few things into our suitcases, hauled everything back to the arcade, and found him carefully deciding how to spend his unexpected fortune.

Naturally, he had his eye on prizes like an electric guitar.

“Son,” I said, trying not to laugh, “pick something that will fit on the airplane.”

He finally settled on a giant Mickey Mouse. And a bunch of candy.

We rushed out of the arcade and through the lobby to the bus station and where the last people on the bus.

That oversized Mickey sat on his lap on the bus and the plane and all the way home.

To this day, it’s one of our favorite family stories.

Looking back, I realize Disney gave me something far more valuable than a perfectly executed vacation. It reminded me that the things I spend the most time planning aren’t always the things that matter most.

As I look back on that trip almost twenty years later, I can still tell you exactly which rides we rode. I still have the planning notebooks from that vacation, and I created three scrapbooks documenting the week. Those details haven’t been lost. But when I think about that trip, what comes to mind first isn’t the itinerary. It’s a little boy who wanted to swim in a hotel pool, a thunderstorm that changed our plans, a power outage that seemed to ruin everything, and a ridiculously long line of arcade tickets stretching across a room while I frantically tried to beat the clock. Those are the moments that have become part of our family’s story.

The trip also taught me something about myself. One of the challenges of having Achiever as one of my dominant CliftonStrengths is that I naturally want to maximize every opportunity. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it becomes a problem when I assume everyone around me experiences joy the same way I do. My idea of a perfect Disney vacation was experiencing every attraction. My son’s idea of a perfect Disney vacation was spending an afternoon in the hotel pool. Neither of us was wrong. We simply found joy in different places. Looking back, I wish I had recognized that sooner.

I also think about how often life surprises us this way. At the time, all I could see was stress, disappointment, and a carefully planned afternoon falling apart. Today, I remember laughter, a giant Mickey Mouse riding home on an airplane, and an arcade jackpot that nearly caused us to miss our bus. The very moments I would have erased from the itinerary became the moments that have stayed with us the longest.

Maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of life. We usually don’t recognize our best memories while they’re happening. We discover them years later, when we realize that what seemed like an interruption to our plans was actually the beginning of a story worth telling.

Want to see the scrapbooks from this trip?