When I was a senior in high school, I was in AP English. My teacher, Mr. Hunt, was a kind but eccentric guy. He loved Shakespeare and made sure we spent plenty of time studying the Bard. In the spring, we studied Hamlet. After reading the play and discussing it in class, we were given the assignment of writing a paper about it.

Mr. Hunt saw Hamlet as one giant metaphor that could be applied to the present day. He wasn't wanting some shallow recap or character sketch. We were expected to dive deeply into the themes of the play and come up with profound lessons that could be applied to real life.  Because the assignment was a difficult one, we got a whole month in which to complete it.

The days came and went, and I relegated my Hamlet essay to the "I do my best work at the last minute" pile. I thought about it a little bit, but I didn’t plan on writing anything down until the night before it was due. I wasn't sure I could find any parallels between Hamlet and modern-day life, and because I wasn't sure what to write, I didn’t write anything at all.

The night before the paper was to be turned in, there was a huge power outage that affected my town and several others. It lasted the whole evening. I briefly thought of writing out the paper by hand, but decided not to bother. There was no way Mr. Hunt would expect all of us to turn our essays in when there was no power to turn on our computers, right? How unfair that would be!

The next day, my friends and I commiserated in the hallway right before English class. Most of us hadn't finished the paper, and we all agreed there was no way we'd be required to turn it in. We slid into our seats and waited for class to start.

Mr. Hunt looked up from his desk as class began and said calmly, "Please turn in your papers." Several of us piped up: "But there was no power last night!" "We couldn’t have possibly finished our papers!" He looked at us for a few seconds, and then said somberly: "The readiness is all."

The readiness is all! Straight from Hamlet's lips to Mr. Hunt's, this phrase knocked down all of our flimsy excuses. Listen to what Hamlet says as he argues with Horatio about whether or not to fight Laertes; he is speaking of his own death:

"…If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all…"

Hamlet’s words did have a real-life application to our adolescent immaturity and procrastination. It just took a power outage for us to discover the connection. The lesson we learned? Not every eventuality can be known, but we hold the responsibility of preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenario just in case. And when beneficial opportunities come our way, we need to be ready for those too. 

I don't know what 2008 will bring for all of us. Most likely there will be new friendships, new possibilities, and changes to the fields of search engine optimization and search marketing.  Maybe some of us will realize that we need to make some changes to our lives or our businesses to be better prepared for the future. Others of us may have to be brave, as Hamlet was, as we face difficult yet unavoidable situations. Whatever the new year brings, it will help to remember the lesson I learned from Mr. Hunt and Hamlet so long ago: The readiness is all.

Happy New Year!