Is this another one of your crazy drills?
Like most big-city hospitals these days, Tufts Medical Center runs regular disaster drills, featuring simulated patients smeared with fake blood.
“There was sort of this beat where everybody in the emergency department sort of stopped for a second. And it was almost like you could hear each other breathing. And everybody looked at me and said, ‘Is this another one of your crazy drills?’ and the first thing I said was, ‘No, this is not a drill. This is for real. We need to huddle up.’ “
Reported by Richard Knox on NPR’s Morning Edition:  Boston Doctors Compare Marathon Bomb Injuries To War Wounds

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In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish writes of the need to have the rhythm of regular meetings — daily “huddles,” weekly “what is the agenda?” meetings, monthly meetings for learning.

In Boston, the folks at Tufts Medical Center were ready for the wounded after the explosion at the Boston Marathon.  Sure, it was a shock.  Sure, it was emotionally painful.  But the training had been done, the drills had prepared the team, and they went to work as the first of the wounded were wheeled in.

The lesson is clear.  It takes many, many “practice drills” to be ready for the real thing.  Whether it was Jerry Rice running his own “after practice” drills to develop his short bursts of speed and his stamina, or the drills Joe Biden goes through, down to the design of the room, to prepare for a debate, to the drills of medical professionals “just in case” it is ever needed — you can’t be ready for the “event” if you have not prepared and prepared and prepared.

Meet; huddle; drill first; drill often; practice; repeat, repeat, repeat.  Then you can be a lot more ready when the hour of need, the hour of testing, the hour to “perform” at your very best, arises.  Because, those “crazy drills” are the very essence of preparation.