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 12/28/2009 |
10 Years Later...
"Stick to it steadily and you will see great effect." -- Benjamin Franklin
The quotation above is posted on a board next to my desk. Torn from a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and posted unceremoniously there with a stapler, it reminds me that great things often take little steps in the right direction.
And this week, that quotation takes on added significance.
This edition of Monday Motivation, late though it may be at posting, fills out ten years' worth of Monday Motivations, either here or on its former home, salesstar.com (which I sold a couple of years ago). I doubt I've created any great literature, but perhaps I've helped a few people along the way, maybe I've made a passing difference in your life, or perhaps I've made you look at something from a bit more positive angle.
But primarily, I write these pieces for myself.
Writing this weekly feature, flawed though it may be, helps me keep my attitude aimed toward a positive goal, and gives me the hope that I am helping others through these pages.
Some pieces get download just a few hundred times. Others get downloaded thousands of times. Occasionally I have heard from some of you -- more often, your visits are only numbers in my logs. Visitors come from all over the world, primarily from English-speaking countries, but mainly from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. I know sometimes people get here accidentally, while some of you come every week. I have heard that some of you forward the material to your friends, and others print it out for their meetings. Back when I was reading the logs line by line, I could see how a piece would be forwarded within an organization; nowadays, I mostly look at aggregate numbers, and hope that it helps someone, sometime, somewhere.
But this endeavor has been taken on on a week-by-week, one entry at a time effort. Ten years is a long time to be keeping something going, but once a week doesn't seem like anything quite as unnerving.
And so it goes with the great endeavors in our lives. When we take our goals, our dreams and our desires, and try to accomplish them in one swift bound, we are usually left with only frustration, fear, and a feeling of failure. But when we undertake our goals a little bit at a time, broken down into bite-sized pieces, often we find we can accomplish great things, though concentrated, directed effort aimed toward a particular goal.
When we do things over the long haul, it becomes essential that we believe in ourselves -- and that we have someone who believes in us. In my efforts at writing this weekly piece, my support has always been my wife Judy. Judy has always believed the best in me -- and always thought I was capable of anything I wished to undertake. She has believed in me when I didn't believe in myself -- and her faith in my abilities has helped me keep going.
I'm reminded of the analogy given by the late Earl Nightingale, who told the story of an ocean-going ship. The ship cast loose from its mooring, and, having a destination firmly established, set a compass heading and kept going until it reached its destination. The ship isn't as fast as an airplane (which also uses the same procedure), but the captain of the ship knew where it was going, made occasional course corrections, and arrived at its destination, just as planned.
So do we need to live our lives -- no matter how fast we may move, or how slowly, the key to achieving any sort of success or arriving at any destination depends on us knowing where we are going, setting our destination, and then "sticking to it steadily" until we achieve our dreams, goals, destination, and desire.
So here we are -- ten years down the road. Thanks for coming by to read Monday Motivation. We'll see you next year.
Daryl Gibson
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