We Have To Be the Hope We Want To See

"The credit belongs to the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and who comes up short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause. The man, who at best knows the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, fails while daring greatly."

~ Teddy Roosevelt

There is an Aesop Fable my grandmother once shared with me. (Grandmothers are great like that. They won’t tell you exactly what you are supposed to know. They tell you enough of what you need to hear so that you can figure things out for yourself.)


The story of the Crow and the Pitcher goes something like this:
A crow, half-dead with thirst, came upon a pitcher which had once been full of water; when the crow put its beak into the mouth of the pitcher he found that only very little water was left, and that he could not reach far enough down to get to it.

He tried, and he tried, but at last had to give up in despair. Then a thought came to him, and he took a pebble and dropped it into the pitcher. Then he took another pebble and dropped it into the pitcher. Again and again he continued to drop pebbles into the pitcher until at last, he saw the water mount up near him, and after casting in a few more pebbles he was able to quench his thirst and save his life.

We all have things that we long for. Sometimes we feel as if those goals are just outside our reach. We get discouraged. We make excuses. If only we had this… If only someone else would have done that…

We have to remind ourselves that we are the captains of our fate. We are the ones who choose our actions. We can choose to react or we can choose to be proactive. Whether the outcome is positive or negative, we must choose. We must decide on which course our story will be written.

One of the great philosophers of my day is quoted as saying, “Do or do not, there is no try” (Yoda, Star Wars).

How sad is it that we have become a society of TRY-ERS and not one of DO-ERS? We are satisfied with saying, “I gave it a shot”, rather than, “I failed and failed until I succeeded”. Many of the greats we tout as successes were once failures in their own right.

After being cut from his high school basketball team, MICHAEL JORDAN went home, locked himself in his room and cried; THE BEATLES were rejected from Decca Recording Studios, who said “we don’t like their sound”… “They have no future in show business.”;At 30 years old, STEVE JOBS was left devastated and depressed after being unceremoniously removed from the company he started; WALT DISNEY was fired from a newspaper for “lacking imagination” and “having no original ideas”; OPRAH WINFREY was demoted from her job as a news anchor because she… “Wasn’t fit for television”; and ALBERT EINSTEIN wasn’t able to speak until he was almost 4 years old. His teachers said he… “Would never amount to much.”

It could have been really easy for these individuals to take these failures to heart. How many countless others have taken negative criticism and failure to heart? How many truly great individuals will we never know? I encourage you to fight for your goals. Choose your destiny. And, if you lose your footing and fail, get back up and try, try again.

There is a new Christian artist I heard the other day while jogging. Her words stuck in my head and I could not get them out. If you get a chance, get a copy of Mandisa’s “Waiting for Tomorrow”. I am paraphrasing, but these are the words that spoke to me. I hope they do to you too.

“I can't spend my whole life wasting everything I know I've been given. You've made me for so much more than sitting on the side lines. I don't want to look back and wonder if good enough could've been better. Every day is a day to start over. So, why am I waiting for tomorrow? I'm making this my moment, now!”

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* This article was originally printed in the Sunday, August 19, 2012 issue

of The Chronicle's "Planting Seeds" column.