Due to the fact that I’m knee-deep in turnaround strategies for 3 clients right now, I MUST give “props” to Tim Ferriss and his blog entry today…
There are a lot of hard choices and big decisions in life. Dealing with most of them requires facing daunting — but transient — discomfort. I encourage you to read the following, which helped me to eliminate the rationalization we so often use to avoid doing what is important.
“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.
You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.
Whether it’s an employee that you like, but isn’t doing the job or whether or not you’re going to the gym today, ALWAYS take what my Daddy calls “The Hard Right” rather than “The Easy Left.”
About Wendi McGowan