December 29

  

Today's quotation:

I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and
I found that the men and women who get to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.

Harry S. Truman

Today's Meditation:

One of the most important things that I learned during my time in the Army was that sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and if you give a lot to it, you get much more out of it.  We often had to do tasks that were unpleasant at best, yet if we complained about them and did them without any enthusiasm, then we did them poorly and we didn't enjoy them one bit.

If, on the other hand, we approached those tasks with enthusiasm and did our best to do them well, then we were able to get some enjoyment out of them.  It became a challenge to see how well we could do them, the time went by much more quickly and we finished with results that we might even have been proud of.

It was all our choice.  We had the ability to choose to put some effort into our tasks or to choose to do them poorly.  If we did them poorly, we always disliked the process and never liked the results.  If we did them well, we might not have received a lot of praise or thanks, but we knew that we had at least given our all.  And almost more importantly, we gave ourselves the chance to actually enjoy doing something that seemed to be unpleasant from the beginning.

This type of attitude very often defines the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people.  I've worked with the people who do things half-way, who never put all they can into a job.  They aren't fun to work with, and they rarely produce work that will help them to advance in their fields.  Their counterparts, though, help to spread positive energy by sharing their enthusiasm, and their work tends to be work that others can count on.  Which kind of person do you wish to be?

Questions to consider:

Is it easy to be enthusiastic about work that doesn't
challenge or interest us?

Should we let the work determine our attitude,
or let our attitude determine how we work?

How can we make ourselves interested in work that
may not be interesting in nature?

For further thought:

To bring one’s self to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has.  When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy.

Thomas A. Buckner

   

   

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