Building and Destroying
To build may have to be the show and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day. –Winston Churchill
So, Do Something about It
A young boy complained to his father that most of the church hymns were boring and old-fashioned, with tiresome words that meant little to his generation. His father challenged him with these words: “If you think you can write better hymns, why don’t you?”
The boy accepted the challenge, went to his room, and wrote his first hymn. The year was 1690, and the young man was Isaac Watts. Among his 350 hymns are “Joy to the World,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “I Sing the Almighty Power of God,” and many other classics.
The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards
Resolved:
To live with all my might while I do live;
Never to lose one moment of time;
Never to do anything which I should despise or think meanly of in another;
Never to do anything out of revenge;
Never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.
How to Make a Fortune
Make a bathroom scale that lies, convincingly. –Fran Lebowitz
Goals Require Preliminary Steps
Ray Stedman of Peninsula Bible church in Palo Alto, California, once asked a nine-year-old boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he answered, “A returned missionary.” The boy looked ahead not to the years of graduate study, not to the years of separation from home and loved ones, not to the months and years in steaming jungles or parched deserts—but to the final state of recognition and acclaim. It’s hard to skip the preliminaries and still reach a final goal. The musician’s finger exercises, the Olympic athlete’s daily push-ups, and the Christian’s daily stint in the prayer closet can’t be bypassed.
Activity
It is better to wear out than to rust out. –Bishop Cumberland
Thinking on a Grand Scale
Decision of the builders of the cathedral in Seville, Spain, in 1401: “Let us build here a church so great that those who come after us will think us mad ever to have dreamed of it!”
Reject Rejection
Many of those who have risen from failure to real achievement have rejected the rejection of this world. In 1902, the poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly returned a sheaf of poems to a twenty-eight-year-old poet with this curt note: “Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse.” The poet was Robert Frost, who rejected the rejection. In 1905, the University of Bern turned down a PhD dissertation as being irrelevant and fanciful. The young physics student who wrote the dissertation was Albert Einstein, who rejected the rejection. In 1894, the rhetoric teacher at Harrow in England wrote on the sixteen-year-old’s report card, “a conspicuous lack of success.” The sixteen-year-old was Winston Churchill, who rejected the rejection.
Average Man
I am only an average man, but I work harder at it than the average man. –Teddy Roosevelt
Think Big
Attempt something so great for God that it’s doomed to failure unless God be in it.
How Impossible
Never tell anyone it can’t be done. God may have been waiting for centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing. –J. A. Holmes
Goals and Targets
I like to think of a goal as a target. The bull’s eye is 100. Concentric rings are 80, 60, 40, and 20. I aim for 100, but sometimes I hit 80 or even 20. But if I don’t aim for 100, I will hit zero every time. Someone said, “I would rather attempt to do something great for God and fail, than to do nothing and succeed.”
After Eisenhower won the Republican nomination for President from Robert Taft in 1952, a reporter asked Taft about his goals. He said, “My great goal was to become President of the United States in 1953.” The reporter smirked, “Well, you didn’t make it, did you?” He said, “No, but I became senator from Ohio!” –Mark Porter
Goals, Short-term
Charlie Brown is at bat. STRIKE THREE. He has struck out again and slumps over to the bench. “Rats! I’ll never be a big-league player. I just don’t have it! All my life I’ve dreamed of playing in the big leagues, but I know I’ll never make it.”
Lucy turns to console him. “Charlie Brown, you’re thinking too far ahead. What you need to do is set yourself more immediate goals.”
He looks up, “Immediate goals?”
Lucy says, “Yes. Start with this next inning when you go out to pitch. See if you can walk out to the mound without falling down!”
Short-lived
Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and before you realize what’s wrong with it.
Step One
The first step in solving any problem is to begin.
Persistence and Presence
In the first part of this country, Sir Ernest Shackleford began his voyage to the Antarctic. It was his dream to cross the twenty-one hundred miles of wasteland by dogsled. He didn’t make it that far, however. On the way, his ship was stopped by an ice pack and sank. He and his men had to trudge over drifting ice floes, trying to reach the nearest land, nearly two hundred miles away, and the nearest human outpost nearly twelve hundred miles away. They towed behind them a lifeboat weighing nearly one ton. When they finally reached waters clear enough of ice to navigate, they faced waves as high as ninety feet. Finally, they reached South Georgia Island, only to find that it had never been crossed before. When they finally reached their destination almost seven months after they began the journey, they were so bedraggled their friends did not recognize them. To a man, however, those who had completed the journey reported that they felt the presence of One unseen to guide them on their perilous trek. Somehow they knew they were not alone.
The Plodders Are Christ
When William Carey began thinking of going to India as a pioneer missionary, his father pointed out to him that he possessed no academic qualifications that would fit him for such a task. But Carey answered, “I can plod.” How true it is that God accomplishes mighty things for His kingdom through those who are willing to persevere, who are willing to plod faithfully through one difficulty after another in the power of the Spirit.
The Determined Lincoln
It comes as a shock to me to realize that the man who could write the Second Inaugural Address, regarded my many as the noblest of all political documents, and the Gettyburg Address, had no more than four months of formal education, and that in a one-room country schoolhouse where students ranged from age five to twenty-five, and the teacher probably had no more than an eighth-grade education, if that.
Lincoln is held up as an example of achievement in what we have come to know as “The American Dream.” Where else but in America could this happen? One father, knowing the determination of Lincoln as a boy to achieve an education, said to his less than energetic son: “Do you know what Abe Lincoln was doing when he was your age?” “No,” replied the boy, “but I do know what he was doing when he was your age.”
Trying Again and Again
Among other qualities of personal character, what makes a man great is his determination to keep going. Most sports buffs know that from 1960 to 1966 the record for the most stolen bases was held by the incredible Maury Wills. In 1962, he set the current club record for the Dodgers: 104 stolen bases in one regular season.
But Maury Wills set another record in those years. A record probably obscured by his other accomplishments. A rather dubious record, for in 1965, a year in which he again held high honors for the most stolen bases, he also took top billing for the most times caught stealing in a single season. He got thrown out (or “knocked dow”) thirty-one times that year. But, he got back up. And that’s why we remember him. Proverbs 24:16: “For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again.”
Refusal to Change
A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. –Winston Churchill
Put Your Body Where Your Mouth Is
A Nova Scotia insurance salesman had been told by his boss that he and the other agents were not assertive enough. They were not as outgoing as they needed to be. One salesman wanted to prove his boss wrong, and he didn’t have to wait long for an opportunity.
Outside his seventeenth-floor window, he noticed a scaffold with some workmen on it. He wrote a note asking them if they’d be interested in life, accident, or disability insurance, and he help the note up to the window.
They said they would listen to him if would join them on the scaffold. He did, with the help of a cable from the roof, and he sold one of them fifty thousand dollars worth of life insurance.
Stay with It
We read about people who sail around the world in a thirty-foot sailboat or overcome handicaps to win a gold medal at the Olympics, and we later find they’re stories about persistence. I remember well the day I sat down to write the first of my radio programs. That was more than twenty years ago, more than fifty-two hundred programs ago, the equivalent of thirty-six full-length books. Certainly no world’s record, but a good example of what persistence can do.
When we see the tired faces of commuters on the big city subway, and children climbing aboard the school bus, we see persistence at work. We see it in the expression of a housewife doing grocery shopping or the week’s laundry. But everything we do contributes to the life we lead, the joys we experience, the satisfactions we realize from time to time. And persistence itself is a joy when we’re doing what we enjoy and want to do. Not a very complicated formula, is it? –Earl Nightingale
Never Say Die
Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it! –Chinese proverb
Be Sure of Your Course and Keep on Going
The setting was a cold January morning in a little town in Wisconsin, on the southern shore of Lake Superior. It happened to be the Saturday when they had their annual dog sled derby on the ice. A one-mile course had been staked out by sticking little fir trees in the ice. The whole course was easily visible because of the steep slope of the shore.
It was a youngster’s meet and the contenders ranged all the way from large boys with several dogs and big sleds to one little fellow who didn’t seem over five with a little sled and one small dog. They took off at the signal and the little fellow with his one dog was quickly outdistanced—he was hardly in the race. All went well with the rest until, about halfway around, the team that was second started to pass the team then in the lead. They came too close and the dogs got in a fight. And as each team came up the dogs joined the fight. None seemed to be able to steer clear of it. Soon, from our position about a half mile away, there was just one big black seething mass of kids and sleds and dogs—all but the little fellow with his one that managed it, and the only one to finish the race.
As I reflect on the many vexing problems and the stresses of our times that complicate their solutions, this simple scene from long ago comes vividly to mind. And I draw the obvious moral: No matter how difficult the challenge or how impossible or hopeless the task may seem, if you are reasonably sure of your course, just keep going!
Can It Be Done?
The impossible is what nobody can do until somebody does.
Will Power Unlimited
Strength is the ability to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands—and then eat just one of the pieces.
Determination in Use
Jan Paderewski was asked by a fellow pianist if he could be ready to play a recital on short notice. The famous musician replied: “I am always ready. I have practiced eight hours daily for forty years.” The other pianist said, “I wish I had been born with such determination.” Paderewski replied, “We are all born with it. I just used mine.”
One Step More
An explorer named Fridtjof Nansen was lost with one companion in the Arctic wastes. By miscalculation, they ran out of all their supplies. They ate their dogs, the dog’s harnesses, the whale oil for their lamps. Nansen’s companion gave up and lay down to die. But Nansen did not give up. He told himself, “I can take one more step.” As he plodded heavily through the bitter cold, step after step, suddenly across an ice hill, he stumbled upon an American expedition that had been sent out to find him.
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