Tuesday, June 7, 2011

You can't ground someone for bad behavior if they still have a cell phone...

There must be a written rule; a single line of thought transcribed then tossed somewhere under a beat up barnacle covered shell located beneath four miles of ocean waves and seagull droppings that simply states: Mentors find you, you don’t find mentors.

My first degree black belt mentor would probably argue with this unrehearsed word sketching claiming it was me who chose him to lead only to find myself fighting constantly with his mind body and soul.

We’ve all had someone that’s put a dent in the circles tightly kept and in the end their efforts are what’s helped inspire, influence and shape who and what you’ve become be it through teenage peer pressure or physical rip the human processing system completely out and replace it with an Intel modem that guarantees all Best Buy shoppers a better performance.

There can be no excellence without effort.

Not my words but completely without a doubt my way of life. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.”

Thomas Jefferson adds to it, “I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have.”

Theodore Roosevelt put in some seriously long hours without complaint because he believed that it’s only through labor and painful effort by grim energy and resolute courage that we move onto better things.

When does giving too much become bad behavior?

I recently stood next to an extremely sad man; sad because he couldn’t believe how fast life was passing. His baby brother was due to report to active duty and although his love for family seemed overbearing and never ending, there was nothing he could say or do that would silence the emptiness now felt.

Caringly I asked, “And this emptiness you speak of…where do you think it originates?”

He blamed his career. He was deeply angry that he had given every ounce of his God given effort to finding success at his place of employment that it completely took his eye off the little brother he vowed to watch.

“But you found success in your career right?”

“Nowhere near what my dreams set out to accomplish. I invested everything into my job and lost the view of my brother growing up.”

The one thing they don’t teach you in high school is that one day you’re going to wake up after life happened. You’ll be completely surrounded by materialistic reminders of where effort guided you but in the end you’ll never get back the innocence of going against your parents wishes of riding a bike with no hands. From there you’re challenged to race two blocks from home then to a completely different park, mall and across five lanes of reckless rush hour city traffic.

Inside a current society fed by a need to succeed…if the average corporate boss was asked to name their employees they’d fail. This becomes your mentored inspiration; a need to know is covered by a need to know basis meaning no effort should be spent on getting to know when knowing too much doesn’t guarantee you business success.

The efforts placed upon the growth of this nation by the footprints of Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt have been replaced by the effort to make more money than your neighbor, cousin, sinister sister and unmasked warrior from high school that claimed he knew the way of the world until old age caught up.

In his book The Black Belt Book of Life the Secrets of a Martial Arts Master; Richard Andrew King exposes our greatest human weakness…the ability to create shortcuts.

Achieving success through excellence, dignity, nobility, character and reputation no longer require years of fine tuning by way of being shaped by mentors who’ve been to hell and have vowed to never return but only moments taped to a brilliantly written resume and cover letter.

There used to be a time when effort put American’s on the moon before the Russians. Effort led Mohammad Ali to being the greatest boxing machine displayed in the most marketed colorful cities of the world. Effort has kept freedom on the shores of a nation other nations created because its people wanted to find peace, love and religion. Effort from Bill Gates has gifted your life with computers that fit under a desk or on your lap. Effort has allowed grass to grow in desert states like Arizona and New Mexico.

Effort isn’t expecting your people to perform when your hands have never been dirty. That’s how the pyramids were created and I might be wrong but in a different part of the world didn’t Rome fall?

I’m not asking for my father to take off his leather belt then wave it around like a wild man in pursuit of achieving all chores to be done…I’m just asking for the mentors to come out of hiding. The day has come that those in charge can’t get it done and it’s going to require leadership not a college education to make it through the perfect storm.

There can be no excellence without effort. Or let me put it in a less poetic way…ATM machines on every block are only cool if you’ve got money to take out. Starbucks coffee can only purchase you an hour of feeling up then its back to reality. No President of the United States moved this country forward…it required the entire embodiment of people.

arroecollins@clearchannel.com

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