National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work
Prompt – Discuss this quote by Maya Angelou: “Nothing will work unless you do.”
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This quote falls along the likes of what I often say, that few things worth doing are easy. The point here is that the easy route usually fails (though occasionally you luck out). If you want to succeed, you have to do some work. You’ve got to pay your dues, as it were. For most people, work is a requirement for success.
This isn’t to say that hard work is a guarantee of success, but no work is basically a guarantee of no success. Even people who seem to get lucky breaks work hard to put themselves in situations where they might get noticed.
That’s why it’s important to keep working toward goals, even if they seem impossible, because when you stop working, success is not possible.
It’s an unfortunate circumstance that (here in the U.S. at least) this lesson is lost on many. We have a great sense of entitlement in our culture (and I won’t get into the discussion of why) in which we all assume that if we’ve been working scut jobs for so long, we suddenly deserve to get paid more and have wonderful living conditions. And when that fails… well, it’s bad news.
We’re a society of getting a prize for trying, not for winning, which has resulted in a whole generation of people who think they should get something just for being there: entitlement. It can’t work that way, though. Not for adults. Some cope with that just fine. Others sometimes go off the deep end, with potentially disasterous results.
Yes, we need to teach this lesson to our kids: You don’t get something for nothing. You’ve got to work for the things that you want. Nothing worth having is easily attained. “Nothing will work unless you do.”
For 12-19-12
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 