How do you want to be remembered? Do you want your life to make a difference? Or are you content with status quo?
When you plant a seed, if given the right nutrients and light, it strives to grow to it fullest potential. I’ve never met a flower that grows to one size and quits. They continue to grow all season until the freeze comes. By the end of the summer the plant and it’s flowers are many times the size of the seed.
Weeds grow even faster…or it seems like it. I know you’ve seen weeds grow where a flower would starve to death. I pulled a goat head weed out of a crack in the sidewalk yesterday. This growth and expansion is the way that they reproduce themselves.
Every year about this time, the volunteer cherry tomatoes in my garden overtake everything else. If I don’t keep up every week and pull those baby tomato plants that spring up from last year’s seeds, the kale, chard and parsley is dwarfed–like now. (Obviously, I haven’t been weeding in awhile.)
As a leader, I know I am often tempted to laziness. In fact, just last week I tweeted, “Let someone else be CEO this week–I’m weary.” Sometimes, I just don’t want to venture out of that comfy zone one more time. Can’t I just have a week or two of average? If I’m not careful, I can stay there for awhile.
But is that how I want to be remembered? As average? Do I want to be described as ordinary?
Paganini, the great violinist, came out to his audience one day and made the discovery just before they ended their welcoming applause that something was wrong with his violin. He looked at it and saw that it was not his famous and valuable one.
He was paralyzed for a second and told his audience that he somehow picked up the wrong violin. He went back behind the curtain quickly, thinking that his precious violin was right where he left it. He discovered that someone had stolen his and left that second-hand one in it’s place! He stood there for a moment, then came out before his audience and said:
“Ladies and gentlemen: I will show you that the music is not in the instrument, but in the soul.” Paganini played as he had never played before, giving it more than he thought he could; and out of that second-hand, average instrument came the most amazing music. The audience was thrilled with enthusiasm and the applause almost lifted the ceiling off of the auditorium. He revealed to the audience that the music was not in the instrument but in the soul of the man that played it.
What music is in our souls that we are not revealing to the outside world? Where are we playing average in our lives? What if we stepped out onto the stage of life and gave it everything we had? What if we used our talents and gifts to our fullest capabilities and held nothing back? What if we overrode the voices of fear, doubt and procrastination? Not only would the applause be thunderous, but our enthusiasm for life, our music, would spill out onto others in the form of hope. Seeds of courage and expectation might just be planted in others that could shower them with right nutrients and light to let their soul sing, as well. Not only would we expand ourselves, but those we influence.
There is so much potential in each one of us. As Thomas Edison once said, “If we did all the things we were capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.”
Can you hear it? Are you able to discern that music deep within that is clawing to get out and show itself to the world? Oh…it’s there. The seeds of greatness are within you. Keep feeding and nourishing that greatness and it will grow, because that’s what it’s been created to do.
Jan McDonald
John Maxwell Team
(still CEO of Life Options)
For a friend to subscribe, here is the link
https://tinyurl.com/janmcdonald
Comments are closed.