Attributes of Success -3: Initiative
American author, Robert Allen says “Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone”. All of us wish to stay within our comfort zone; there is a huge inertia which pulls us from moving out of our comfort zone. Our mind helps us invent all kind of logic to convince us not to move. Ghosts come out from the closet of mind and start showing us the fear of failure, fear of rejection; they do everything possible to stop us from laying our hands on the most potent tool of success called initiative. What is initiative? Writer Cameron C. Taylor, illustrates it brilliantly - “It is doing the right thing without being told. But next to doing the thing without being told is to do it when you are told once.. but their pay is not always in proportion. Next there are people who never do a thing until they are told twice; such get no honors and small pay. Next, there are those who do the right thing only when necessity kicks them from behind, and these get indifference instead of honors, and a pittance for pay… Then still lower down in the scale than this, we have the fellow who will not do the right thing even when someone goes along to show him how and stays to see that he does it; he is always out of a job. To which class do you belong?” Look around, seek the achievers, hear their stories, you will always find them replete with instances of initiatives. The lives of the Wright brothers provide many wonderful examples of taking the initiative. William J. Tate, a man who helped the Wright brothers in assembling the Wright’s first glider in North Carolina, wrote of the early flights, “the mental attitude of the natives toward the Wrights was that they were a simple pair of harmless cranks that were wasting their time at a fool attempt to do something that was impossible. The chief argument against their success could be heard at the stores and post office, and ran something like this: “God didn’t intend man to fly. If He did, He would have given him a set of wings on his shoulders.” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/unlikely-inventors.html) In 1899, they began their flight experiments. At this time the Wright brothers were running a bicycle repair and sales shop. The revenues from this company supported their living expenses and funded the development of the airplane. During the next four years, the Wright brothers performed thousands of tests and experiments, and flights. In 1901, they created the world’s first wind tunnel and tested more than 200 different wing shapes, and just in the months of September and October of 1902 they made over 700 glides. On December 17, 1903, Orville, Age 32, and Wilber, age 36, achieved their dream of a controlled powered flight. The flight covered a distance of 120 feet in 12 seconds – about half the length of a 747 jumbo jet. This flight was the beginning of modern aviation. Just think about this, none of this would have been possible if these two young men stayed afraid of the ghosts of the mind, didn’t break free from fear of rejection and failure and ridicule. Running a cycle repair shop and thinking of inventing the airplane, can there be more audacious thinking? God did not give men wings upon their shoulders, but He did give them minds and hands to create. It took faith, study, courage, work, and persistence to achieve the miracle of flight. Two men with a dream to fly created wings for us all – the wings God intended for man. An implemented average idea is thousand times better than an unimplemented great idea. Just knowing the way won’t take you there, you got to come out of your bed, put on your shoes and walk, the action, the will to break free from the status quo, to destroy the inertia holding you from taking initiative, differentiates between an achiever and a loser. You don’t need to leap or jump long distance, even small steps would do, but then steps there should be. Come on, hold on to your dream and goal, take out the map, tie your shoes and walk.