What Will You Give Up?
Hey team. All right, here we are for a Monday workshop, and I guess it’s called a Monday Message? Workshop Wednesday. Monday Message, sorry, got it confused there for a second. But hey, I wanted to talk to you guys. If you notice the background behind me, what did we have this last weekend over the weekend and throughout the week? Starting Wednesday night, we had ourselves a snowstorm. It’s a pretty big one for Portland, and our team did a fabulous job. We didn’t have any car wrecks on Wednesday night into Thursday morning. Our team, the majority of everybody, made it to work. We helped shuttle some people. Things went off, considering how much snow we got. Went off pretty well, so you should give yourselves applause. My hat’s off to you. I am so proud of every single one of you.
All right, so for Monday, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. Charles Dubose. So, what does that mean? What does that mean? Sacrifice what we are for what we could become. It’s easy, it’s quite easy to maintain the status quo, to just fit into that niche and just kind of go through life on autopilot. But some of us want more. Do you want more than you have today, do you want to be better than you are today? Do you want to do more than you have done today? Well, sometimes you have to sacrifice a little bit of what you have now for the purpose of what you want later. What will you give up?
I’ve been reading a couple of books here recently about some great men and people in our lives and our history and stuff, and some people were called crazy. You know, Thomas Edison, I remember hearing a story about Thomas Edison, and he had like 10,000 failures before he got the light bulb. It’s that failure and the number of people sometimes that aren’t willing to sacrifice for what they want. They don’t have enough faith or belief in themselves, and some people stop short of the goal.
I remember reading about one guy here recently who found a bunch of gold, I think it was in Colorado or something, and he made enough money to pay off the equipment and so on and so forth, and now it was time to really make some serious money and stuff. The vein ran dry, and they kept digging a little bit, trying to find the vein, and so on and so forth. The end result was he didn’t find it, so he stopped and sold it to a guy, he sold the mine and the equipment and everything for a few hundred dollars. This is way, way back.
That guy decided he figured, you know what, I should maybe talk to somebody. And so he goes and he finds an engineer, an engineer looks at it and he does some calculations and stuff, and he says, “You know what, you need to go this way. If you dig about three or so feet this way, you’re gonna find the fault line. You’re going to run into that vein again.” And he does it and he makes millions of dollars. Millions. Three feet. Three feet. Can you imagine? Three feet from the goal and you don’t get there.
Kind of reminds me of a Super Bowl a few years back when the Seahawks were trying to do it again and they were so, so close, but they got stopped and the Broncos won. Just a few feet from the goal. I mean, that could have made them win the game, and they were just a few feet away, and they lost the Super Bowl. I know some of you, that’s a sore subject.
My point is, that instead of stopping three feet, sometimes you need that expert help. Maybe you need to take some classes, maybe you need to read some books, or maybe you need some expert advice to help you find that vein so that you can get those three feet in the right direction. Because digging three feet in the wrong direction, you still find nothing. Three feet in the right direction, you’ve hit the motherload. That’s the difference. Sometimes expert advice can help you.
What will you give up?
So, what do you need to sacrifice so that you can become what you dream of? What will you give up? Or are you just happy with the status quo? God is my witness, I don’t want to stop three feet from my goal. I want to keep moving. It’s hard, it’s not easy. I’m not here to sell you a pipe dream or snake oil. It’s hard work. What will you give up? You’ve got to get up every morning when you don’t want to and you’ve got to push forward and push through. But God is my witness, it’s a beautiful thing.
All right, well, God bless you guys. It’s a beautiful Monday, and I am excited to be a part of your lives. Thank you for being here. Thank you for working so hard, Patrol. And Thank you for working so hard through the storm on sites. Thank you for working so hard, Longview. Thank you for working so hard through the storm and what we’ve got going on around here. God bless you all. I’ll see you next week. Be valuable because nothing less will do.