Responsibility

Hey team, happy Monday. All right, so what do I think about when we’re getting to the other side? We’ve just had a snowstorm recently, and we’ve got a bunch of things going on, and it’s cold outside, been cold for months and gray. Well, I think about a beach. I think about palm trees and I think about going somewhere warm. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I think about.

So on this Monday, I wanted to give you a little bit of a quote. It says, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” Abraham Lincoln said that. You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

So what does that mean? Well, are you skirting responsibilities? Are you being valuable because nothing less will do, are you investing in your life, in your community, in your friends, in your job? Are you taking ownership? Do you have the resolve to improvise, adapt, and overcome? Are you transparent with those around you? These are all of our core values. Do you like to eat cake? That’s right, our core values matter. They’re the bedrock of what we’re built on. And the responsibility of tomorrow and the dreams of tomorrow come from the hard work you put in today. You get what I’m saying, right? You can’t evade responsibility today and expect to be somehow responsible or hold a position of responsibility tomorrow.

No great person ever just got responsible and got responsibility and got riches and got everything. And I’ve said this many, many times when I talked to leadership teams and stuff like that. We talk about the number of people who win the lottery and then still become broke within just a few years, sometimes even less, millions of dollars.

I can honestly say that probably everybody who’s listening to this message right now has at one time or another bought a lottery ticket and thought about it. And if you didn’t buy a lottery ticket, even if you didn’t, you thought about, “Oh my goodness, if only all the things I could do if I had that money, if I had all that lottery money.” But would you be able to stay rich, or would you just blow it? Would it just all disappear? Are you being faithful in the little things? That’s the key.

So this Monday Message, don’t escape the responsibilities of today thinking that somehow you’re going to end up responsible tomorrow. You want to be a great leader. You want to be great at what you do. And You want to accomplish great things in your life because I’ve also said many times in leadership class, nobody goes to a guidance counselor, and the guidance counselor looks at them and says, “Hey, you know what? You’ve got sanitation written all over you.” Nobody wants to be the porta-potty cleaner. Nobody lives for that job. But you know what? Even if you had that job, you should be the darn best porta-potty cleaner there is and take that responsibility seriously.

No matter what job you have, no matter where you’re at currently here in life, to be great and to move forward in life, you have to take the responsibilities of today very seriously because that’s how you get to the responsibilities of tomorrow. You can’t evade responsibility today and believe that you’re somehow going to make it tomorrow. You’ve got to put in the hard work today to accomplish those things, and that’s the beauty of greatness. That’s how greatness happens because you have the tenacity to keep doing the things over and over and over.

I never dreamed, never once in my life, that I really dreamt that we would be where we are today. Every so often, you have this flash of like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to…” Oh, wouldn’t it be great to, you know, this kind of thing. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s how did we get from one employee, me, to literally 130, 135, wherever we’re at right now? How did we get there? How did we get to having three offices? It’s by being faithful and steady through the process and being responsible for what we had today to get us to tomorrow’s responsibilities and then being responsible tomorrow so we could get to the next day’s responsibilities. And it’s being faithful in all of those little things consistently and consistently that is what gets you to that bigger picture of growth.

All right, God bless you. Be valuable because nothing less will do, and handle today’s responsibilities with excellence, and tomorrow you’ll be even more responsible. All right, I’ll see you guys next week.