Anyway

It is my intent to fill in a lot of the story behind the scenes of Don't Die.  Here is today's installment.

Truth be told I enjoyed my prep day enormously. The book I was reading ended with a passage entitled Do It Anyway. I knew that passage, and I knew it well. It had come into my life in the late 1990’s. My spiritual advisor, Vicki, had introduced one line from the poem to me as a comfort. During the many years of work with Vicki, I agonized to understand a destructive business relationship my husband was involved in. Vicki attributed the piece to Mother Teresa, as did the book galley I read that day. I found out a few years later the passage was often attributed to Mother Teresa. The real author is leadership visionary, Kent Keith. Keith wrote the piece when he was a 19 years old sophomore at Harvard as part of a booklet created to teach leadership skills to high school students. The correct title is The Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership.

The Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership

By Kent Keith[1]

People are illogical,

unreasonable, and self centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good,

People will accuse you of

selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win

false friends and true enemies.

Succeed anyway.

The good you do today

will be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness

Make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest of men and women

with the biggest ideas can be

shot down by the smallest

men and women with

the smallest minds.

Think big anyway…

People favor underdogs

but follow only top dogs.

Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building

may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

People really need help

But may attack you

If you do help them.

Help them anyway.

Give the world the best

you have and you’ll get

kicked in the teeth.

give the world the best

you have anyway.

Reading the concluding passage in the book galley flashed me back to the years 1997 through 2000 when my husband of struggled to get a project built. Each time I lamented whether we should be involved with the project, Vicki would say, “I don’t know if you should be involved but I do know Richard was meant to build this project. As I sat there in June 2007 I could remember every time Vicki quoted the line, “What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.”

Her guidance during that time did not give me any comfort. I did not grasp that a situation could be terrible but I was still suppose to be doing it.
Guess I needed to remember to: Live the 'Don't Die' Spirit©
Andrea T. Goeglein, Ph.D.
http://www.dontdiebooks.com/
http://www.servingsuccess.com/
866 975 3777 Toll-Free
www.YouTube.com/user/ServingSuccess

[1] Anyway:  The Paradoxical Commandments.  Copyright 2001 by Kent M. Keith. Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc. Makawao, Hawaii.