You Can Change for Good
Adopted from Earl Nightingale’s “Our Changing World” Radio Transcript, 2002
Have you ever read anything that had a tremendous effect on you? Well, I’m sure you have…it has happened to me lots of times. Some time ago I was reading about an interview between a reporter and a man who made crime his life’s work. He went on about getting into one jam after another and eventually getting caught…every time. He kept repeating the same mistake…like a man hitting himself on the head with a hammer, repeatedly. It hurt the first time, but for some reason he either thinks it will not the next time, or something stronger than him makes him do it again…and again…and again.
Anyway, the reporter jotted down what this man said and, in reading it, something about it affected me pretty strongly. The man said, “That is the story of my life. I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know how to get there. All this happens because somewhere along the line I took a wrong turn. You can’t stop and you can’t go back. There’s nothing to do but roll forward. I used to think that if you kept rolling forward that someday you were bound to hit paradise. But I’ve learned better now.”
Here is a man who lost in the game of life. Either he has not learned the right rules, which isn’t likely, or he decided he could make them up to suit himself. There are about 85000 people in the UK prison system today and they represent one of our biggest problems and expenses. “Why?”
Let us take this one man for instance: What did he say? He said, “I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know how to get there.” I believe he stated his biggest problem right there. Maybe it is an educational oversight either in the home or school. I cannot think of anything more important than teaching our youngsters the importance of having an aiming point of life…a goal toward which to shoot. You see, once we know where we are going, we can always figure out a way to get there. Just knowing the answer to the first part of the question ends up answering both parts.
It is estimated that nearly 95% of people do not know where they are going in life. That is, they have never sat down and deliberately figured out what it is they want. And want enough to work for it. You could not have a baseball game without home plate, a football game without goal posts, a business without next year’s growth plan…it is logic. And yet, individuals do not do the same thing in their own lives.
A goal in life is a difficult decision to make, but it has to be made anyway or we become drifting boats without sails. And then chances are we get nowhere…washed up on a deserted stretch of rocky coastline.
The man interviewed was not right when he said, “you can’t stop and you can’t go back.” Maybe you cannot go back, but you sure can stop hitting yourself on the head with that hammer. Take a better, and in the long run, easier and more satisfying course. In other words, it is never too late to start doing things right.
Decide what we want, make up our minds, and get it. Follow the rules – do not break them. We can have just about anything we want, if we’ll only decide once and for all what it is we want and then spend enough time and effort earning “it.” Maybe there would not be 85000 people in prison if they were convinced of this when they were younger. Maybe they should have been told that laws are not there to annoy or frustrate us, but to keep us from being sorry that we wasted our one chance to play the game of life…dignified.
A man named Bailey once wrote, “We live in deeds not years; in thoughts not breaths; in feeling not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heartthrobs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, and acts the best.”
