Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Encouragement

If you wanna change the world, start off by making your bed. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. When the task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed.

Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you cannot do the little things right, you will never be able to do the big things right. If by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made.

That you made.

And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

To pass SEAL training, there are a series a long swims that must be completed. One is the night swim. Before the swim the instructors joyfully brief the students on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente. 

they assure you, however, that no students has ever been eaten by shark attack. At least not that they can remember. But you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position, stand your ground. "Do not swim away, Do not act afraid. " If the shark, hungry for a midnight snack darts towards you, then summon up all your strength and punch him a snout and he will turn and swim away.

There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete your swim, you have to go through this and you have to deal with them.

So if you want to change the world, do not back down from the sharks. Over few weeks of difficult training, the SEAL class, which started with 150 men, was down to just 42.  There were new six boat crews of seven men each. He was in the boat with a tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of little guys, the munchkin crew we called them. No one was over five foot five. The munchkin boat crew had one American Indian,  African America, Polish American, Greek American, Italian American, and two tough kids from the Midwest. The out paddled, out-ran, and out swam all the other boat crews.

The big men in the other boat crews would always make good natured fun, of the tiny, little flippers, the munchkin with tiny little feet prior to every swim. But somehow for these little guys from every corner of the nation in the world, always had the last laugh, swimming the faster for everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us.

SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education, not your social status. If you want to change the world, measure by the size of their heart, not by the size of their flippers. The 9th week of training is referred to as Hell Week.

It is six days of no sleep, constant mental and physical harassment, and one special day at the mud flats. The mud flats were at area between San Diego and Tijuana, where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana sloughs, a swampy mud of terrain where the mud will engulf you. It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing cold, the howling wind, and the incessant pressure to quit from the instructors. As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some egregious infraction of the rules was ordered into the mud. That mud consumed each men until there was nothing visible but our heads.

The instructors told us, we could leave the mud if only five men would quit. Only five men and we could get out of the oppressive cold. Looking around at the mud flats that one of them was almost give up. It was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was all over 8 hours until the sun came up. Eight more hours of bone-chilling cold, the chattering teeth and shivering of the trainees were so loud, it was hard to hear anything. Then one voice began to echo through the night. One voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two, and two became three and many. And before long,everyone in the class was singing. The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud, if we kept up the singing, but the singing persisted. And somehow, the mud seemed a little warmer, and the wind little tamer and the dawn not do far away.

If I have learned anything. In my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person. A king, a prime minister. One person can change the world by giving people hope. So if you want to change the world, start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone!

Know the life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when the times are the toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give up, if you these things, the next generation  and the generation that follow will live in  a world far better than the one we have today. 

And what started here will indeed, have changed the world for the better.

Credit to : Goalcast, Winning Edge Academy.



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