Submission by Dr. Glenn Mollette
We should never put off until tomorrow what we can do today.
The biggest problem with this is that we can’t do everything today.
Life has to be spaced out, and we have to hope and pray that we will have the opportunity to do some or most of what we would like to do. You can’t graduate from high school until you complete the requirements. You can’t begin a new career until you obtain the job you want. Most jobs have prerequisites, and prerequisites require time. Many occupations require years of education and training. Thus, you have to do what you can today and plan out what you are going to do over the next three or four years to prepare yourself.
If you spend every day doing nothing, then nothing is what you have to look forward to. The musician practices long hours in hopes of performing at a future date. The runner trains daily, hoping to win a 5K or even a marathon later on. A family may dream of a vacation, so they save their money and make sacrifices for a future outing.
The best we can do today is simply to do our best. Do what we know to do. Try to do the right thing. Have a goal or a list of objectives, and do today what is necessary to move us closer to that goal.
We don’t have to live by goals, but if we aim for nothing, we achieve nothing. Often, our goal may simply be to do a good job at whatever we currently have to do. If we do a good job every day, then tomorrow will most likely be good. If we do a bad job every day, then tomorrow may not be so good. We reap what we sow. Planting good seeds in our daily lives will result in a harvest a little later, somewhere down the road.
Hard work pays off. The harder you work, the luckier you become. The more you try, the more likely you are to succeed. If you fish, keep baiting your hooks and dropping them in the water. Eventually, you will get a bite and even catch a fish—if there are fish in the water. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to catch fish where there aren’t any. This applies to jobs as well. You can’t get a job where there aren’t any jobs. This means you have to make plans to be in a place where there is at least an opportunity.
Again, we all have limited time. We could eventually accomplish everything we want if we had 500 years to do it—but we don’t. Forty, eighty, or even a hundred years is just a flash in the pan. Thus, we need to figure out what we really want, because we don’t have that much time to do it.
Be good to yourself. Love people. Love God. Wherever you are, be fully there. Our time is precious.
Feature photo: Isabelle Grosjean ZA, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
