Cheryl Baumgartner   Medical...
I recently came across this quote and thought that it was the explanation to much of our problems in  a nutshell.  All of us are created with the same potential but somewhere along the line we buy into failure.

John Addison VP OF Primerica talks about this on his CD "Never Accept Advice From Anyone More Screwed up Than You Are"  He makes the point by looking at how children see their future.  If you ask a child what he wants to be when he grows up, a child has big dreams.  Doctor, Astronaut, Fireman etc.  He does not say "I want to be a line cook at McDonald's" or "I want to be a garbageman".  He will tell you of big dreams.  Yet in many cases the child who told you he wanted to be an astronaut, is the very one out at the crack of dawn dumping your garbage.  Somewhere along the line something kills his dreams.

Could it possibly the limitations that we put on them?  How often do we support their dreams? Most of the time we tell them what they can't do rather than what they can do.  Think about it.  If your child comes up to you and says "I want to be an astronaut"  What would you tell him?  

Most of us would say something like "Do you know how hard that is? Do you know how many people join the program and never succeed?"  Right there we have limited him or her by pointing out that most people never make it.  Instead maybe we should respond by saying "That's a great thing to be, and it takes lot's of work and studying.  Let's look into it and see what you would have to do."

The first response is what some people would call "practicality".  Since it's so hard let's point that out so my child forgets about it and settles on a more "realistic" goal in life.  Here's the catch, your child was born with the same potential to be an astronaut that every other child was borne with.  However that is not what we concentrate on, we concentrate on the odds of failure.

Adults have been conditioned oner the years to set the bar low so we can achieve our goals, rather than to reach for what we want.  We tell ourselves that what we want is beyond our reach so we reach for what we can attain.  We then pass this same philosophy on to our children.  Thankfully some of our children don't listen.  These children grow up to be the ones that change the world.  Do the grow up to reach their dreams?  No not always but they do reach heights we felt were beyond them.

They may have been aiming for the moon and missed, but they still ended up among the stars!
Jan 9th 2008 09:24