Read the Eternities
I just touched down on Vancouver Airport about 3 hours ago, and made it to my dorm. Beautiful place! I’m here for Summer Study Trip!
Anyway, to continue on what I talked about last week on defining our realities. I once came across this quote: “Don’t read the Times, read the Eternities.”
In our effort to catch up with this ever changing world, many of us try to keep ourselves updated on the latest news in the economic, government, social sectors. We spend time reading newspapers, reading up magazines, watching the News and so on.
That’s important, especially if we’re working in those particular sectors; but I personally believe that we should, as the quoter said, learn to read the eternities. Sometimes we can be caught up with the news of the present that we forget to hold on to what is eternal.
For example, values are eternal. Principles that we learn for business, relationships, career, and so on are enduring, and it’s more important in the long run that we keep honing ourselves in this area. Better than keeping ourselves fully updated on the latest H1N1 cases; we might do better reading up on a book that help us grow as a person.
The thing is, we get bombarded by so much of news that we unconsciously start believing the world to be a negative place. Think about it; of the latest news you heard, how many of it was good news, and how many was bad? The media understands the power of bad news in attracting attention compared to good news, and hence the slant.
But if we continue to allow ourselves to be influenced by these, we naturally become more cynical people. Financial crisis; H1N1 virus; AWARE; all about the greed, division of men, death and diseases. But one thing I notice is that the more I read from the books I choose ( usually leadership, business, Christian) than from these news, the more I get my focus right. While I roughly know what’s going on with the above, but I never know too much about the details.
Knowing the severity of the financial crisis isn’t going to help me much in my life. It’ll probably help me worry more. Make me panic more. But the reason why it hasn’t really affected my moods or anything is because I don’t really think about it. I just live.
I just focus on what I want to do in my life; and just work at it everyday. That is what matters in the long run. I want to become a better writer; so financial crisis or not, I just keep building and building my content based website on leadership ( http://www.leadership-with-you.com ). It’s the same for you; whatever you’ve been doing, keep doing it.
Nothing will stop us from our successes if we keep looking straight; if we keep building things that last like values, character, ability. But if we keep shifting positions, preferences, jobs based on the external circumstances, nothing will stop us from our failure as well. ->We simply don’t know where to go in life, so we wait for society to tell us.
So look straight!
If you want to become an investor, read the news, yes, but only to increase your analytical ability.
If you want to run a café, keep learning ( can join Eric for the YMCA Rooftop Project) and applying yourself.
If you want to become a dancer, keep dancin’ away! Practice hard at it!
It doesn’t really matter what goes on in the world today, if you look straight ahead, keep focus on the things that matter, you’ll succeed anyway.
