Living on Purpose: One Rock at a Time
Some people have an innate ability to persist. To keep on trying when there don't seem to be any prospects in sight. They live with purpose, every day doing what they believe is right and never giving up on their dreams.
Others of us may not be quite as persistent – but if you’re one of those, then it might just be time to find your focus and get started living with some purpose….and here’s why.
Picture a man who has built a small house out of rocks. It's small but it's a nice size and has a nice front porch to sit on and watch the world go by. He likes sitting on that porch and just watching his world go by. One day he decides, "I'm going to spend the next half-hour watching that stone fly; I'm going to see how long it takes for that stone to travel from one end of this yard to the other." So he sits down on the porch, leans back into the rocking chair and starts watching that stone fly. Hoping and hoping for an accident that will screw up his day.
Time passes, and he starts to get furious. He thinks, "What's wrong with this rock? Why isn't it getting anywhere? I've tried throwing it so hard that it should have flown by now. It's just not getting anywhere!" Finally, after about half an hour of frustration, he jumps up out of his chair and runs over to the rock…and picks it up. Now he throws it with all his might – and in a few seconds the stone is halfway across the yard. The man feels really satisfied as he goes back to sit on his porch and watch the world go by.
You see, sometimes we fail to realize just how close we are to doing what we want to do. We get so stuck in the world that we lose sight of our dreams and our goals. Then we can't believe how far we've come after all, how close we are to achieving what we want. It's like that rock!
We've got a lot of rocks in us, and they're not really very hard to move. We just need to look up – real often.
I think at some point in your life you probably had a little stone that you tried to lift into the air and couldn't quite do it. And if you had…I want you to think about it and then realize that now, six years later, you can pick that stone up over your head and look at it fly. You've come a long way, baby!
We just need to put our minds on what we want to do – and not on all the reasons why we can’t do it.
Have you ever heard of somebody so poor they couldn't afford to be rich? I know this guy who was so poor he couldn't afford any credit cards. He had no credit cards, no checking account. He was so poor that he couldn't afford to buy the shoes he needed to walk to work each morning, so he walked home from work barefoot. So now we've got this poor guy who's got no shoes and no credit cards – but one thing he's got…and that's a dream. He's so poor and has no shoes…but he still has his dream: "I want to be rich."
So this guy walks home every day from work, all the way through his neighborhood, and then all the way across town. He has to walk a long way because his house is in the poorest area of town. He's so poor that he can't afford to drive a car – and if he did, he wouldn't have any gas for it because the guy who owns the gas station can't afford to keep his business going, so all he does is sit around telling stories about how much money there used to be in this town. But now all he's got is a lot of stories about how rich everybody used to be – and how that gas station used to always be packed with people trying to fill up their tanks before going somewhere. "When I was a kid back in the old days," he says, "this place used to bustle all day long."
So the poor guy who can't afford any credit cards or shoes but still has his dream, walks from his house to work and then back home. Every day…and every day he thinks about how much better off he could be if only he had that credit card and those shoes.
The whole time this guy is walking home and thinking about all the things that money can buy – that it takes to get him where he wants to be, if only he could have them; but here's the thing…you can't buy anything with money.
So this guy has all this money in his dreams, but he can't buy any of it with real money. So his dream of being rich gets bigger by the minute and keeps getting further away. He's so poor that he can't afford to keep on dreaming, but he still dreams – because what else is there to do when you're so poor?
Every day this guy walks home across town and he thinks about how hard it is to be poor when all the other people were rich back in the old days…and every day he's wondering if maybe some day he'll get a good job and start earning some money. Finally one evening he gets home from work and there's a letter in the mailbox. He tears it open and it says, "You have been chosen to be our next president for the U.S.A.!"
So this poor guy who can't afford any shoes, who can't afford any credit cards – and now he can't even afford to be president of the United States – he's so poor that he only has a dream, but it's so big that it keeps getting bigger.
And once again we've got the poor guy sitting on his porch thinking about the dream that he wants to have. Every day he's trying to figure out how to make his dreams come true — if only they were something real — if they could be something that you could buy in a store or own in your hands…and every day as he sits there, his dream grows bigger by the minute.
Conclusion
You see, all we ever have is what we imagine. That's all that ever comes true. Because here's the thing – nothing else really exists in this world. It's all just something that you've imagined yourself into existence. So it's up to you to open your eyes and realize that all you've got is this moment of now…and then if you want it enough – it can be everything to you!
So if you want to be rich – then just for a minute stretch your mind out there and imagine yourself as rich; like an emperor with a palace or an astronaut going into space, or even better…like a great warrior who has come back from some sort of heroic adventure.