WILLIAMS OF WEST POINT
The first book I remember reading as a child was Williams of West Point. It was an inspiring story of perseverance in the face of adversity and of duty and honor. The most important moral of Williams' story to me was that you never fail unless you stop trying: People may say you ran out of time but no one can count your efforts as failure until you give up. I've tried to live to that all my life. It's a good way to live: It avoids excessive discouragement, gives you a target that's possible to reach, provides at least one reason to continue in the face of adversity. I recently found a copy of the book and it reminded me to think about success and failure and goals. Trying assumes a goal, implicitly suggests a worthwhile goal, a goal you really want to reach.
I've written before about the goal of money and how work can trap people. I've also urged goals of kindness, tolerance, patience, loyalty and the like. Somehow none of these things rises to the level of a goal to keep us going, a lifetime goal, a goal which defines success and failure.
Perhaps there is no single goal to think about. Perhaps the goal of a lifetime is simply living every day in the best way we can. Perhaps broad, long-term goals are self-defeating, perhaps we lose the pleasure of frequent achievement of small, short-term goals. Perhaps, even, long-term goals are doomed to failure because without small, simple, every-day goals we too easily become discouraged, too likely to give up.
I think that's the answer: It's okay to have long-term goals, overall targets, broad, life-defining plans but we should have mileposts along the way, small achievements, simple daily targets to keep us going. If we can look back at the end of each day and say we made progress, even the simple progress of living the day the best we could, we'll have less reason to be frustrated and tired and more reason to hope for the achievement of bigger goals. In that way, we'll never give up because we'll have no reason to give up, no occasion to think ourselves failures.
3-6-00
Archives 2000 Archives 1999 Archives