THE POWER OF INITIATIVE

The word to initiate means to begin or start. The power of initiative is the power to begin.

Initiative is the ability to begin, to take the first step that leads to a series of other steps that will take you from where you are now to where you desire to be. Initiative is the ability to recognize what needed to be done and having the courage to step out and do it without waiting for promptings of others.

Initiative is the passkey that opens the door to opportunity.

 To see initiative from a proper perspective let’s see what initiative is not.

 INITIATIVE IS NOT INSTINCT: Instinct according to the chambers dictionary, means, “an involuntary prompting to action.” Instinct is the natural impulse by which animals are guided apparently independent of reason or experience.”

 THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INITIATIVE AND INSTINCT.

1. Instinct is an unreasonable response, while initiative is always a reasoned action deliberately taken to achieve a definite end.
2. Instinct lacks foresight, while initiative is always based on foresight.
3. Instinct is action without preparation. Initiative always involves preparation before action.
4. Instinct is not based on experience, while initiative may sometimes be based on past experiences.

 INITIATIVE IS NOT PREPARATION ONLY: Some people spend all their time preparing that they never have time to live. Preparation without action leads only to frustration and failure. Good intentions are not good enough if they can’t be put into life benefiting effect.

Someone observed, “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action”

 INITIATIVE IS NOT INDOLENCE: Indolence is the absence of both preparation and action. Indolent people hate work, they lazy and lack the motivation to make a meaningful contribution to life. “Go to the ant thou sluggard……..”

 WHAT THEN IS INITIATIVE?

Initiative = preparation + action

CULTIVATING THE POWER OF INITIATIVE.

1. Practice initiative strengthening activities. Example, reading good books, especially those books that help you understand your purpose in life. The very best of course is the bible.
2. Avoid initiative draining activities. Examples, keeping bad companies, overeating, oversleeping
3. Set goals that demands initiative to accomplish.
4. Find ways to reward yourself each time you take initiative

 The power of initiative is the power of winning. It is the power that overcomes the inertia of laziness and over rules the deceit of excuses.

Slothful is the biblical name of the man that lacks initiative.

 

 

Little things

Little things are little things but little things compounded over time is large.

One of the greatest mistakes mankind make is to despise “little”. You can not despise the little things in your life and become great. Little is not the opposite large, it is the process to large. Even the bible counsels us never to despise the days of little beginning. 

“Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase.” Job 8:7

The rule to becoming great in life is compounded effort. The law of compound interest according to Albert Einstein is the eight wonder of the world. Whatever you compound over time grows exponentially. If you expose your mind to an idea over a period of time, when it comes out, it no longer come out as an idea but as a concept. Someone once said ‘If you study a subject for 5 years you will become a master at that subject’

One of the Aesop’s fable says that a crow half-dead with thirst came upon a pitcher that contained very little water in it and it could not reach far enough down to get at it.

It tried and tried, but at last had to give up in despair. Then a thought came to it, and he took pebble and dropped it into the pitcher. Then it took another pebble and dropped it into the pitcher.

It took yet another pebble and dropped it into the pitcher and yet another, and yet another and yet another and at last it saw the water mount up near it, and after casting in few more pebbles it was able to quench it’s thirst and save its life.

Effective living is nothing more than utilizing the little time that exist between major tasks, saving up the little money that seems useless at that time, putting a little more effort into the job at hand and being a little more friendly than is expected from you.

There is power in little and that power resides in its compounded effect.

LIMITATION

LIMITATION IS AN IMPOTENT WORD TO THE MAN WHO HAS LEARNT TO TAP FROM THE UNLIMITED RESOURCE RESIDING IN HIS MIND.

Take a short time and read the story of two conjoined twin (Eng and Chang) who still made a difference in there world.

No case history of conjoined twins can be complete without mention of the Bunker brothers, the original twins from Siam (present-day Thailand). Born on May 11, 1811 in a tiny village along the Mekong river, the brothers were xiphopagus twins, joined by only a small band of cartilage at the sternum. Their livers were fused but were each independently complete. Through practice they were able to stretch the tissue that connected them and stand side-by-side rather than facing one another. This gave the illusion that they were joined at the side, and even today conjoined twins are frequently depicted as joined side-by-side by a sliver of tissue. Separation of Chang and Eng would have been extremely easy, even with 19th century medical technology. Ironically, the boys were three-quarters Chinese and known in their native village as ‘The Chinese Twins’.

At age 17, the boys were brought back to America by the showman Abel Coffin, whose associate had initially discovered them in 1824 while they were swimming. In America they toured with P.T. Barnum until their retirement in 1839. They adopted the last name Bunker in 1844, their original Siamese last names having been lost when they joined show business. While in North Carolina, Chang and Eng began to date Adelaide and Sarah Ann (or Sally) Yates, respectively. They were scheduled to marry but locals disapproved strongly of the brothers’ courtship of the girls and even threatened them. Fearing for their lives, the brothers arranged for a separation surgery, begging to be separated even if it meant killing them both. However, the sisters intervened just before the operation and married the twins in a quick double-wedding ceremony. One couple purchased a farm adjacent to the brothers’ original property and the brothers built separate houses and raised tobacco. From then on, they spent alternating nights with their wives in their own houses and together fathered 22 children (10 were Chang’s, 12 were Eng’s). However, several of the children died in infancy or early childhood.

In 1874 Chang, the stronger and more stubborn of the twins and a heavy drinker, contracted pneumonia, which was worsened by the carriage trip in the rain between the two farms. He died rather suddenly during the night of January 17. Eng awoke to find his brother dead, and he called for his wife and children to attend to him. According to some stories, the family sent for a doctor to perform an emergency separation, but Eng had died by the time the doctor arrived. By other accounts, Eng refused to be separated from his dead brother. He died three hours later.

The twins’ fused liver – the only organ the twins shared – is still preserved in formalin at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is exhibited alongside a plaster death-cast of the twins.

If they refused to be limited, then why should you?.

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