Welcome to the Our Moral Compass Podcast. Each daily reading focuses on a different quote on how we can best apply it to our own moral compass and one of the five areas in Social Emotional Learning: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills and Responsible Decision Making. Thank you for listening and we hope you consider subscribing to the podcast for future episodes.
We All Need To Take Risks
“It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness.”
-Ray Kroc
American businessman Ray Kroc wanted to build a restaurant system that would be famous for providing food of consistently high quality and uniform methods of preparation. And thanks to his ingenuity the success of McDonald’s overtook the world during the late 1950’s and is still one of the top fast food restaurants today. His quote is one that is straightforward and to the point: if we play it safe and don’t take risks we won’t ever achieve what we were destined to become and in the end, happiness becomes nothing but a faded memory.
Ray Kroc saw the McDonald brothers run a small, but very efficient operation by producing a limited menu, concentrating on just a few items – burgers, fries and beverages – which allowed them to focus on quality and quick service. From there he helped not only franchise this restaurant but established Hamburger University, which was a training program that to date, produced more than 275,000 franchisees, managers, and employees. Each decision Ray Kroc made was a risk, but was a calculated one.
What I love about today’s quote in particular is the first part commenting that if you walk along a tightrope laid out on a floor is really no achievement, no risk. If you were to step off of the tightrope, no harm, no foul. Even if you were to cross that tightrope, while it lay on the floor from one end to the other, there is no great feat in accomplishing that. Thousands of others could do it and make this decision blind folded because there would be no risk in involved of getting hurt. Now if this same tightrope was attached at the top of the Empire State Building in New York to another tall building and you were asked to walk across it, your risk stock just shot up tremendously. You may be scared and decide not to walk across it but if you decide to risk it (especially once you realize their is a safety net already in place in case you fell), think of the self confidence and high level of achievement you would attain, especially once you did reach the other side: one of pure relief and happiness, ultimately feeling success.
This example is lot like the risks we each either take or shy away from when the stakes are high. Every decision we make, especially those that have more weight to it, is like walking that proverbial tightrope. The greater the risk the greater the reward and the reward, when we decide that it is worth the risk is achieving pure happiness.
What does this quote mean to you and how can you apply today’s message towards developing your responsible decision making skills?
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Music from https://filmmusic.io
“Relaxing Piano Music” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
A special thank you to Feedspot for recognizing the Our Moral Compass podcast as one of the Top 10 Social Emotional Learning Podcasts on the internet. It is an honor to be amongst the other podcasts on this list as we all strive to make this world a better place.
Becoming The Change 