Welcome to the Becoming The Change 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.
Be Better Than Yourself
“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
-William Faulkner
American Disc Jockey Casey Kasem used to say at the end of each of his radio shows encouraging the audience to “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.” This was very similar to what American writer William Faulkner encourages in today’s quote to always dream and shoot higher than what you can do. But it is the rest of his quote that resonates with me most and is something we must all decide on doing in addition to striving to shooting higher than our initial expectations.
Often times we become consumed with what someone else is doing instead of just focusing on one thing and one thing only: ourselves. We get so caught up in, as the saying goes, “Keeping up with the Joneses” we tend to lose our way and worry about status rather than our own results. There are even times where we worry on how things were done in the past by others instead of focusing on the here and now. This needs to stop because you are only hurting yourself and potentially others in the process.
If we try to just better ourselves that is the only measuring stick we will ever need. We will achieve things in due time and our own timeline, our own deadline. We should be in control of things rather than having the situation or the circumstances for that matter control us. But the bottom line is this: we choose what path to follow. The path that was already created by others which in some sense is the easy way out or the path that we forge ourselves. A path that we determine in what we will and will not stand for; in what we are ready and willing to fight for. We decide. So let’s make sure we do the right thing for the benefit of our future endeavours.
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 Becoming The Change 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 