Goals

Understand many of the reasons that you don’t achieve your goals in life are because of an Upper Limit Problem. That means that you feel like you don’t deserve to get your goals or you’re not capable of getting them. Maybe you think other people will be upset with you.

If you get what you really want, remember, you want to make sure that you get out of the Zone of Incompetence. You get out of the Zone of Competence. You even get out of the Zone of Excellence. That’s the most dangerous one. Work your way into the Zone of Genius.

Remember the four hidden barriers. Those are unconscious barriers that will prevent you from getting the goals that you really want. Don’t feel fundamentally flawed, like you can’t get what you want. Don’t feel that this is disloyal, or you’ll be abandoned by other people. If you get what you want. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that getting what you want will be a more considerable burden and take more of your time to take more of your effort. When you get what you want, the new tasks seem like nothing. You get more done. And you give up the things that you don’t want to do

Write down a paragraph that talks about what it would look like if you’re doing all the things inside your Zone of Genius. What would your day look like? What would your life look like? How exciting would it be to live your new life? How energizing would it be to do those things every day?

Get into your Zone of Genius by thinking about the things that are effortless for you. That time just slips away. They call it being in the flow. Then look at the things that drag you down and feel like they take a long time. It’s hard for you to actually get them done. Time is so slow when you’re doing these things because you don’t like it. Maybe you’re not even good at it. Make sure that it incorporates your unique abilities and the things you love to do.

Remember the Enlightened No, which means anything that is not inside your Zone of Genius. You say no. Obviously, that’s easy for you to do when you’re in control of your whole life. Many times at work, you can’t say no to things. But when you can, make sure that you don’t say yes to the things that are not helping you stay inside your Zone of Genius.

Challenge

• Pick one thing you’re doing today that is not inside your Zone of Genius. Maybe it’s inside your Zone of Excellence. Say the Enlightened No to it. Stop doing it now!

Links

https://hendricks.com/product/the-big-leap/

Summary

We examine the life of Dwayne Johnson, Charles Schultz, Grace Hopper, Frederick Douglas, Malala Yousafzai and apply the Genius Notebook rules to them.

• Create a summary of achievements, quick biography of all the different landmarks they made in their lives.
• Answer the question about how it relates to you. For example, why do you admire this trait?
• Trait this particular person’s life and how it is beneficial to you? What do you think that you could learn from that?
• Write up a list of traits and indicate which traits you share with that person and which ones you don’t share?
• What does the trait look like in your daily life?
• How does this trait fit in your dreams, your goals, anything that you wish to attain
• Could the traits help you in your love-life, work-life, and daily personal life?
• Do a creative challenge based on the person’s life. Make it interesting!

Challenge

• Pick on a person who you could use the lessons that they’ve learned in their lives, the traits they have in their lives, and make your life better to make the world a better place.

Links

https://azzarellogroup.com/

Summary

1. Ensure that you find a mentor and connect with people who can help you understand your next job and the jobs around you so that you can take them on and that you can slide right into those new jobs. Understand what they are and how you’re going to help
2. Make sure you keep up with your old connections, friends in the company, co-workers that you talk to you regularly find out how they are doing. Find out how they’re doing. Find out how their teams are doing. Sometimes you’re able to help them because you know something that would make their lives better. Sometimes they can help you because they understand something. But it also makes your working life so much richer when you have people around you that you love to talk to. You might keep up with them on social media. LinkedIn is a great place to find your customers, your past co-workers. Keep those connections alive in any way you can and go to lunch with people.
3. Make a list of good ideas for the company and keep thinking about new ideas. Idea-making is like any other skill. Once you practice it every day, it gets better and better at it.
4. Figure out the job that needs to be done. Find someone who’s doing that job or something close to it.Interview them, make sure that you understand what the job takes, what the job is like, and some of the hardships in the job so that you’re prepared for that.
5. Act confident, even if you’re not. If you’re not confident, and you act like it, you’re already sunk, and there’s just no point in it.
6. Tell the story of what you will do. Don’t talk about your past. Don’t talk about your skills. Instead, paint the picture of your goals and how you would make things so much better in your company. And then start doing that job. Even if you don’t get it. Prove to people that you’re good at it, and that you should be on the list for the next time that kind of position comes up.

Challenge

• Try a little experiment and start writing a daily list of 10 things that are just great ideas. You can do it for work if work is what you’re trying to improve in your life. Or you could do it for your home life. Become a better ideas person by doing it every day.

Links

https://azzarellogroup.com/

Summary

1. Make sure you look better by being relevant to what the company needs to happen. Be a translator for your customers and other co-workers to people who have responsibility inside the company

2. improve the business. Ensure that what you’re doing makes your company your customers and the products you’re selling better.

3.  Identify a personal brand. That means what people think of you try to figure out what you want your personal brand to be. Then make sure that every project, every communication exudes that brand.

4. Identify the stakeholders in your life. Those will be your bosses, your co-workers, people involved in your project, and your customers. Whoever has an impact on the work you’re doing. Ensure that you don’t annoy them and that you’re brief, and you give them exactly the information they’re looking for.

5. Don’t fade away. Don’t disappear. It is so easy to disappear in a company to be in the corner of the room. When you show up late for meetings, a lot of times, you disappear. When you show up first, your front and present and greeting the customers or your other co-workers, make sure that you are noticed. But realize that sometimes when you’re noticed. It can be harsh to be noticed, so be prepared to take some constructive and maybe some not so constructive criticism.

6. Have a presence and practice your story and your answers. Often, you’re coming up with great ideas for your company or projects that you want to work on. People will challenge it and try to find out more about your ideas. Make sure you have ready answers and ready stories to give the best possible responses.

Challenge

Spend some time this week and write down who all of your stakeholders are. Are they your customers? Are they your co-workers? Is it your boss? Write down those stakeholders in a gigantic list, and then next to their names, write down what they want. Think about how you best can give your stakeholders exactly what they’re looking for.

Links

https://azzarellogroup.com/

Summary

1. Go above and beyond your job description and do what needs to be done. Make sure your job suits your ruthless priorities. You can’t do everything, and if you get tied up doing the projects and the tasks that don’t matter, you’ll never get time to do the ones that really do matter. They are the ones that put your company and your career ahead.
2. Keep a priority list. Ensure that you always build in a time buffer, so you have time to think and plan and then actually do the necessary work.
3. Protect your important projects. Over-communicate anytime something goes wrong, goes right, or you need help from your boss and other people in your company. Make sure you finish those critical projects first.
4. Hide physically and digitally. Find some way of getting into a quiet space where people can’t find you. Don’t automatically respond to your phone, to Slack, or to other messaging devices. Make sure you get time to concentrate.
5. Build trust in your community at work with your bosses and with your coworkers. When they learn they can trust you, that’s when the good projects will come your way.

Challenge

• Try to spend at least one hour in pure silence, whether it’s from distractions, noises, or digital signals that try to steal your intention. Try building that up. It’s hard to concentrate but start small. Use this experiment as a way of seeing whether good focus time could improve your productivity.

You know how I always dread a whole year? Well, this time, I’m only going to dread one day at a time – Charlie Brown

How do you look at a year in reflection? And how do you look at planning the next year? It’s complicated, even in the best of years but this one’s a doozy. We’re recording this right in the middle of the pandemic, and a lot of us have been through many different things. Some of us had plans and those maybe didn’t come out the way we expected. Some people had unexpected loss. Other people had major life changes. Some other people found themselves with a lot of time on their hands, and not much to do. And whatever it is, and whatever year it is, it’s great to reflect and think about what kind of impact this last year has had on us. They’re all different. They’re all weird. They all do something to us that’s a little bit different.

End-of-Year Rituals

Gretchen Rubin in the Happier podcast mentions about how do you usher in a new year, and she talks about it as exorcising, not exercising, the previous year. People wrote in and talked about how they like to end their years and what types of rituals they do. They had someone who’s going to build a 2020 pinata and fill it with all sorts of dreams for next year, and candy. The whole family was going to beat on it and enjoy New Year’s Eve. There was a lot of burning too. People were going to throw a lot of things in the fire. Having these kinds of traditions always helps people do that reflection on the previous year, but then also try to come up with the plans for next year. Some people make this the time where they do charities and donations. I know a lot of nonprofit organizations get a majority of their gifts at the end of the year. People clean their house; they make room for new things in the house. Sometimes it involves food. In the chilly Midwest, we have cocoa and mulled wine and that goes a long way to keeping us cozy. The fireplace gets going. My friend always bakes and shares Christmas cookies. And she loves to watch all the classic Christmas movies, and Die Hard which by the way, is not a Christmas movie. I always watch It’s a Wonderful Life. One Christmas a few years ago, we had this perfect snow where it was gentle and twinkling. Wasn’t too cold out and I went into my garage and found the skis that I bought 30 years ago and never used. I went cross country skiing. It was downright magical. I could hear the snowflakes hitting the ground. My new hope is that every Christmas, I can go cross country skiing in the woods. I just loved that. I also pull out a book that is special for the end of the year. There’s also a lot of things that have to the end of the year to do with money. Everyone does something that’s a little bit different. And I know I’m single, so my list is a little bit too much a me, me, me.

• https://gretchenrubin.com/podcast-episode/303-find-a-ritual-to-exorcise-2020

End-of-Year Questions

Think about what you can do with your spouse or your friends. And it’ll help you to with this type of reflection that people love to do. Having that other person who can ask those questions of you and write them down for you and then go through their list is helpful. Or even doing these things together and think about how the year went. Always remember that when you look at these past years, life always brings change for the good and for the bad. It’s never one thing or another. And I think that what you have to do is give yourself a lot of grace at this year in particular. There were things that you have planned that you just can’t get done and you’re not going to get done just because of the nature of the year. There were things that you probably hope to tackle, and you just didn’t have the energy to do it. This is that time to be graceful to yourself and to give yourself a little forgiveness. When you look back at a year, there’s nothing you can really do about it. Unless you built yourself a time machine, that year is done and over with. All you can do is go forward. The only purpose of reflecting on your previous year is to give you a stronger perspective for the future. And so just remember that when you look back at your year, this is not a time to beat yourself up. This is a time to learn from it and learn how to go on and do better next year in everything that you do.

So, one of the things that I do is I have created a OneNote planner for myself. And I asked a lot of questions about the previous year in this OneNote journal. And here are some of the questions I asked:

• How did the year go?
• Was I happy last year?
• Did I do interesting things?
• Did I see key areas of my life improve?
• What really made me laugh?
• What went wrong?
• What did I do about the things that went wrong?
• What do I need to forgive myself for?
• What do I need to forgive others for?
• Are their trends of the things I did last year?
• What did I learn about myself?
• What helped me spiritually and helped me feel closer to God?
• Did I gain friendships or lose them?
• What about my career?
• Did I take a step forward in my career or back?
• Did I have a good working year?
• Did I like the work that I did?
• What makes this year unforgettable?
• What did I enjoy doing this year?
• Who are what is the one thing or one person I am grateful for?
• What is the biggest win this year?
• What did I read, watch, listen to that made the biggest impact on my year?
• What did I worry about the most before this year? And how did it turn out?
• What was the biggest regrets and why?
• What was the one thing that changed about me the most?
• What surprised me the most about this year?
• And if I could go back to January 1, and tell myself something, what would I say?
• Were there goals and plans that I had? How did they go? Do I want to continue those plans next year? Or do I want to consider them complete?
• What surprised me the most?
• What was my favorite meal?
• What was my favorite book, favorite trip, favorite quote, favorite event?
• What made me laugh the most?
• What changed the most about me this year?
• Were there any big milestone events in terms of marriages? Or birthdays are anything that happened?
• What was my biggest influence this year?
• If I were to write a book about the previous year, what would the title of the book be?
• If I were to write a paragraph that would go on the back cover of the book, what would that paragraph say?
• How is that going to influence what I am going to do next year?
• Is there anything or anyone I need to tie up any unresolved issues with?

What I can tell you is to dig deep inside of all these issues. This is a chance for you to really reflect and it’s not about listing one thing per question. It’s about listing an exhaustive list of all the things. What went right can be a list of 100 things that went right. It’s important to get those down. And again, this might be fun to do with other people so that you can reflect on them with another person.

• https://covisioning.com/how-to-assess-your-year/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauladavislaack/2016/12/28/8-questions-to-help-you-evaluate-2016
• http://www.mariasfarmcountrykitchen.com/10-ways-to-end-a-tough-year/
• https://www.jamessweetman.com/my-end-of-year-ritual/
• https://vidyaliving.com/rituals-my-end-of-year-ritual/
• https://www.denisedt.com/blog/end-of-year-ritual
• https://www.yesandyes.org/2016/12/end-of-year-traditions.html
• https://www.businessinsider.com/new-years-rituals-around-the-world-2013-12

Have an End-of-Year Project

The other thing I do when it comes to the end of the year, is I always have an end of the year project. One year I sewed pajamas, I don’t know why. I got my sewing machine out and learned how to use it.  I got some flannel material. I said I was going to sew myself flannel pajamas, and I am going to wear them on Christmas Day. And sure enough, I did that. They weren’t the most comfortable pajamas in the world. But you know what I made them, and I wore them on Christmas Day. Last year, I worked on a project where I changed every password on every website and started using a password manager. Oh my goodness, that was not a fun project. Usually, I try to pick fun projects. But I benefited from that all year long! This year, my project is going to be my Day One journal. Day One is a journaling app that is found on iOS and MacOS. I’m going to try to fill in a lot of holes where I failed to journal. I’m going to go through Facebook and find all the pictures, I’m going to look through my picture files and look at the dates. And I’m going to put them in my journal. And I’m just going to try to come up with lists of pictures and events that I did. I plan on working on that now until the end of the year. I also plan on working on this podcast and making it better.

Planning for Next Year

So next let’s talk about planning. You know, it’s one thing to reflect on the previous year. But then there’s another way of taking a look and saying how can we plan for the next year? We talked in previous episodes of this podcast about planners out there like the Full Focus Planner. That planner is really engaged in reflection and planning. How can I look back at the things I did? And how can I look forward to the things I’m going to do? A lot of people like journaling on paper with a pen and they find it much more meaningful to them when they write it out. I can’t read my own handwriting.

Develop a Perfect Week

Everything for me must be digital. So, I have this OneNote journal that I created, where I took a lot of ideas from books and journals. But some things that I do for a year is I first start out with what would the perfect week look like. It’s just a grid of every hour in the day and every day of the week. And you don’t fill it out by typing in each of the grid areas. What you do is you draw these big color blocks around it. So, you’d say this is the time that I work. This is the time that I sleep. Maybe I want to read a book every night before I go to bed. I want to pray every morning before I go to work. I want to exercise every morning when I get up. Every weekend, I want to be with my friends and have lunch and every Sunday I want to go on a hike. Whatever it is, you block these out as your perfect ideal week. And then you place it all over your house so that you can look at it. And I will tell you that once you start planning out what your perfect week looks like, it starts to happen. You start moving more and more towards that perfect week. And suddenly your real week start looking like your perfect week. I remember my boss asked me how my weekend was. And I said, “You know what, it was perfect!” And I really meant that because I did exactly what my perfect week for a weekend was supposed to look like and it really actually helps a lot.

Create Planning Questions

Then I have planning questions. My planning questions are sort of this combination of my OneNote book, but it also comes a little bit from that book I talked about in a previous episode, The One Thing and remember, his thing was to ask that question, “What is the one thing I can do this day, this week, this year, that by doing such, everything else becomes better or easier?”

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project

One thing that really helps is this thing called the Happiness Project, and this is a book by Gretchen Rubin. We talked about her in the past. She wrote that personality tests that talked about Upholders and Obligers. But this was an earlier book where she was happy, but she wondered if she could make herself even happier. To learn about her Happiness Project, she has resources on her website. She also has the whole book which you can read. But I will tell you that one of the really interesting things that you can do is just search on the internet for Happiness Project and see the amazing things that people have done with their own happiness projects. So, for my take on it, the Happiness Project starts out with these 10 Commandments, and they’re for the year. And to give you an idea, here’s my 10 Commandments

1. Be the best Jill possible
2. Face things honestly and say things honestly.
3. Be with God and that includes prayer and reading the Bible every day.
4. Health is what we do every day, and not something we do every once in a while.
5. Focus on strengths and minimize weaknesses.

This one was a bit of a premonition because I hadn’t even thought about doing this podcast yet.

• Small steps and if it’s not working, make the steps even smaller. Wow. There you go. A whole podcast right there.
• Focus on actions, not outcomes.
• Stand up for yourself.
• Listen more, ask more questions.
• Controlling your behavior starts with controlling your environment.

Then the next step is to take 12 ideas of improvement one for each month. You’ll focus on one thing each month. So last year, my focuses were daily exercise. Then the next month was going to bed and getting up at the same time every day. I had a sleep project where I worked on making my sleep better. My third month was about controlling snacking, and getting only one snack every day, I had a house cleaning project where I had to every day throw out something every day organized one thing: a drawer, a shelf, just something. And by the time I was done with it, my kitchen was incredibly organized. It still is today. But that was because I focused on it to clean everything within one shelf one area and made it so much better. It’s a really good way of just having these mini goals to tackle some of the issues in your life.

• https://gretchenrubin.com/books/the-happiness-project/about-the-book/
• http://www.mariasspace.com/2009/12/i-have-book-to-start-your-new-year-with.html

Summary

1. Come up with a list of questions for your reflections of last year. Make sure you look at good things and bad things. Examine plans that went right plans and didn’t go right.
2. Work with friends or spouses to come up with reflections of last year together. See how the year went for you.
3. Develop an end-of-the-year rituals so that you can put a close to the last year and start thinking about next year.
4. Ask good questions about what you want your next year to look like. What is the one thing you could do next year that by doing so would make everything better?
5. Consider doing a Happiness Project including 10 commandments for the year and 12 themes for each month. And then little mini goals that go under them. You can tackle each of these overarching themes and make it better each month of next year.

Challenge

• Come up with next year’s 10 commandments, what would be the 10 rules that would make the biggest impact on your life in 2021.

Now we’re going to look at our advice of the week. This quote comes from it’s a wonderful Life and our friend, the angel Clarence.

“Each man’s life touches so many other lives when he isn’t around and leaves awful hole, don’t you think?.”

I think everyone understands what their life means to them. But what they don’t realize is everyone has an impact on everybody else they touch. everybody else’s lives are interlaced in theirs too.

I appreciate all of you and I hope you have some good reflections on the last year and some good planning on the next year.

“System thinking is a discipline for seeing the wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots’ ” – Peter Senge

Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about the difference between having a system or having a goal. The word “goal” gets thrown out there and sometimes we don’t really know what that even means to have a goal. So, think, for example, if you are someone who was a coach, and you say, ‘My goal is to go to the championship.”’ You might not be able to go to the championship. And so that’d be super depressing, because only two teams go to the championship. Instead of having the goal of winning the championship, and being that sole team, come up with a system. It will include coming up with better plays, getting better players on your team, having coaches that have particular skills, and talents, having good practices where everyone gets stronger and better at the game. And those systems will build your way to becoming better and more likely to winning the championship. It will provide a pathway for becoming better next year, becoming better five years from now. And that is really what the difference between having a goal and having a system that makes it likely that you will get your goal. but you will go beyond that. When I first lost weight, and I had that goal, it gets very narrow minded because there’s a lot of different ways to lose weight. You could starve yourself and you would be in very poor health. But you’ve lost weight. You don’t think about it as losing weight.  James Clear talks about the problem of goals is that everyone has the same goals but not everyone succeeds.  He Says “Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.” What you do is you think of a system, I want to be a healthier person. I want to be a more fit person. Instead, think about those things you really want to do. A system is about doing these exercises that will give you a strong core. That will give you strong legs. That will give you a lot of stamina and a lot of endurance. And then we’re going to work on healthier eating so that you can start reducing weight, you feel better and your stats are healthier when you go to the doctor. Because now you have a system in place of healthier living instead of a goal.

Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.

Systems vs Goals: How I Lost 70lbs and Learned Piano

Systems vs Goals: How I Lost 70lbs and Learned Piano

Scott Adams How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big on Systems

The next person who talks a lot about systems versus goals is Scott Adams in his book, How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. He says, “… losing ten pounds is a goal (that most people can’t maintain), whereas learning to eat right is a system that substitutes knowledge for willpower” And he talks a lot about how the systems then will become routines. He says, “Compare the goal of exercising 3-4 times a week with a system of being active every day at a level that feels good, while continuously learning about the best methods of exercise. Before long your body will be trained, like Pavlov’s dogs, to crave the psychological lift you get from being active every day. It will soon become easier to exercise than to skip it – no willpower required. And your natural inclination for challenge and variety will gently nudge you toward higher levels of daily activity while at the same time you are learning in your spare time how to exercise in the most effective way. That’s a system.” And that you will be able to create this constantly rewarding system. So, you can have tinier steps. You can have tinier goals and celebrations because you’re constantly achieving the system. So, you reward yourself, not for losing weight, you reward yourself for following through on your weekly plan of becoming more fit. On your weekly plan of eating better, and you’re warding yourself. Because this will eventually get you to where you want to go. Goals can be very negative, because when you don’t get there you feel depressed about them, you feel sad about them. And so, it’s really one of those things that makes it so much easier for us to keep going. Because what we’ll do is we’ll turn these steps into routine, and they will be habits. And then we will stop spending energy trying to force ourselves to do something, but we will become used to this pattern. And that’s why it’s important that the system has steps that are easy to follow and easy to accomplish. As you start getting better at these steps, just like when I first started, I said I had to do this amount of cardio every day. I am much more capable than I was back then. So, I tweaked it up a little bit. I’ve done some more interesting things. And I’ve been able to actually make it a little bit more fun. I bought myself an Oculus Quest and now instead of just being on the exercise bike or the rower, I’m rowing in the Antarctic. It’s more fun. And because I was able to tweak this as I was able to go along, I found a way to take something that was fine and make it even better. So, you keep tweaking those things until they become a routine that you will enjoy. You will be less likely to go back to your old habits. Because sometimes when you say well, I want to lose this amount of weight and then you lose that amount of weight. And you go right back to where you were before you got into your healthier lifestyle. But when you have a system, it’s no longer about that goal, even though you probably will hit it, you will probably shoot past it. And you’ll say great, I’m not interested in losing weight anymore. So, I can adjust my system a bit. Maybe I get a few more calories, but that same system is in place to keep us from going back and sliding back into where we are. Problem is goals as they tend to be very inflexible.  

https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/

Flavio Rump On Systems

Next article we’ll talk about comes from Flavio Rump calls The Underlying Principle of Becoming the Person he said when you work on a system as compared to goals, “What seems to happen is that you start becoming the person who works out regularly, or the person who reaches out to new prospects every day. And then you feel good every time when you act, you start becoming a person who naturally does this, and you start doing it regularly, more frequently than you would otherwise do it, it turns the path into a goal, you reap the benefit of feeling good every time.” So, he talks again about how goals are really narrow and specific. While systems are bigger. Find a way of making smaller steps that will break the things that you’re really looking to do in the end into small repeatable actions. Stop thinking of things in terms of goals and start thinking of things in terms of skills and repeatable actions and it will become a lifelong habit of taking you well beyond that. You just not going to lose 10 pounds, you’re going to be a healthier, more fit person who loves to be active and go hiking and go skiing, because you’ve built this system of health instead of having a goal of weight loss.

https://medium.com/@flaviorump/systems-vs-goals-a67fcd937370

Summary

1. Look at your goals in your life and think, how could these be broken up into smaller steps? What are the types of behaviors I need to learn or actions I need to take in order to meet this goal?
2. Build a system around those steps that you’ve just determined that you need to take and make them repeatable.
3. Come up with smaller step celebrations, not because you achieved your goals, but because you achieved the method of your system.
4. Learn how to tweak your system as you go on, so that you’re able to make it more fun, more beneficial. And we’ll start meeting where you are right now, instead of where you were two months ago when you started the system. Adapt the system to meet your new scenarios as you build up your strengths, your knowledge, your abilities.

Challenge

• Take one thing that is a goal of yours and break it into a system and write that system down and give it a shot for a couple of weeks to see if the system is more positive, more flexible, and easier to do on a weekly basis. It’s going to take a little bit more time than a week because things just take time. But it should be apparent that this is easier to follow instead of trying to meet some goal.

Our fun movie advice of the day is from the Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

Sam: It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Whew, that was a long one. Sorry about that. But it is one of my favorite quotes in a movie and it just seemed so appropriate right now. And Sam has it right! These stories of people going through dark times or hard times are great because they did not think about how bad things were right at that moment. They were able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.