Thars Gold in Them Thar Hills….. April 22, 2008

Before I get into today’s blog too far, for those of you who were wondering if I found someone to make happy yesterday…..I had a little bit of a hard time thinking of a way to make someone happy that didn’t involve buying them something.  Oh, I tried to do nice things for some strangers….for instance, I let the guy on crutches go ahead of me at the pharmacy (I know….but some people might not have…), and I complimented the check-out lady on her cool glasses…I’m not sure if these things actually made anybody “happy”, though.  I am working on a “project” that I cannot mention that I do think might make someone happy in the future, but I am not at liberty to discuss it in open forum….

 

As for today…I was listening to a portion of an audio by the famous motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar.  He was speaking of the famous industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, who lived over 100 years ago.  It is said that Carnegie had 43 millionaires working for him.  When asked how he managed to employ 43 millionaires, Carnegie replied, “not one of them was a millionaire when they started working for me.”  Naturally, the question to follow was what did he do to make them so productive that they could all become millionaires under his tutelage.  “Well,”  he said, “you develop people the same way you mine for gold.  If you go into a gold mine, you’ll move TONS of dirt to find an ounce of gold….but you don’t go in there looking for the dirt….you go in there looking for the gold.“ 

Wow….for some reason that really struck me.  We do it with ourselves, our kids, our loved ones.  Unfortunately, sometimes we’re so focused on the dirt that we forget about the gold.  Thars gold in them thar hills!  And we need to be looking for it when we go into the mines of our day to day lives.  I personally have been feeling up to my neck in dirt these days….but I know there is a nugget in here somewhere that I cannot leave buried.  So I plan on digging until my fingers are raw.

Have you seen the future of gold?  Maybe I’ll use a shovel….