FIT@50 / week 40
Big Shoes
Facebook launches these memories and top posts apps along with other fun and invasive things every so often. I admit, I fell for it. My top 3 posts for 2015 was my retirement as Chief of Police, my marriage to Liliana Hart and Max & me.
It was the perfect trifecta. Those three simple pictures illustrated the Big Shoes approach I take to life. It’s not about outdoing anyone else. It’s about being present in the lives of others.
It’s about leaving a giant footprint wherever I’ve been placed in my life. Giving everything I have to doing the best job I can. Now that often means finishing last in a race, or second on a test, or maybe having a book release that tanked in sales.
No matter. It’s the effort that matters. Did I give everything? When I crawl off of life’s many battlefields, did I take anything with me that I could have left out there in the way of effort?
I appreciate the sentiment of working smarter than hard, but I treasure the ethic of hard work. I recall raking leaves until my 7 year old palms blistered and bled. You’d thought I’d been bitten by a shark, but my dad would send me back out until it was done and done right. Those are lessons that benefitted me in the toughest and most dangerous of times.
I don’t get today’s tenor of neither working smart nor hard. When did that become dishonorable? When did an honest day’s work get exchanged for this false sense of entitlement? When did pussyfooting around life’s responsibilities replace two feet firmly planted in reality?
Leave the biggest footprints you can in this life. Work so hard that they will never be filed without an equal or more Herculean effort. And when they are, make sure you acknowledge that person, who too, still honors the American ideal of honest effort.