I came across two quotes today and I see them to be related... let's see if I can successfully communicate the connectedness.
First up from the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg:
“Everybody’s got different opportunities in front of ‘em, different skill sets they bring and luck plays a
part of it. But my experience is that you make your own luck. The harder you work, the luckier you get.”
“I always tried to be the first one in in the morning and the last one to leave at night, take the fewest vacations and the least time away from the desk to go to the bathroom or have lunch. You gotta be there. I mean, everybody says, ‘Oh, that’s crazy!’ But if you want to succeed, … you can’t control how lucky you are, you can’t control how smart you are, but you can control how hard you work...”
part of it. But my experience is that you make your own luck. The harder you work, the luckier you get.”Earlier in the day, I came across this from blessed, soon to be Saint, John Paull II:
“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness;
He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.”
“It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.”On it's face, Bloomberg's keys aren't too shabby but any happiness gained via all that hard work is going to be short-lived and less than satisfying in the end. The evidence for this is abundant.
I'm going to suggest more strongly that JP II holds the keys for which we should all be grasping.
Take what I'm saying here for what it's worth... but know that I believe it's worth everything.
Carry on.
