Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

"Knowledge is only useful when put into action. You can't just sit there and wait for your ship to come in . . . you've got to swim out to it before the pier rots.  We can learn a lot about action by looking at insects. Consider the bee. It will make visits to 125 clover heads to make one gram of honey. That comes to about 25,000 hips for bees to make only one pound of honey. Ants are admirable creatures as well. They're not concerned about their stature but go about their diligent, tireless work of storing up food for their colony.”-

Harvey MacKay (HM)

Lillian Vernon, friend of HM was a 24-year-old newlywed seeking some extra income for her family when she spent $2,000 of her wedding money on an advertisement in Seventeen magazine, promoting monogrammed handbags and belts. The orders came, business grew, and today her mail-order catalog company, Lillian Vernon Corporation, has annual sales of $240 million and ships 50,000 orders daily during its peak holiday season. 

Ted and Dorothy Hustead likewise had a dream in 1931: to open a drug store in a town with a good school, a Catholic church, and a doctor. They chose Wall, South Dakota, a middle-of-nowhere town situated between the Badlands and the Black Hills. Alter a long dusty year in which few visitors stopped at their drug store, they were forced to do some serious soul searching.  They came up with an idea to lure parched visitors to their establishment and acted on it, posting FREE ICE WATER AT WALL DRUG signs all over the area. The signs soon became a novelty and were placed further and further away. Today, Wall Drug signs can be seen all over the world. During peak season, four to six thousand people visit daily. The fact is that you don't have to be famous or the CEO of a large corporation to have an idea and act on it.

Will Rogers once said, "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."  And here's a scenario you might recognize at your workplace: There once were four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. An important job had to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it and that Somebody would do it. But Nobody realized that Everybody thought Somebody would do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Sounds confusing? You’ve got the point. This is what happens when nobody wants to pick up the tab and take responsibility. Everything turns out confusing.  Why not be somebody who makes things happen.  But how? In the words of a popular shoe and sportswear commercial, the slogan says: "Just do it."

Harvey Mackay says: “Ideas without action are like being all dressed up with no place to go.”  Nothing happens when you sit around waiting for things to happen.

And then there are only 3 kinds of people in this world. 
1. Those who make things happen. 
2. Those who watch things happen. 
3. And the last and the lost who wonders: “What happened?”

Don’t waste precious time. Do not delay. Do it now.