Last night I was revisiting some of the blogs I’ve written over the last few years and came across this one. It is a post I had forgotten about but today it resonated. In my day to day life I meet many people who are working hard to make a positive contribution to their field of work, their community or to society. Driven often by strong personal values of making a difference. It’s a tough place to be with many knock backs and periods of self-doubt and personal challenge.
If you are one of those people and have ‘entered the arena’ I suspect, like me, you will at some point have had a sense of coming up short or come up against people who put endless barriers and negativity in the way this may resonate.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt.
If you’d like to listen to a slightly longer version here you go……
This is sent with love to every single one of you who enter the arena.
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash