On Monday, June 29, I was attending the mid-year retreat for the executive team of BNI Southeast. As some of the ladies were preparing food in the kitchen, they asked my good friend, David Alexander, to light the grill. I usually cook on a propane grill with an automatic lighter; however, the cabin only had a charcoal grill.

Since we did not have lighter fluid, we tore strips of thin cardboard and put them on the bottom, picked up some dry grass and limbs from the back yard and put them above the cardboard, placed the charcoal on top and lit the paper. David blew air on the embers for approximately 1-2 minutes to start the fire. All of this took a tremendous amount of energy but it was well worth the effort.

Though it took a remarkable amount of energy to start the fire that stayed warm for over 2 hours, we enjoyed the reward of some delicious chicken.

Sometimes people will have a dream to do something in their life that they have never done before. It may be to start a business, write a book, go on a dream vacation or invent a product to help society. It takes a massive amount of energy to make these things happens.

Thomas Edison was asked by a reporter how it felt to fail 1000 times when making the light bulb. His response was, “I didn’t fail 1000 times, the light bulb was an invention that had 1000 steps.” The development of the light bulb took thousands of hours of energy but the reward was well worth the amount of energy that was used to create this fantastic product.   

I remember as a child, when a person’s car broke down in the middle of the road, we did not get on our cell phone and call AAA or a wrecker. We would have the person put the car in neutral and we would push the car onto the shoulder of the road so that traffic could pass. When we first began to push, it took all of the energy that we could muster for the car to roll a few feet but once the car was moving, it didn’t take nearly as much energy to keep it going.

Since we didn’t want to block traffic, the energy expended was well worth the effort.

I encourage you to tell us about your dream and how you plan to see it come to pass. The reward will definitely be worth the energy. When was the last time you used an incredible amount of energy to do some task and the reward was well worth the effort? Share your thoughts below.

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       James Barber

       Author of The Networking Guru

       Networking-Guru.com