Stairway to Success: The Complete Blueprint for Personal and Professional Achievement

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SAY GOOD-BYE TOTHE PAST

The past is a bucket of ashes.

—CARL SANDBURG

The past is over. Enjoy the good memories, use the bad ones as lessons in life, and get ready to make some new ones. Your focus should be on the future.

Imagine that you’re the batter in a baseball game, waiting for the next pitch. Think of the ball as your life and the path of the pitch as the course of time. From the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand until it passes over the plate, it is beyond your influence. It’s in the future, out of reach.

The future becomes the present the split second the ball crosses the plate. You can swing at it or you can let it go by. But as soon as the ball makes contact with the bat or pops into the catcher’s mitt, you’ve lost control of it again. It’s in the past. You may knock it into the stands, hit into a double play, strike out, or walk. But your only chance to control what happens is in that minute speck of time when the ball is over the plate.

The future races toward the present, then zips into the past quicker than a ninety-eight-mile-per-hour fastball travels from the pitcher’s mound to home plate.

If you decide not to commit yourself and swing, your fate is in the hands of the umpire. He can call a ball or a strike. If you swing, you take a risk, but you also give yourself the opportunity to score. And the outcome is in your hands.

WELCOME CHANGE

Fortunately, life keeps throwing pitches at you. You get a chance to swing again and again. And though the future ...