to be shattered

Anatole France once wrote, “To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” It makes you pause, think and wonder.

Anatole France is a great French novelist, poet and writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his day, he was considered one of the finest minds in France. But many people did not know that he was diagnosed as having a brain that was two-thirds the normal size.

How does one continue to dream and believe? Many of us lose our capacity for dreams and belief the moment we get introduced into the difficulties of life, the choices we are forced to make, the compromises that seem easy to agree to.

I like to think that as we are faced with decisions and choices, we need to put a picture of ourselves in our mind. What type of businessman or entrepreneur do I want to become? That vision will guide us in making the right call.

Too often, many entrepreneurs lose themselves and their business by losing sight of that vision. We start spending the rewards of the present, trusting that the future will be taken cared of automatically. Or we lose hope in attaining that vision and start making compromises, which ultimately lead us further and further away from that vision.

Losing hope is easy to do because if we set a high enough goal, the road will seem impossible or unattainable. The secret is to set up our own glass ceilings and not to let others place it above us. If we set our own and work within our capacities and realities, we will soon discover that glass ceilings are meant to be shattered. As we break through, we then need to set up another one, in order to see what we need to do to shatter that too.

President Barrack Obama owes his place in history to this great man, and the choices that he made. History was not the by product of one big action, but through many small decisions that were made, all pointing to one vision.