By: D. A. Slinkard
Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Seriously, stop it! Now, I want you to tell your family to stop feeling sorry for you and stop with the excuses they keep making for you. We have too many people running around with the victim mentality, blaming others for their own life failures — excuse after excuse when the truth points back to the person staring back in the mirror. The place you are at right now in your life is because of life choices you have made; but this is reality for too many people who are afraid to admit it.
When I look at the world, I notice our society is teaching our men to be more feminine and our women to be more masculine. Values we once treasured are but a distant memory of the way things used to be when our men were men and our women wanted a hero, not a zero. To get back the mentality that made America great, we are going to have to change the way we think. Honestly, the only feminine thing about me is my wife. Sadly though, we have role reversals throughout society in which moms are having to be dads and dads are having to be moms. If only we could keep the core nucleus of the family together, and we do that by making better choices.
Life is all about choices, and if you make a bad decision, then you are going to get bad results. If you make good decisions, then you are going to have positive results. If we had our moralities back when it came to choosing our spouse, and if we did not rush to make decisions, just maybe we would not live in a society with a divorce rate greater than fifty percent. How different would our society be if parents stayed married because when they said, “I do,” they actually meant until death do us part? Don’t believe me, ask the child who has been impacted by divorce.
There is a misconception that somehow people wake up one day and they are in a bad situation. This is not how life works. The person who is down and out is at this point in their life because of a culmination of decisions they have made over the course of time, yet the same can be said for the person who is thriving in life. We all want to find success in life, and we all have different definitions of success. The question becomes are we going to make good decisions or bad decisions?
We need to pay attention to the daily decisions we make because the results of today are directly related to the choices we made yesterday. There are too many people out there looking back on their life wishing they would have done more with their life, taken advantage of the opportunities they had. These are nothing more than the choices they made. When you hear someone say they regret the things they did not do, they are saying they regret the choices they made.
Start today with the mindset of being intentional. I wonder how different my life would be if someone would have told me twenty years ago to be intentional in my decisions because, no matter what, I would eventually have to live with them. Good or bad choices – we reap what we sow, and some of us like what we are getting while the majority of people go through life with dread and wondering, “What if…”
Do not let this be you. Decide now that you are going to do something with yourself and the choices you make. Most notably, though, is getting past feeling sorry for yourself. Everyone on the planet has had something horrible happen in their life, and just because something bad happened to you, it does not make you special. It is a tough reality that was hard for me to understand, but I eventually got it through my head that someone else had it rougher than me. I no longer played the victim and decided I would do something different.
I think about who I am today versus who I was as a teenager, and I cannot begin to tell you the difference. Youth is wasted on the young because of the stupid decisions they make; but you can decide now whether you are going to be the hero or the zero. The decision is always yours.
By: D. A. Slinkard
D.A. Slinkard is the manager of the Athens Staples store
