It’s easy to quit and despair. It’s easy to say “well I gave it my best shot but it didn’t work” and just give up on trying to move ahead. It’s quite another thing to see a failure or a difficulty and to shift gears out of one venture and go into another.
This last week the world lost Sir Christopher Lee. While most of the world knew him as a long time actor, very few people knew about his other exploits before becoming an actor or his other ventures and honors that he accumulated over a lifetime. I could do a list of all of these things but I think there are plenty of websites and articles out there that do a fine job of this.
Looking at his life in a totality however it is worth noting that he never had an easy or obvious path to success. This was an individual that faced setbacks and failures quite a few times over the course of his life yet he never allowed this to slow him down or stop his progress.
What’s more he was an individual that actively went out seeking new opportunities and interests on his own. You would think that someone who had difficulties in his life might be content just to “break even” or just be a little better off but in his case he did not wait for these new ventures to present themselves. He either went looking for these new ventures or he created them himself.
Like I said above, it’s easy to despair. Despair is easy to do. It’s comfortable, it can be done at a moment’s notice, and requires little to no investment. Despair can be such a hard temptation to resist sometimes.
But lifting yourself up, having the presence of mind to look around and plot your next move, getting on with your life as it stands after a setback, that’s hard.
I think that’s something that a man like Christopher Lee can teach all of us.
Recent Comments