Control your sacrifice. Either you pro-actively sacrifice or a sacrifice will be made for you. And as I emphasize in Willing to Die to Live … The Pain of Discipline, you have free will. Your sacrifice decision is up to you. Just know that “you are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequence of your choice.” If one chooses to NOT sacrifice watching TV or fun to study, their success on a test may be sacrificed instead. A deeper thought is that it’s valuable to sacrifice for sacrificing sake, regardless of what comes out of it. In the same way that honoring one’s cocoon time is valuable even if someone never transforms into a butterfly, one must trust that sacrificing pays hidden dividends. Even if there is not a visible reward to it, it builds character. And even if sacrificing does not appear to benefit you in this life, who knows how it will impact you after-life? Who knows how it will affect future generations after you? I don’t know. It’s up to each individual to find out. Og Mandino once stated, “What you plant now, you will harvest later.” Though usually the case, there is never a guarantee of harvest though. So you have a decision to make: Even if there’s no guaranteed reward upon sacrificing, will you choose to control your sacrifice or will you leave your sacrifice up to another hand?
Martin Luther King Jr. – “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Eric Thomas (1:20) – “To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could be … I dare you to stop dropping classes like you’re soft. Always wanting to give up – ‘I’m dropping.’ ‘Why you dropping?’ I’m so grateful that the slaves didn’t drop and quit, say ‘I’m just going to stop. I’m a slave. I’m just going to be a slave. Imma’ quit.’ Listen to me – the slave said, ‘We will live because one day we will become. We won’t always be slaves. So today although we’re slaves we’re gonna’ act like we’re free and one day our children will be free.’ If the slave would have just said, ‘We quit. We give up,’ we would have died in the middle passage. But some slaves said, ‘I don’t care what we go through. We’re gonna’ survive this.’ 400 years of slavery, we’re gonna’ get through this! … Our people did not quit. Harriet Tubman not only made it; she went back and got some more.”
*** Original “Secrets to Success” video of above quote (13:12)
– JD Inspired