The question I recieved for this speech was: why is there sacrifice before success? when i first looked at the question, the first words to pop into my head were "you're kidding me right? how the heck am i supposed to answer this?" And here is what i finally came up with.
We all should know what sacrifice is. "The giving up or foregoing of some valued thing for the sake of something of greater value or having a more pressing claim". Whatever one desires in this life requires the giving up of something. Life does not strive on taking alone. Life also requires giving; hence life is a process of give and take. The simplest form of sacrifice one can give is time.
Sacrifice is one of those things that seems unnapealing at first. We don't like to give up anything, especially not for the fleeting hope that it might be replaced with something better at an undetermined time in the future. Where's the fun in waiting for that time?
The sacrifice of time is the most fundamental form of sacrifice. In America we sacrifice most of our youth towards school. We then sacrifice our time towards daily labor to acquire finances for daily living. On a deeper level the sacrifice of time involves patience.
Sacrifice is essential to human well being. Some people live happy lives sacrificing their pride to beg from strangers. Some people sacrifice half of their adult life in school earning PHD's. Meat eaters in our society directly benefit from blood sacrifice to accommodate their daily meal. Most meat eaters are disconnected from the total disregard of the poor animal's life during its slaughter/sacrifice for their benefit.
Sacrifice is just a small step up too success. it's sort of like sky diving. Sacrifice would be the parachute, without it, when you jump out the door for success without sacrificing, you're just going to die, because you didn't take time to put on the parachute or take some time to sacrifice. But when you do take that time to put on the parachute, or the time to sacrifice,. you pretty much have a 1 in 250 chance of not living. Doesn't that make you feel better about skydiving now?
from some of the stuff that we have read, for example, Emily Dickinson's "Success is counted sweetest", we learn that those of us who never succeed and finally do succeed, it is the sweetest thing in the world, next to chocolate of course. and to those of us who succeed all the time, failure pretty much sucks. it goes to show that when you sacrifice you eventually succeed and when you stop sacrificing you stop succeeding.
Most of us yearn for the familiar and comfortable feeling, even if it's not satisfying. It seems less scary to stay safely inside of our routines. We avoid taking actions when we know we've got to do the sacrifice for success but it seems easier not too.
We sit in a vegatative state in front of the television, so we don't have to think about how unhappy we are, and with each year passing we sink farther into resignation.
What I am doing is asking what would you rather sacrifice. Either way, you do sacrifice something. You are sacrificing your dreams as you hide your head in the sand, or you are sacrificing a portion of a leisure time for a larger goal.
We're always told no pain, no gain. And when people tell us that, they usually aren't kidding about it. There really is no free lunch handed to us in life and we've got to work for what we want.
So to answer this question, sacrifice is the step up to succeeding or in the skydiving example the safety of success. Without sacrifice really there would be no sense of accomplishment. we need to realize that we should blame our unsuccessfulness on ourselves and not on "luck" which most of us or all of us are guilty of doing.
CAclubindia
