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Our dog, Missy, had just ridden with us on a 1,600-mile round trip to Chicago and back. That was the first for her. It was a first for me to do it, too, with a dog and we both survived! Miracles still happen. Missy had been through a lot of upheavals in her routine as a result of that trip, and she'd had an exhausting two days. I can't believe now I was empathizing with our dog!
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If you're a teenager, it's got to be one of the ugliest sentences in the English language. You ready? "You're grounded!" Or if you're a traveler who flies very much, it's not a very nice word for you either. "All flights have been grounded." And if you're a Christian, it's not a fun word either. But there's a way to be grounded without being ground under.
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Did you ever notice this little law of life? Just about the time you get comfortable in a place, the scenery changes. You're all comfy at home as a little child, and you think this is a world you can handle. You just figured out your house and the yard, and suddenly somebody plunges you into this unfamiliar jungle of kindergarten with all these crazy kids in this classroom. And then you get pretty comfortable in elementary school. You say, "Hey, I know how to handle this place. I've conquered this place." And no sooner do you get on top of that, and they plunge you into the junior high zoo.
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I don't think Alexander Graham Bell could ever have conceived how much we would use his little invention called the telephone, or how many ways we would think up to use it! You know, some of those magic three-number prefixes that we all know so well; the 800 number, because 800 equals toll free calls, and there's 888, and there are all kinds of them now. We're pretty quick to make that call. Then there are the 900 numbers; the toll rich calls. You really want to be very slow to make those calls. Those 900 numbers can access everything from Santa Claus at Christmastime to party lines for lonely people, to pornography.
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Motivation—That's the art of getting a person to do something. We're all in the motivating business. You may be motivating people to go somewhere, or to do a job, to correct a weakness in their life, to change their ways, to finish what they start, to do what you want them to do. Motivation comes in a lot of forms. You can inspire people to do it. You can threaten them if they don't do it. You can love them into doing it; put an arm around them and say, "Come on, Buddy." You can help them do it; pitch in and show them how and be willing to do your part.
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I picked up a habit while going out to eat with my young children years ago. It's a habit I really don't need to do any more, but I got in the habit of cutting their meat for them. Now, if you're a parent, you know that you get that old knife out before you start on your own dinner and you cut theirs into bite-size chunks. The problem is that I go out to lunch with a lot of businessmen, too, and I kind of have this reflex to cut their meat. But I've never found they really appreciated that. And, you know, the principle of bite-size chunks...well, that's not a bad one. I mean, the best way to tackle a big piece is in little chunks that you can handle.
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Being my wife is a full-time job, and she does a tremendous job of it. In fact, I'm thinking of doubling her pay-I really am. Let's see...two times nothing is...Well, anyway, once in a while we will get so involved in our projects, and she's usually doing them for me, that the laundry will fall a little bit behind. As a result of that, one morning I panicked and I said, "Honey, I don't have any clean shirts!" She said, "You don't have one?" I said, "Well, I have one." She said, "How many are you going to wear today?" That's the kind of practical clarification you get from a wife. See, it is true; I can only wear one at a time. It's nice to have a closet full of shirts, but the fact is, one at a time will do it. I'm okay if I just have today's.
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Gary had a hotel on the Jersey Shore. It's one of those big, old rambling hotels with a lot of style the East Coast is famous for; kind of a bed and breakfast place. Now, if you had just taken over a hotel, what would be your greatest need? Well, of course, fill the rooms! How do you get all these rooms filled to pay off all that you've just invested in the place?
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I happened to be there when my friend, Rick, tried a Jet Ski for the first time. Now, you may have seen those little water machines that look kind of like a baby snowmobile, and they're a lot of fun. But it takes some skill to stay balanced on them as they start to take off across the water. Rick actually handled it pretty well for a while; he's a good water skier, and that didn't surprise me. But it was inevitable that he would eventually fall off. I expected that when he hit the water, that Jet Ski was going to take right off without him across the water. I wondered how he'd ever get back! It didn't happen. That Jet Ski is designed to start going in a circle near you, and it did, and it circles until you can get back on. Well, that's exactly what you need when you fall off.
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If you've ever given a child a helium balloon, you know you had better tie it to something or you're going to have a heartbroken kid pretty soon. That crazy balloon will just float away and slowly disappear into the sky, and all the while here's this crying child pointing at the sky and expecting you somehow to get up there and retrieve it. Now, when you go from a helium balloon to a hot air balloon-the kind that carries people-you don't want that balloon to just go drifting off somewhere. That's why they put those sandbags on hot air balloons. I think they call it ballast. It's to hold them down; to help control them and to keep them from drifting off. Balloons need ballasts; so do people.
