The world is moving pretty fast, specifically at 1675 km/hour (that's the speed at which our earth spins on its axis), turning day into night and night into day as the surfaces of our planet become exposed to the sun's rays. But our earth isn't stationary in relationship to the sun either, our planet orbits around the sun at the incredible speed of 108,000 km/hour.
And that's not even the end of our travels because our solar system is moving at the astronomical speed of 828,000 km/hour within the Milky Way galaxy. And in fact the Milky Way galaxy is moving at the phenomenal speed of 2.1-million km/hour. So even though it may seem as though we are sitting perfectly still, we are all moving through time and space faster than our minds can hardly contemplate.
Yet for many of us, it may seem that we are stuck in one of those English hedge mazes, where we always come to a dead end and can never find our way beyond where we are at. We seem to be going nowhere despite the fact that we are following the same old path day after day. Repeating the same steps that led us to the same dead end (once again).
Yet we know that if we were to look down from high above we could clearly see the path out of our maze. Or if we could somehow peek through and beyond the hedge in front of us we could see what lies in store on just the other side of obstruction.
And so be it with ProAdvisors, year after year taking certification examinations that simply confirm our status quo (knowledgeable about one or more products). Perhaps we even take an advanced certification and earn a 'red badge of courage' telling the world that we have given our all in exchange for becoming yet a little more narrowly focused in a singular ecosystem. It is almost as though we are saying, "the earth is at the center of the cosmos" and everything rotates around the earth. We look down upon the ground where we are standing, rather than out at the stars where we could be going.
On August 3, 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail, the start of an epic voyage, for he refused to be confined by the notion that there was 'nothing beyond' the then known world.
On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy gave a speech beginning, "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won..." He went on to say, "We choose to go to the Moon...and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win..."
Kennedy's speech was the start of an EPIC journey that saw a man set foot upon the moon less than 7 years later. And why? Because those with 'the Right Stuff' refused to look down and say this is as far as I can go, I am stuck here in this place. Rather, they chose to look out upon the stars and strive to take that first step into the universe beyond what they knew.
Where is your gaze? Are you looking down at where you have been, or are you looking to expand your horizons, to take a new journey, and to go beyond the status quo?
In the next few installments of this series, we will look at what such an Epic journey might look like.
By the way, on October 12, 1492 Columbus set foot in what was for him ‘a new world’....in a place we today call, the Bahamas.