The Farmer’s Dog

Dear lovely people,

Tom Landry says “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan. “

I read about a farmer who had a dog that used to sit by the roadside waiting for vehicles to come around. As soon as one came he would run down the road, barking and trying to overtake it. One day a neighbor asked the farmer "Do you think your dog is ever going to catch a car?" The farmer thought for a while and replied, "That is not what bothers me. What bothers me is what he would do if he ever caught one."

Unfortunately, many are the people in life who behave exactly like the farmer’s dog. They spend so much energy and resources every day, pursuing meaningless goals. They insist on doing just the things that take them nowhere.

I am however, aware that there is always a personal definition of “meaningless” for each of us. Life has so much to offer that it is often very difficult to make the right choices for ourselves. Sometimes, we may think we have made them, but the resulting experience may leave us gasping. So, there is little satisfaction in the whole exercise.

The good news is that this kind of experience helps us search further and this search takes us forward in our journey towards ultimate success. We need to know what to do, of course, but it is also equally extremely important to understand what not to do.