Ask the Coach! (10.27.05--Making It!--Joshua 9:14-15)
I grew up in a time and place of heroes. Mostly my heroes were TV cowboys like Roy Rogers or the Cisco Kid. In those days there was something common to nearly every TV show--the hero had someone else standing beside him. Roy had Dale, his wife; and the Cisco Kid had Pancho his faithful sidekick. Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. Although there were a few like Hop-A-Long Cassidy that road the trail alone, the shows themselves inevitably always turned up someone, whether that was a local sheriff or a kindly frontier widow, who came to the hero’s aid. To be successful as a cowboy you needed more than one pair of hands; a faithful companion, even if that was your horse, who was always there to get you out of the inevitable tight spots. Going it alone in the wild, wild west was never a very good idea.
Yet today, we live in a culture in love with the loner, the hero who takes on all foes with just his bare hands. In most cases other people just get in the way. There seems to be an unwillingness to share in the glory, to hog the limelight and be your own “team.” Yet, as heroic as this sounds, it isn’t very real when it comes to our daily lives. Going it alone is often a catalyst for failure. We need relationships, especially family, to be successful and the facts show this.
The evidence is convincing that the better our relationships are at home, the more effective we are in our careers. If we’re having difficulty with a loved one, that difficulty will be translated into reduced performance on the job. In studying the millionaires in America (U.S. News and World Report), a picture of the “typical” millionaire is an individual who has worked eight to ten hours a day for thirty years and is still married to his or her high school or college sweetheart. A New York executive search firm, in a study of 1365 corporate vice presidents, discovered that 87% were still married to their one and only spouse and that 92% were raised in two-parent families. The evidence is overwhelming that the family is the strength and foundation of society.
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