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The surgeon who only takes out half the tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse. He either operates or he doesn’t. Similarly, the effective decision-maker either acts or he doesn’t acts. He does not take half-action. This is the one thing that is always wrong, and the one sure way not to satisfy the minimum specifications, the minimum boundary conditions.

-Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

The books on manager development for instance envisage truly a `man for all seasons’ in their picture of `the manager of tomorrow’. A senior executive, we are told, should have extraordinary abilities as an analyst and as a decisionmaker. He should be good at working with people and at understanding organization and power relations, good at mathematics and have artistic insight and creative imagination. What seems to be wanted is universal genius; and universal genius has always been in scarce supply. The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent. We will therefore have to staff our organizations with people who at best excel in one of these abilities. And then they are more than likely to lack any but the most modest endowment in the others.

-Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

I probably would have been the worst candidate to emulate “Abraham”.

It is simply so hard to move without knowing which direction to go! I’m sure we all understand that from the humanistic point of view. What if we end up heading in the wrong direction? How could you just tell Abraham to go?

Recently, God revealed to me His perspective on this through a line in a book.

“Every sailor knows that you can’t steer a ship that isnt moving forward…to change direction, you first have to create forward progress.”
-John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws Of Leadership

Go think about it…

Another excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

…the oldest seer he had ever sought out (and the one most to be feared) had asked why the camel driver was so interested in the future.

“Well… so I can do things,” he had responded. “And so I can change those things that I don’t want to happen.”

“But then they wouldn’t be a part of your future,” the seer had said.

“Well, maybe I just want to know the future so I can prepare myself for what’s coming.”

“If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise,” said the seer. “If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.”

“I want to know about the future because I’m a man,” the camel driver had said to the seer. “And men always live their lives based on the future.”

An Excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

“I’ve had this shop for thirty years. I know good crystal from bad, and everything else there is to know about crystal. I know its dimensions and how it behaves. If we serve tea in crystal, the shop is going to expand. And then I’ll have to change my way of life.”

“Well, isn’t that good?”

“I’m already used to the way things are. Before you came, I was thinking about how much time I had wasted in the same place, while my friends had moved on, and either went bankrupt or did better that they had before. It made be very depressed. Now I can see that it hasn’t been too bad. The shop is exactly the size I always wanted it to be. I don’t want to change anything, because I don’t know how to deal with change. I’m used to the way I am.”

The boy didn’t know what to say. The old man continued, “You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.“

“Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. It is as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that is going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.”
-Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die

“Collective madness is called sanity.”

[An except from the curious incident of the dog in the night-time]

Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and brown is just being silly. And Siobhan said she shouldn’t say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don’t take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So its good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. It is like being in a restaurant like when father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don’t know if you are going to like something because you haven’t tasted it yet, so you have favorite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you don’t like and you don’t choose these, and then it is simple.

Singapore’s probably the only place you can sell cheesy can drinks such as “Anything” and “Whatever” but still make a sale of 3.5 millions cans on its 1st month. How can you decide between moral standards when you cannot even decide on your choice of drink? May God flip a coin to decide when you enter the Pearly Gates or not.

Perhaps by not choosing heaven, you have already chosen hell.