All Leaders Sacrifice Something!
The law of sacrifice basically says that if you want to go up, you have to give up.
You have to give up things in your life if you want to increase your value and increase your growth as a leader.
There is no such thing as a growing person, that hasn’t paid a price to grow.
It’s kind of like mountain climbing, you don’t begin in the middle of the day when you set out to climb a mountain. You don’t say how many things can I take with me. You basically say, how many things can I leave behind.
Now obviously you need the essentials to mountain climb. But I can tell you from experience, you do not want to bring anything extra. Because this is going to be a journey. It’s going to be labor-intensive. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to be steep and I don’t want anything to hold me back or to pull me down. That way you can accomplish your journey.
I have often said that growth basically stops in your life and in my life and in most people’s lives when the price gets too high.
I can name your friends in my life that started the journey with me
- Some of them with more focus than me
- Some of them more talented than me
- Some of them I am sure had more gifts then I have
And now I can sit here and tell you that many of them are no longer on this journey with me.
Many of them have kind of plateaued. They have fallen off and it has always been a question of price.
You see when we start on our dream journey, it is because we like the fact that there is no cost involved.
You might begin to daydream about where you want to go, what you want to become, what job you might want to have one day.
You might think to yourself that it would be nice if we could go on a vacation to a certain spot, and you just dream, dream, dream.
You know why? Because it’s fun! It’s fun to dream around the table. Because you don’t have to pay anything for them.
You see you don’t pay anything for the dream until you start the journey!
Once you start the journey, guess what? Now, you have to start paying for it.
I thought very naively in the beginning that I would simply pay a price, get on the toll road, and then I will go get my dream.
Well, what I didn’t realize is that you constantly keep paying the price, the price never stops.
Because the sacrifice never ends. It's not like one day you kind of say oh.. wow.. I have arrived. Woohho..
Now...
- I don’t have to worry about anything
- I don’t have to work for anything
- I don’t have to pay for anything
- Just give me a hammock its time to relax I have arrived at my destination
No no no, can I tell you something?
The dream journey that you are on, it has a continual toll booth. The kind where you will make a deposit and you go a couple of miles and then guess what there is another toll both, then you will deposit some more money and you go a little further.
What you are going to find out there is that there are toll booths all along the road to success.
The road to success, let me tell you its an uphill battle.
So if your coasting and your vehicle are in neutral, guess what, you are going to be going downhill. Trust me on this, the price on this toll road never stops.
What I have discovered is this, people who get sidelined in their careers aren’t people that got sidelined because they lost out on an opportunity, nor are they someone who didn’t have the gifts to arrive there.
They just quite paying the price.
It may not be a financial price, but the higher you go the more you have to set an example and people watch you.
So the greater your responsibility, there is always a price attached to it.
Let me just say one more thing about this price.
People that keep paying the toll road, people that keep depositing and keep giving, and keep sacrificing, they are successful and they will keep growing.
I have never had a person yet tell me they have paid to much.
They are always glad they made the deposit and they gave up and made the sacrifice.
They did the trade-off because they realized the joy of possessing leadership and the benefit of leadership is the fact that you didn’t get it free.