Greatness, Contribution and Making a difference

It's been nearly two months.

Recently, a dear friend gifted me a copy of Stephen R. Covey's book, The 8th Habit.

Synchronicity seems to be at work. I was thrilled when on p. 27, I found another reference to Robert Frost's poem The Road Less Travelled that has been buzzing in my mind for quite a while now, and was discussed in my last post.

"Two roads diverged in a wood and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference..."

I have talked in my last and other posts about the need to break away from old patterns and explore new paths. With a marvellous analogy about the practice of blood-letting used to heal people in the Middle ages, Stephen Covey writes on p.19,

"If you want to make minor, incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvement, work on paradigms."

Further on p. 20 he writes, " ...the problem is that paradigms, like traditions, die hard. Flawed paradigms go on for centuries after a better one is discovered..."

Seems to be that's where we are at really - trying to discard old paradigms and find new ones. Which comes first?

We must teach the new generations that mediocrity cannot walk hand in hand with "greatness and contribution". (p.28) And we must walk the talk.

In the same vein, a really fun and entertaining card game about change and transition that some friends in Cirencester introduced us to is Fluxx. Quite disconcerting at first, dealing with and adapting to rapidly changing rules. Quite too much like life really.