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The Monday Morning Memo

Chasing the Carrot on a Stick

August 8, 2005

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https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/a94fd5a2-bb7c-4f39-88d9-4cc46f2eb705/MMM050808-Chasing-Carrot.mp3

Chasing the Carrot on a Stick

COURTESY NOTE: This is one of those days when I write about something other than business.

Have you ever been in a K-Mart during a “flashing blue light special?” The sad circus begins when an employee rolls out a chrome cart with a rotating blue light on a pole about 8 feet high. A voice on the intercom says, “Attention K-Mart shoppers,” and then tells you know how lucky you are to be in the store right now. They're about to offer an unadvertised special. Just follow the flashing blue light.

Watching those poor people follow that light is profoundly sad to me. It's the reason I quit shopping at K-Mart.

Our world is full of flashing blue lights that cause us to lose our focus and forget the reason we're here. Is there a blue light in your life right now?

Blue lights often arrive as an adversary that begs to be defeated.

No, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about you and the distractions that cause you to forget your real purpose.

Have you allowed the merely urgent to replace the truly important?

I've made this memo short to help you justify taking a few minutes from your crazy schedule to just sit and think about what life is really all about.

Do it now. For yourself, and the people you love.

The world will wait.

Roy H. Williams

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Random Quote:

“On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went North in April.

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, ch. 1

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