Quote of the Day

Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. 

I think this quote it important for more than just work and society. It also pertains to marriage and family. In order for anything that requires more than on person’s effort to succeed, all parties need to be individually committed to making it work. This is more than just going through the motions or doing the bare minimum. In order for there to be success in any group effort, every person needs to be committed to doing their best and putting in their full effort. Otherwise, the burden of the group effort will fall on a few individuals. This may work for a time, but eventually those who aren’t truly committed to the success of the enterprise will let their own personal agendas and desires pull them away from the efforts of the group and whatever the goal of the group was, it will either fall apart or become more difficult to achieve.

Reading this quote, I think back to the company I worked for before coming out to Malaysia. There were groups of employees who busted their buns to get their work done and do it well, there were groups who worked at a steady pace to get their work done at an acceptable level but refused to do more than that and there were groups who spent most of their time goofing off and pawning their work off on other people. There were a lot of problems as far as employees quitting because they got burned out and were tired of seeing the small group who didn’t work get away with it every day; mistakes being made because people were more concerned with chatting, smoke breaks, watching the golf channel (yeah, there was a guy who would put his feet on his desk and watch golf during the day), checking sports scores, etc; and deadlines being missed because half of teams weren’t doing their share of the work. It was frustrating to see, but nothing could be done about it. At least not from my position. Once management realized the depth of the problem, they did a lot of weeding out and a bit of restructuring, but it’s hard to find an entire employee pool of hard-working and committed individuals. 

Looking through society, every country and even different ethic groups inside individual countries have their own agendas and desires for wealth and power. These detract from a global desire for peace, prosperity and freedom for all.

In regards to marriage and family, if one partner isn’t committed to working through the tough times together and coming to compromises on disagreements, it just isn’t going to work. This becomes even more difficult to do when kids come along and both parents are needed as a united front.

If each of us makes an effort to be personally committed to the good and right things of the world, think of how much better we can make things. It will be hard at times with all the people who don’t care to or don’t want to make the world a better place, but if we all keep trying, we’ll make headway and more people will start working towards the same goal. We just have to start at home with our own families and then in our work. From there we can make a change in the world.