The Four C's in Trucking

The funny thing about life is no matter how well you plan, or how cautious your step, there will always be ups and downs, and turnarounds. Like the Israelites wandering 40 years around a mountain in the wilderness, instead of a trip that was supposed to take 11 days. Too many of us come to our own proverbial mountains, and instead of conquering it, we just go around and around, never accomplishing what it was we had set out to do.

Maybe we're too afraid of failure to even give it a try, maybe we're too lazy and the mountain is too steep, or maybe we feel we're not good enough to take on a big mountain, so we leave that to the other folks. Confidence is a strange thing. Many people say they have it, but don't truly understand its nature. Confidence, when coupled with courage, are the only ways to conquer a mountain.

Walt Disney once said that, “Somehow I can't believe there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in the four C's. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy, and the greatest of these is Confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.”

Everyone knows that Walt Disney achieved great things in his lifetime, most of them starting with a very insurmountable dream. While the greatest attribute is unarguably confidence, and while it takes courage to act on confidence many times, sometimes it takes curiosity to even get to the point where confidence and courage would be required.

Curiosity gets a bad rap from the popular euphemism about a cat, when in reality, curiosity is something that is not only healthy but good. Curiosity can expand boundaries, alter the direction of life, and forge new discovery. If Christopher Columbus hadn't wondered if it would be faster to get east by going west, America would be very different from the one we know today. It takes a curious nature to dare to dream, to wonder about impossibilities, and to try to turn impossibilities into possibilities.

My husband and I love to watch a new Disney cartoon called “Kim Possible”. The main character, Kim, is a teenage cheerleader who also fights evil doers across the globe with a little help from her best friend and side-kick, Ron Stoppable. As the series progresses, the audience learns that Kim has an extreme amount of self-confidence and courage, while Ron has many phobias and plaguing self-doubt. Undoubtedly, Ron's idiosyncrasies make him an enjoyable character, but in real life, Ron would be in danger of succumbing to his failures unless he had the constancy of Kim in his life.

It takes constancy, a steadfastness of a person or of a goal to reach the summit of every mountain.

In every person's life – in your life – there are mountains. Sometimes the mountain is a challenge that stares you in the face, sometimes it is merely a leap of faith that must be taken. Sometimes the road is straight, sometimes it curves and turns. And sometimes, you just have to pull to the side of the road and wait for directions.

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