Carry the Message to Garcia
How often do you find yourself wishing you could find someone to Carry a Message to Garcia?
Finding people who understand the value of completing a mission without filing a flight plan, without endless questioning, without frivolous interruptions is a mission all by itself.
Initiative, according to Elbert Hubbard who wrote the famous essay had one definition:
Doing the Right Thing without being told.
Hubbard goes on:
But next to doing the thing without being told is to do it when you are told once. That is to say, carry the Message to Garcia: those who can carry a message get high honors, but their pay is not always in proportion.
Next, there are those who never do a thing until they are told twice; such get no honors and small pay.
Next, there are those who do the right thing onlywhen necessity kicks them from behind, and these get indifference instead of honors, and a pittance for pay. This kind spends most of its time polishing a bench with a hard-luck story.
Then, still lower down in the scale than this, we have fellow who will not do the right thing even when some one goes along to show him how and stays to see that he does it; he is always out of job, and receives the contempt he deserves, unless he happens to have a rich Pa, in which case Destiny patiently awaits around a corner with a stuffed club.
To which class do you belong?
I promise you that sometime in your life you will have wished you had printed Elbert Hubbard’s 1899 Essay so that you could hand it to someone and save them decades of excuses!
Find it here and save a copy to your computer for that eventuality:
http://www.nato.int/nrdc-it/about/message_to_garcia.pdf
