The Time Has Come For Everyone to Clean Up Their Own Backyard.......

Hey Troop! Before They Go Knocking On Their Neighbors Door. One of my favorite quotes of all time. True words to live by. You may have heard it another way, "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." Basically it means that unless you have all your stuff together you shouldn't go around telling everyone how to live their lives. We see it all the time from our leaders in this country. The guy telling us the loudest how it is wrong to be gay.... Turns out, he's gay. A guy on the tax committee, always telling everyone to pay their taxes... Turns out he didn't pay his taxes in decades. Doesn't matter what political party, seems like every month or so we catch someone doing something they get on their soap box about. On a smaller scale I've seen it for years in the work place. Some of you may have heard of Pat, she used to work here and most of the time she had top sales. When Bill was still on the phones Pat was on the night shift and all the day shifters would say "the day shift gets all the cancels, night shift gets all the sales." One day, Pat wanted to come to the day shift, so we moved her and almost instantly all the night shift people would say "night shift gets all the cancels, day shift gets all the sales." Couldn't just be that Pat was doing something a little better could it? Nah! Must be the customers. If you follow UFC at all you may know who Chuck Liddell is, he was the Light heavyweight Champ for quite sometime. There was a point where he went 9-2 with 9 knock outs. People would say "man, that guy keeps getting lucky with that punch." In and interview someone asked Chuck about that and he basically said 'I must be the luckiest guy in the world because I've landed that lucky punch 9 times in a row.' Of course fighters often don't want to admit that on that day someone was better than they were. So it had to be some cosmic force. Had to be luck. Its so easy to just chalk up a loss to something else. So easy to say "so and so gets better customers than I do." Piece of cake to throw your hands up and say "well, it just isn't my day." "I'm unlucky." Why not put in a little effort and see if you have room to improve? What? Effort? He wants me to put out effort? Shocking I know, but there are people who make this a successful career at Magazines.com. There are people who work here for a few years and put the money toward college and move on to something they've been wanting to do their whole lives. Putting in a little effort can reap huge rewards. So, clean up your own backyard before you go knocking on your neighbors door. The funny things is, your backyard should really never be fully clean. You should strive to always get a little better.