Youth Care: Make every effort for your best

Make every effort for your best

Posted by Youth at 8:04 PM

Make every effort to make today your best day ever.
If you do that every day, your yesterdays will be filled with
happiness and your tomorrows will be filled with hope.
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I read a story about two frogs. Perhaps some of you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

Two frogs were hopping around the farmyard and they came across a bucket
half full of milk. Being partial to a tipple, they hopped in and drank as much as
their little green bodies could take.

When they'd drunk their fill and tried to hop out, they found that the milk was
weighing them down and what had been an easy entrance now seemed like an
impossible exit!

They hopped and they hopped but no matter how hard they tried they couldn't reach
the top of the bucket.

All the other animals in the farmyard saw what was going on and started shouting
abuse at them:

"Yah - you're useless at jumping, you'll never get out!"

"Hah - look at you - the farmer's going to throw you right into the pasteurizing machine!"

"Call yourselves frogs, you'll never get out of that bucket - you couldn't jump out of a
circle drawn on the ground!"

The frogs were getting tired, but they kept trying and failing.

Eventually, the constant insults got to one of the frogs and his jumps got even worse.
This of course just made all the animals jeer even louder.
They could see that the end was close and they were loving seeing the
frogs get in so much trouble.

Finally the frog slumped into the milk and stopped trying. He knew he was a failure
and just couldn't fight any longer.

But his friend never wavered. The louder the animals jeered at him the harder he
pushed himself until eventually he managed to get one foot over the edge of
the bucket.

He paused at the top, gave a big smile to all the animals who were shouting at him
and hopped off towards his pond in the corner of the farmyard.

Now that is a nice little story, but there is a postscript. Why do you think that our frog
succeeded against all the criticism and negativity while the other one gave up
under the barrage?

Because he was deaf. He didn't hear the jeering and the insults, and when he looked
around he thought that all the animals were cheering him on.

Everywhere we look there are people who take pleasure in seeing us fail, people
who can't or won't do things themselves and so are quick to try and stop us from succeeding.

The only way to quite them is to become like the deaf frog and stop listening.
Only then you can succeed on your own terms, not on theirs.