Inspirational story

There was a group of boys at a summer camp. They were enjoying themselves, playing games and starting to get quite exhausted from the heat. In fact the heat became such a concern that the camp leaders decided to help out in a creative way- with funds available they made it a competition to see which group would drink the most water.  They split the boys into 5 groups of ten.  The groups started out drinking an drinking. They made piles where they could drop the water bottles off when they were empty so they could be counted at the end of the week. Through the heat, through the struggle the boys pushed on making sure they pace themselves but drank what they could. At the end of the week, one of the groups of boys cumulitively drank 3,000 bottles of water. The next closest group to them drank less than 1,000 bottles. And the number progressively got smaller.

One of the boys from te winning group turned to the councilor and asked him in a tone of frustration  "Why didn't you tell us we were winning by so much?!" 

Looking for the opportunity to teach the young boy an important lesson he took a moment to think about his response. 

He turned back to the boy and said "if I had told you where the other boys were, you wouldn't have pushed yourself so hard. You would have just gone the bare minimum and where would it have gotten you?  You may still have won, or maybe not.  What would you do if everyone told you what the minimum was that you had to do in life? Where would you get in life and what would you do? Would you still push yourself? Would you give up out of frustration?"

The boy stopped. A little puzzled he started making the connection of the analogy. He realized that life had no limits. 

In fact, life only has limits that we put around it and for some reason we stop ourselves from doing great things because we let others tell us what should be our maximum potential and we live with that dissatisfaction - at least until we pull away from those who hold us back and reach for the stars.

So as for me this year on living life for this year, I am going to get married! We are going to go to Mexico and then a few months later we will go and live in China for 4 and a half months.  We just got accepted to a school to teach english in Changzhou! We are so excited!! We will be living it up for sure because that is what we do best!