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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, January 9, 2000 Volume II Number 2
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FOCUS - Giving In
I strolled into the office after five days away.
The mail was stacked high – mostly junk and bills. The voice-mail box overflowed. It was the start of the Third Millennium, and I just wanted to go back to vacation mode.
I wasn’t alone.
My first day back, three clients wanted to talk. Now. They all three wanted me to enter in to a feasibility study. They do not know each other, but they all had the same concern. They wanted to know - “can I quit my job and still survive?” They all asked, “Ken, will you help me crunch the numbers to see if I could somehow make ends meet without this miserable paycheck?”
Each of them came off their first day back to work after bringing in the New Year – and they drove home that night with a burning conviction – I gotta get outta here.
It was the basic stuff. Office politics. Incompetent colleagues. Unresponsive, irresponsible subordinates. Clueless superiors. Stress overload. Impossible expectations. Cognitive dissonance (that would be mental discord). Crushing liabilities. Jammed intersections in the commute of life.
Stop the world, I wanna get off.
Yep, the possibilities of the New Year are endless. The profits are huge. The potential for success is staggering. And after this week’s NASDAQ sell-off, the buyers are coming back with a vengeance. There is no shortage of irrational exuberance (to borrow Mr. Greenspan’s fertile phrase).
But on this Monday morning of all Monday mornings, for most of us it’s the same old same old.
Routines haven’t changed. The action list remains pretty much the same. All the familiar characters show up on stage for one more Monday performance. Undone pre-getaway tasks still haunt us in the pre-dawn hours. We’re dealing with customers and clients and suppliers and students who are facing the same suffocating stresses.
No wonder there’s an epidemic of grumpiness.
As
I listened to the Three Amigos (none of my three clients knew they had two
other friends on my list who were thinking similarly) I found myself pondering
that favorite one liner you and I have heard in countless motivational
speeches. It’s been quoted in
various forms, and the story is old enough to have evolved into several
versions – but the point is the same. It
was Sir Winston Churchill who said, “Never give up.”
I spent a little time checking it out. And it’s true. He said it.
It wasn’t, however, the only thing he said to the boys at Harrow School on October 29, 1941.
I’ve heard it said that this portly statesman stood up in the grand lecture hall of his alma mater before a rapt audience of young boys and gave a three-word speech. Repetition gave emphasis. “Never give up. Never. Never. Never give up.” And then he sat down. Some of the better speakers I’ve heard tell that story even came up with a convincing, gravel voiced impersonation of the cigar chomping Prime Minister in the King’s English.
But that’s not what happened.
In fact, he didn’t say, “Never give up.” He said, “Never give in.”
The quotable quote was at the center of a larger speech. It wasn’t his only line. And the context of the speech is equally telling.
Just ten months before, Churchill
addressed the same group of students and faculty at the Harrow School.
Circumstances were markedly different.
Hitler’s advance appeared unstoppable.
His armies rolled over Eastern Europe.
They occupied Northern Africa, virtually unchallenged.
He built fortresses 
to
the north in Norway. France fell.
His mighty military machine was on the march.
Britain once ruled the world. But
in the face of the Nazi threat, it was but another pawn on a Western World
stage that was becoming the sole possession of A. Hitler.
The mood of that first speech reflected the despair felt by a nation under siege. Now in his second address, he reminded the boys -
“Why, when I was here last time we were quite alone, desperately alone, and we had been so for five or six months. We were poorly armed… We had the unmeasured menace of the enemy and their air attack still beating upon us, and you yourselves had had experience of this attack…”
Hitler
pounded London with “buzz bombs.” Relentless
self-propelled missiles fell like rain on a helpless city whose populace
huddled night after night underground in concrete shelters.
Some of those bombs hit the prestigious Harrow School.
All of England learned to pray.
This
second speech went on. “Appearances
can be deceptive,” he said. Then
Churchill quoted the beloved English poet Rudyard Kipling who wrote that we
all must “… meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters
just the same.”
If
Kipling is right, then Triumph is rarely Triumph.
And Disaster is rarely Disaster.
Buoyed
by the unwavering resolve of the Brits, Churchill told the boys,
“You cannot tell from appearances how
things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they
are; yet without imagination not much can be done.”
Churchill, speaking for a beleaguered nation, believed that determination and grit and character and backbone meant eventual victory. These same boys of Harrow School, just a few years later, would put on the uniform and march headlong into harm’s way with dignity and valor. Churchill’s words echoed in their minds time and again…
“I am addressing myself to the School
- surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never
give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or
small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good
sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might
of the enemy.”
Thirty-nine
days after Churchill delivered this speech to the Harrow School, December 7,
1941, Pearl Harbor was brutally assaulted.
The
attack on the United States Naval Base sounded the alarm.
Americans awoke to the fact that the United States of America was
vulnerable, too. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt labeled it a “day that will live in infamy.”
Even two oceans could not protect the USA against the threat raging on
both sides of the globe. America
mobilized.
Churchill
gained a powerful ally. It took
more than four years. But Hitler
met his match. Only his name
lives in infamy. He is
a goner.
If you braved Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan, then you experienced a couple hours or so of the horror of World War II combat. The big difference, of course, is that you were munching popcorn in the air-conditioned comfort of a reclining theater chair. But think about it - some of those Harrow School students were there. D-Day and beyond.
Tom Brokaw calls them “The Greatest Generation.”
It’s a pretty safe bet to say that Brokaw is right. Many of our freedoms and privileges and much of our standard of living – is directly related to the determination of the men and women who marched under the Churchillian Banner – Never, Never, Never Give In.
* * * * * * * * *
There is a difference between giving up and giving in.
Giving up is a consequence of giving in. Just because you give in doesn’t mean you will necessarily give up. But it is the first step.
To give up means that you quit. Hit the road. Throw in the towel. Color me gone – I give up. Out the door and never turn back. It’s over. Done. Finished.
But to give in is far more subtle. And it can be just as consequential. In every worthy endeavor, there will be resistance. In the case of a World War, there is an enemy. The enemy is readily identifiable. There is a flag, a uniform, and an emblem. There is little ambiguity about who the enemy is. If you give in to this brand of enemy, you have also given up. You have surrendered.
It is unlikely that many of us will bear arms in military combat. But we have battles. We face enemies. They may simply be our competition. Worse, there may be someone in our sphere who is actively lobbying for our elimination. That operation may be either overt or covert.
There are other enemies. Fatigue. Boredom. Frustration. Anxiety. Destructive personal habits. Self-doubt. Distractions. Derailed business plans. Short attention span. Blurred professional vision. Financial reversals. Isolation. Lack of resources.
You are getting the idea. You can name some of your own.
Give in to any of them, and your momentum vanishes. Your motivation dissolves. You are no longer pro-active, you slip into retreat. Progress comes to a halt; power fades. You might even slip into reverse.
My truck is in the shop. They tell me the catalytic converter is so bad, that when I rev up the RPMs, the converter blows hot, spent exhaust back into the cylinders. I’ve got no power. I barely get up the grade. I’m a hazard on the uphill. My converter needs conversion.
When you give in to those pressures, those enemies, it’s like you are blowin’ hot, spent gasses back into the engine… and then you are wonderin’ why the whole thing is backfiring. The power is gone.
Maybe we all need to pretend for a moment
that we are young students again, sitting in the lecture hall of the Harrow
School, listening to the Prime Minister who is speaking directly to you and
me… never
give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or
small, large or petty - never give in.
Because giving in is giving up.
Get up that hill. Attack that pile. You can do it.
One more thing. All Three Amigos are back at it.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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