From my alter ego over at Herz for President, I share my Election Day Greetings
My Fellow Americans:
I greet you this election day in a spirit of amusement. I do not expect to see any great shift toward a bold new world with either of today's presidential choices.
Either way, we tend to balance things. We may adjust congress in two years to moderate the effect of a too zealous leader. We may count on the snail's pace of political decision making to ensure that change takes a measured course.
But if we really want to see a change in the world, our job, today, tomorrow, and for the rest of our lives, is to change how we look at the world, to adjust our philosophy as the late Jim Rohn would suggest.
It is the fearful, those who see themselves as powerless, those unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives, who think that the answers will come from somewhere else, from “government,” from a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton.
The interesting thing is that government as we know it has no chance to keep up with how the world will change in the next ten years. Technologies are now coming on line that will change our lives in ways that most of us can't even begin to imagine.
Whole industries may disappear. Others will spring up. What our role inside of those will be we have yet to discover.
But maybe that's what's missing. I didn't listen too closely, but I didn't hear as a major theme in either campaign the encouragement of a sense of wonder or curiosity, or support of the notion that we are the authors of our own lives.
I've been listening to a lot of Tony Robbins recently. The man touches a quarter million lives a year. He enrolls people in a vision for their lives that leaves them in action and creating bold new futures, sometimes in a conversation of just a few minutes. I'm wondering how many people that Hillary and Donald have spoken to actually found themselves called to action in a profound way in their own lives, rather than called to try to get their candidate in to “fix things.”
Things will never be “fixed” until we stand up to do so. So my invitation for you, for today, for the next four years, for your life, is to take a stand, give your life over to something bigger than yourself, and you and I will see the world change in a way no political hack could make it happen.
And I leave you with an apology. I am sorry I did not take a stand and take my own campaign as something that could grow wings and change the world. If anything, this election cycle has taught me truly and finally that America is the land where anyone - natural born citizen obviously - can rise to be president. And if the best don't step up, and sometimes even when they do, we will be left with the kind of choice before us today.
So we have a choice. We can spend the next four years watching Donald or Hillary theater imagining that our lives would have been different if the other were chosen, or we can be the agent for change in our own lives, whatever Hillary or Donald have to say be damned.
Happy Election Day.
Whatever you choose at the ballot today is small fry next to your actually choosing yourself. Please do that and we'll all have an amazing four years.
All My Best,
David R. Herz