Who Do You Want to be When You Grow Up?
By Harvey Mackay

(ARA) - I've always been fascinated by the Japanese carp, otherwise known as the koi. It's a fish with seemingly unlimited growth potential.

If you put the koi in a small fish bowl, it will only grow to be two or three inches long. In a larger tank or a small pond, it will reach six to ten inches. A bigger pond, and it gets to be a foot and a half. But if the koi is placed in a large lake, where it can really stretch out, it can grow up to three feet long. The size of the fish is proportional to the size of its home. Well, it works that way with people too. We grow according to the size of our world. Not physically, of course, but mentally. You too can be a mental giant! They say you learn something new every day. I would take that statement one step further and say that you need to learn something new every day. Waiting for someone to teach you a lesson, (translation: the hard way), is a poor way to get an education. You have to make the effort to learn and grow so that you are worth more to your employer, coworkers, friends and family. Your potential is unlimited.

The beautiful part is that you can grow as much as you want. Your mind has plenty of room to hold information. In fact, I recently read that we typically use only 10 percent of our brains. Would you be satisfied to get that little service out of any other part of your body?

My guess is that most folks fall into some comfortable habits and are content with the status quo. When anything has been done the same way over a long period of time, sometimes it's a good sign it's been done the wrong way. Now don't go changing things just for the sake of change. Try something new because the result could be better.

Is it up to your supervisor to prepare you for a promotion? Maybe a little, but the real responsibility belongs much closer to home. You have to let your boss know that you're always ready for a new challenge and will do whatever it takes to prepare. You want to be qualified before the next job opens up, not disappointed after. You want to be interesting at the office and after hours. Your coworkers and friends can only hear the same stories so many times.

I'm a big proponent of lifelong learning. You don't go to school once for a lifetime; you are in school all of your life. That's why they call graduation "commencement" -- it's just the beginning.

There are growth opportunities everywhere for both work and leisure. Take a class. Get a library card -- and use it. Learn to play a musical instrument. Study a foreign language. Visit an art museum. Sign up with a Toastmasters group. Drive home a different way. Taste a new food. Surf the net on a topic you've wanted to know more about. Coach a team. Read a different section of the newspaper. Volunteer for a job that nobody else wants. Cut your apple in half horizontally instead of vertically and look for the star in the middle.

Grow. Stretch. Transform yourself. A simple bar of iron is worth about $5. Made into horseshoes, the value rises to about $50. Transform it into needles, and now you're talking $500. But if you take that bar of iron and make it into springs for a Swiss watch, it could be worth a half million bucks. You started with the same raw material; the value grew as the material was formed and developed. It's the same with people.

My friend Zig Ziglar challenges his audiences: "Go as far as you can see and when you get there, you will always be able to see farther." Christopher Columbus took his advice and didn't even know it!

We live in the information age, the space age, the dawn of the new millennium. Technology has given us access to facts and figures and people and places at the touch of a button. We have every opportunity to learn and grow at any hour of the day. Today is the right time to start expanding your mind.

Mackay's Moral: The largest room in the world is the room for improvement.