One day in America a man decided he was tired of working for other people and was going to set up his own business. So he bought a stall and stood by the side of the road selling hotdogs to passing motorists. He put up a sign on the road saying how good they were and he stood for hours by the roadside urging passer byes to buy his wares. People stopped their cars, bought his hotdogs, enjoyed them and told their friends how good they were and business boomed. he then bought a shop on the same road and as people found out how good his hotdogs were, trade grew and grew and he had to employ an assistant to cope with the rush, as people realised that his hotdogs were indeed very good. He now thought that he could afford to pay for his son to attend university and gain the sort of education that he himself had always lacked. So his son went away to university, looking forward to the challenges, whilst his father worked hard with his little business.

Then something happened which was to change all this:-

After more than a year at his university, his son came home for a holiday and said to his father, “Dad, things are looking really bad, there’s a world recession, the situation is terrible and the domestic one is even worse.” His father thought to himself, he’s been to university, he reads all the right newspapers and knows about finance and he listens to the radio with serious programs all about the economy, so he must know what’s going on more than I do. So he started by taking down all his advertising signs, then shortened the number of hours the shop was open, sacked his assistant and starting telling all his customers of the terrible recession that was about to hit them all. After three or four weeks he began to notice that his trade had fallen off considerably and he said to his son, “You know you were quite right, we are in the middle of a serious recession.”

The moral of this little story, is that we should all have faith in ourselves and ignore the gloom and doom others try to spread in our lives.

“Whenever we don’t do what we know we should, we can only kid ourselves for so long.
Eventually we will have to stop blaming others for our failures.”