Week 35 Day 1
Be Useful
And one of [the ten lepers] when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God.
Luke 17:15
What thanks I owe thee, and what love,
A boundless, endless store,
Shall echo through the realms above,
When time shall be no more.
When Abraham Lincoln evaluated another person’s qualifications for a job, he ordinarily looked at only one thing. He called it “usefulness,” or effectiveness. He wanted to know if the person was not only a hard worker, but a smart worker. Lincoln had no patience for people he called “idle” and even less for those who kept busy but didn’t achieve much. “The habits of our whole species fall into three great classes—usefulness, labor, and idleness. Of these the first only is meritorious, and to it all the products of labor rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of its just rights,” he wrote. Work on your usefulness. If you’re idle, get busy. If you’re busy, make sure you’re busy working on the right things. Then you’ll be the kind of person Lincoln would hire.