Today is Martin Luther King Jr.
Day. Please take the time to read this in honor of him.
This speach helped me immensely.
What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?
Six months before his death, Dr. King
spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior
High School in Philadelphia on October 26,
1967
I want to ask you a question, and that
is: “What is your life’s
blueprint?”
Whenever a building is constructed, you
usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that
blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is
not well erected without a good, solid
blueprint.
Now each of you is in the process of
building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether
or not you have a proper, a solid and a sound
blueprint.
I want to suggest some of the things that
should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one in your
life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own
dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness.
Don’t allow anybody to make you
feel that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always
feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has
ultimate significance.
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint
you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve
excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going
to be deciding out the days, as the years unfold what you will do
in life – what your life’s work will be. Set out to
do it well.
And I say to you, my young friends, doors
are opening to you – doors of opportunities that were not
open to your mothers and your fathers – and the great
challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they
open.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist,
said in a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better
book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than
his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world
will beaten a path to his door.”
This hasn’t always been true
– but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge
you to study hard, burn midnight oil. I would say to you,
don’t drop out of school. I understand all the sociological
reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in
spite of the situation that you’re forced to live in
– stay in school.
And when you discover what you will be in
your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this
particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out
to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living,
the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any
better.
If it falls your lot to be a street
sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep
streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like
Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets
like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the
hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here
lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you
can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the
valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the
hill.
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you
can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that
you win or fail.
Be the best of whatever
you are.