Communities want success — they make plans for it and work hard to achieve it. In fact, we need our communities to be successful, because strong communities make families stronger, and make nations more prosperous. Yet, so many communities have attitudes that lead to their own downfall, much like people do. It happens because too often we are willing to trade away our biggest plans for the future, for what is easy and convenient now.
Consider for a moment that every single student in high school wants to be successful. We all do. However, for some reason some students get involved in drugs, either taking them or selling them. Other students get involved in crime and wind up in jail. No one wants to become a drug addict or spend their life behind bars, yet too many do that. Too often, I think we fail to realize the impact of the decisions we make today, the path they put us on, and their lasting consequences.
When I was a teacher, I asked students to describe to me what it would look like if they ruined their lives, and they would give me examples, such as drug addict, jail, failing out of school, and so on. I would then ask them to imagine their goal was to ruin their lives, and asked them to explain how they would start today to achieve that failure. Someone would always say that the first step to become a drug addict would be to do something like smoke a joint right after school. And someone in class would blush because that is what they did the day before.
That doesn’t mean that everyone who smokes a joint after school is going to become a drug addict, but if you aren’t careful, you may be taking that first step down a road to ruining your life. I believe communities are prone to the same challenges. We all want things to get better in our community, but how often do we get complacent about how things are now? As business owners we all say that competition is good, but how many of us still value competition when we are the ones being competed against? What we want most is to have a successful future, but often we trade that away for what is easiest to do now.
Does your resistance to a changing world cause you to shun new ideas that could help create jobs for young people in an economy of the future? Does your desire to be autonomous cause you to pull out of a water agreement with neighbouring communities, which leads to water contamination and health risks for citizens? Do you wonder why young people don’t stay in your community, but catch yourself encouraging them to leave for somewhere with a brighter future? We want one thing, but our attitudes cause us to act differently. That must change if we are really going to help our communities succeed.
We need to stop blaming other people and absolving ourselves of responsibility to make our communities better. We need to give our youth reason to come home with new ideas and talents, engage our seniors in our community and economic growth, and welcome outsiders . . . I mean really welcome them, and their appreciation for our community. Attract businesses and shoppers to your community so more money comes into your community than goes out. Deliberately add some beauty so people see just how beautiful your home really is on the inside and the outside.
You must ensure your actions jive with your desired outcome every single day, or you will only wind up with great ideas for the future that are sabotaged by your everyday actions. It comes down to attitude. Attitude is everything. Negative attitudes lead to daily decisions that poison our chances at success. They manifest themselves in different ways, but once we see the negative attitudes and the resulting actions, it becomes clear. Attitude is what will make or break our communities.
As I already stated, building strong communities is the most important job we have. It requires us to all come together to find our strengths and fix our weaknesses, and not to wait for others to do it. It requires our volunteers, not-for-profits, businesses and industry, our local newspaper and media, families, elected officials, and others to come together without finger pointing, but to seek strategies that ensure we have vibrant, dynamic, adaptive, and enterprising communities that are prepared for the changes that are coming.
