Category: Leadership (Page 12 of 22)

Today is Labor Day, the holiday where we rest from our labors and honor those who work for a living. Here’s a couple of things I notice about people who labor. One, some people work harder for their money than others. Two, some people do really important jobs and yet our society pays them much less than they are worth. Others do what are in reality trivial jobs, but get paid massive amounts of money.

It’s easy to see. A great teacher, for example, is of much more value to the long-term health and development of a society than a great entertainer. However, a great entertainer can make 100x the salary of a great teacher in one year. Or how about those who fight our fires and protect our lives, as opposed to CEOs who depend on that basic level of safety to build and to make their companies profitable? Even lousy CEOs tend to be compensated at a much higher rate than excellent firefighters and rescue personnel.

As I read recently in this blog post by Seth Godin, our society does not always match money to contribution. Profitable is not the same as important. Sometimes it is, but often it is not. Think about it – who has influenced you the most profoundly in your life, a great teacher or a great entertainer? For most of us, it’s the contribution of the lowly paid teaching professional that helped set the trajectory of our life.

Today on this Labor Day, let us remember those who work in jobs that serve and promote the common good in our world. This day is for those heroes, regardless of how much money they make this year.

I’m reposting this, my favorite speech, because it’s good to read these thoughts when we’re thinking about the independence we all value and the nation we so appreciate. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address…

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863