No 5. Changing Lives through Dancing
By David Earl Woodbury
Friday, January 29, 2016
Excellence for its own sake!
“Those who turn good (organizations) into great (organizations) are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.” – Jim Collins
Have you ever felt that you are in a renaissance? I feel it right now. I know that all the hard work from the past two years is finally paying off and that we are truly seeing success at our Arthur Murray Dance Center. Have you ever started a business, in a new location and new city, from scratch? No staff and no students and no one knows that you are even there? We have.
A great thanks to the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce for putting Arthur Murray Santa Monica on the map. Also, to St. Monica Parish for their support and putting the word out that we are here, teaching the West Side to dance!
“Aspire, break bounds. Endeavor to be good, and better still, best.”- Robert Browning (1812 – 1889) English poet
Now that we are in our third year of business, I am humbled. We knew what we were getting into when we opened a brand new location. We love people, we love dancing, and we are good at what we do, and we knew of seven day work weeks, and 18 hour days, yet it is all worth it. The challenge has made us strong and I feel like a new, more alive person every day. My old crabby person is slowing fading away to the new strong grateful person (my staff and husband would not agree!).
“In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard on the football field: Don’t flinch, don’t fall; hit the line hard.”- Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) 26th President of the United States
Do you have dreams. A bit of advice “Don’t burn your bridges until you get to them.” Dreams are fueled by hard work, determination, and nerves of steel. If you can’t handle problems, can’t handle facing yourself at your worst, and can handle the truth, you won’t make it. And for being angry at others, anger is like you drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. It does no good.
“To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.”- Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg) (1772-1801) German Poet
Yes, you will have wonderful times ahead, trials ahead, triumph and tragedies, but you will know your own truth if you don’t give up. I have faced my own truth and have lived through that realization.
“Yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat.” – Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) Scottish Novelist
We don’t always know what the day ahead will bring. In dancing, as well as owning a dance center, we may plan a day that will go well, or be a challenge, but the magic that makes everything work is the dancing itself! I remember Roz DeBeve always saying to me “Go back to dancing”. It makes everything right again.
“If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.”- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968) American Civil Rights Leader
Live a life of excellence and live to your best potential!
Happy Dancing,
David Woodbury
DavidEarlWoodbury@gmail.com (email me if you like my blogs!)