Keep the Cheese
Have you ever been in a place and wanted out of it? A place in your life I mean? A time when you decided, “You can keep the cheese, just let me out of the trap?”
Being out of the trap is good.
In 1977 David Allen Coe wrote a song about walking away from the cheese called “Take This Job And Shove It.” Then Johnny Paycheck shoved the song all the way to number one. This turned the once homeless Coe into a successful songwriter and gave him a beautiful home in Key West and in theory, made him a taxpayer. Later when the IRS seized his new home, Coe went to live in a Tennessee cave until he got back on his feet. But Coe's passion was for writing songs and playing his rebel guitar; making money was never his cheese. So he continued writing and playing and his money returned like a dog that had wandered far from home. David Allen Coe no longer lives in a cave.
Being out of the trap is good when you crave a change of scenery, but never fool yourself into believing you're not headed into another trap. Cheese always comes at a price.
Behold, the power of cheese.
I think I'm one of about twenty Americans who never read the book Who Moved My Cheese? so I don't know if I'm asking the same question Johnson and Blanchard asked or if I'm on a different track altogether. But my question for you is simply this: Is the cheese you're after worth the price you're paying for it?
Heck, do you even know what cheese you're after?
Most of us are chasing cheese we cannot name, struggling to win a race we never entered, unwilling to examine our motives because we're afraid of what we'll find.
Richard of Michigan looked deep inside himself in 1927 and then decided to end it all by jumping into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan. But when Richard lifted his eyes from the churning black waters to see the star-sparkled night above, it struck him that his life belonged not to himself, but to the universe. And in that twinkling moment he chose to embark on “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.”
In other words, he turned his back on the cheese.
During the course of his 54-year 'experiment' Richard authored 28 books, was awarded 25 U.S. patents, received 47 honorary doctorates in the arts, science, engineering and the humanities, circled the globe 57 times reaching millions through his public lectures and interviews, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. He's best known for his invention of the geodesic dome – the lightest, strongest, and most cost-effective structure ever devised, able to cover more space without internal supports than any other enclosure.Even the great Albert Einstein was prompted to say to him, “Young man, you amaze me!”
Richard learned the truth about life that night: if you seek to milk it for yourself, it slips like liquid from your grasp. But if you devote your life to the benefit of others, amazing things begin to happen. Those things began for Richard Buckminster Fuller when he stood beneath a black and starry sky and told the world, “You can keep the cheese. I'm not chasing it anymore.”
The night is black for everyone. How starry is your sky?
Roy H. Williams
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