To Jeff…the Rhino Principal article as I promised with an added note from me.  Love Mom

When I ran across this article by Paul Johnson called the Rhino Principle, I of coarse thought of you and as I thought of you I felt extremely proud. I felt proud of who you are, how you have overcome obstacles in your life, the continuing evolution of your maturity, your determined personality, your perseverance, your vision for life and the gentleness and the love that comes from within you.

At the risk of repeating what you are about to read in the article The Rhino Principle, I want to share the last part of the article now just to emphasis how I perceive you.

From the article… “We can choose to lead quiet lives and get through them without achieving much. But if we want to do the big thing, if we hope to leave a record that will be admired and remembered, we must learn to distinguish between the peripheral and the essential. Then having clearly established our central objective, we must charge at it again and again until the goal is achieved.”

I see you this way Jeff; you don’t want to lead a quiet life.   You want to achieve great things. You want to leave a record to be admired and remembered no matter what you do in life. You are learning to “distinguish between the peripheral and the essential” and you are becoming quite adept to doing just that. You have clearly defined and established goals and objectives. And…you charge at them again and again and you do not give up!

You are… The Rhino

 

Here is the article I promised to show you…

The Rhino Principle

By Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author

(Published in Forbes Magazine, January 30, 2006)

There’s a certain rule in life that I’ve found worth considering. It particularly applies if you’re confronted by a crisis. I call it the Rhino Principle.

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn’t been. Why not?   Because the rhino is single-minded.   When it perceives an object, it makes a decision-to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.

We can choose to lead quiet lives and get through them without achieving much. But if we want to do the big thing, if we hope to leave a record that will be admired and remembered, we must learn to distinguish between the peripheral and the essential. Then, having clearly established our central objective, we must charge at it again and again until the goal is achieved.

That is what the rhinoceros does. It may not be a model animal in most ways. But it does one thing very well. And that one thing we can learn: Charge!