Entitlement

Mark and I were driving down the street the other day and passed a quote on a sign. I pointed it out, as I found it so dead-on. As I have said before, responsibility is a crazy thing, and you never have less than you do now. It is also a huge trade-off, a necessary evil, but a price worth paying. It is also tremendously gratifying in the end. So, the quote...

"The price of greatness is responsibility"
- Sir Winston Churchill

Good quote, huh? So, we decided to make up our own quotes and were tossing around a few ideas. Then, it hit us...

"The road to failure is paved with a sense of entitlement."
- Mark and Amber Schaub

When we moved to Dallas about 5 years ago, I had to move down first for my job, while Mark stayed in Cincinnati to wrap up the sale of our house. One day, when on the phone, he asked me what I thought of Dallas, and I told him that I loved the city, everyone was very friendly and I was glad we made the move, but some of the people that I was meeting seemed to feel entitled to everything. They were kids that came from money, adults that wanted all play with no work, women that wanted men to pay the bills with no price. It was so foreign to me. I quickly learned that those people exist everywhere, it was more a matter of my workplace and the people that it attracted. Anyway, I found that these people were some of the biggest failures I had ever met. They thought they were owed everything, but wanted to earn nothing. Even if they had "everything", they never found a sense of fulfillment, which may be even worse.

So, Mark and I vowed that we would never raise our daughter this way. We want to give her the foundation to build her own legacy and be proud of herself when she accomplishes that.