“All your strength is in union,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, “all your danger is in discord.”
In one of his books, bestselling author John C. Maxwell shares this story: Some boys were hiking in the woods one day when they came across part of an old abandoned railroad track stretching off through the trees. One of the boys jumped up onto a rail and tried walking on it. After a few steps, he lost his balance. Another boy soon tried the same thing, and he also fell. The others laughed.
“I bet you can’t do it either,” he barked at the others. One by one, the boys tried it, but they all failed. Even the best athlete of the bunch couldn’t go more than a dozen steps without stumbling.
Then two of the boys began whispering to each other, and one of them challenged the others: “I can walk on the rail all the way to the end, and so can he.” He pointed to his buddy.
“No, you can’t,” said one of the other boys who had tried and failed.
“Bet you a candy bar each we can!” he answered, and the other boys accepted.
Then each of the two boys who had issued the challenge hopped up onto a rail, reached out an arm, locked hands with the other, and carefully walked the whole distance.
Maxwell ends his story with this conclusion: “As individuals, they could not meet the challenge. But working together, they easily won. The power of collaboration is multiplication.”
United we stand, so goes a line of a song, divided we fall. No man is an island, John Donne reiterated. One is useless without the other. That is the reason why we have friends.
“The greatest service one can perform is to be a friend to someone,” C. Neil Strait remarked. “Friendship is not only doing something for someone, but it is caring for someone, which is what every person needs.”
With friends around, cooperation is not a problem.
Two lively heifers were grazing in the pasture. They were tied to one another by a long rope. The farmer came along with two buckets of water and placed them far enough apart so the young cows would not fight when they wanted to take a drink.
No sooner had the farmer left than a real battle started. Each cow wanted to go to its bucket of water, but the rope was not long enough. They tugged and pulled and fumed. Their tempers flared, their hearts pounded, they were sweating. Finally, in utter exhaustion, they both lay down to rest, now thirstier than ever before.
Then one of the heifers said to the other, “We’re fighting for nothing and no one is getting any water. Why don’t we pull together, instead of pulling apart? First, let’s both go over and drink out of my bucket. Then we’ll come back and drink out of yours.”
So, that’s just what they did. And it worked like a charm: both quenched their thirst. They had learned the lesson of cooperation.
Someone once pointed out: “We can see that life is a cycling phenomenon which occurs in many forms within a single system. Nothing stands alone – no individual, species, or community; no rain drop, cloud or stream; no mountain and no sea – for in a cycle each thing in one way or another is connected with everything else.”
In life, we either succeed or fail. Successes often happen to those who believe that without others they won’t be able to reach the top. Success, after all, is a direct result of the efforts of the individual and the support and encouragement of another person or persons.
Many people have gone a lot farther than they thought they could because someone else thought they could. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a good example, according to Zig Ziglar, author of Something to Smile About.
“(Hawthorne) was discouraged and had a broken heart when he went home to tell his wife, Sophia, that he was a failure because he had been fired from his job in the customhouse,” Ziglar wrote.
“Upon hearing the news, she startled him with an exuberant exclamation of joy. ‘Now,’ she said triumphantly, ‘you can write your book!’ To that, Hawthorne responded with the question, ‘What are we going to live on while I am writing this book?’
“To his surprise and delight, she opened a drawer and drew out a substantial sum of money. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked. ‘I’ve always known you were a man of genius,’ she told him, ‘and I knew that someday you would write a masterpiece, so every week, out of the money you gave me for housekeeping, I saved part of it. Here’s enough to last us for a whole year.’
“From his wife’s trust, confidence, thrift, and care planning came one of the classics of American literature – The Scarlet Letter. That story can be repeated a few thousand times – or make that a few million. It happens all the time.”
Give those who have helped you the proper credit – for without them, you won’t get what you long for. Sydney J. Harris believes: “People want to be appreciated, not impressed. They want to be regarded as human beings, not as sounding boards for other people’s egos. They want to be treated as an end in themselves, not as a means toward the gratification of another’s vanity.”
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