Difference between greatness and mediocrity

"No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined." - Harry E. Fosdick

Passion and courage are the driving force that allows us to share our life with a committed sense of mission. It is our fervent faith and conviction that enable us to inspire, captivate and motivate others to embrace our cause, ideas, and vision. Self-discipline (strength of will and mind) is the key to personal greatness. It is the magic quality that opens all doors for you and makes everything else possible. With self-discipline, the average person can rise as far and as fast as his talents and intelligence can take him. But without it, a person with every blessing of background, education and opportunity will not be able to rise above mediocrity.

Everyone can choose from two roads in life. One is the broad, well-travelled road to mediocrity and the other is the road to greatness and meaning. The range of possibilities that exists within these two destinations is as wide as the diversity of gifts and personalities in a person. The contrast between the two destinations is like heaven and earth, night and day.

The path to mediocrity straitjackets human potential. The path to greatness unleashes human potential. The path to mediocrity is the quick-fix, short-cut approach to life. The path to greatness is a process of sequential growth from the inside out. Travellers on the lower path to mediocrity live out of ego, indulgence, scarcity, comparison and competitiveness. Travellers on the upper path to greatness rise above negative cultural influences and choose to become the creative force of their
lives.

Being effective as individuals is no longer optional in today’s world. It is the price of entry to the playing field. But surviving, thriving, innovating, excelling and leading in this new reality will require us to build on and reach beyond effectiveness. The call and need of a new era is for greatness and that called for courage, truthfulness, passion and significant contribution.

The perfect murder

The Ice Man - Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, by Philip Carlo describe even the very minute details of the most morbid account of Richard Kuklinski’s killing spree. He was one of the most diabolical self-confessed contract killers in American history taking credit for over 200 murders.

Richard Kuklinski was born to Stanley and Anna Kuklinski. Stanley was a severely abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children. Anna was also abusive to her children probably resulting from her own abusive childhood. When Richard was 5 years old, he witnessed the beating of his older brother, Florian resulting in his death. Stanley and Anna hid the cause of the child's death from the authorities, saying he had fallen down a flight of steps. By the age of 10, Richard was filled with rage and began acting out. For a start, he would torture animals and by the age of 14, he had committed his first murder. Although he was dyslexic, Richard had no problem reading True Crime magazines about criminals, upon which he based his actions.

He lived a double life as a dedicated family man and cold blooded hit man but he would never kill woman and children. Over a period of forty-three years, he killed numerous people, either by gun, strangulation, knife, or poison. He favored the use of cyanide since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He would variously administer it by injection, putting it on a person's food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin. One of his favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, freezing the body or placing it in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He left bodies sitting on park benches, thrown bodies down "bottomless pits" and fed alive victims to giant rats in caves in Pennsylvania.

What struck me most is that Richard didn’t seem remorseful about the people he killed per se but he was genuinely upset and sorry that it affected his family after his arrest. If his childhood was filled with love… would he be capable of such multiple atrocities? When he was asked what he would like to say for the ending of his story, he said:” I’d rather be known as a nice man, not the Ice man. I was made. I didn’t create myself. I never chose to be this way, to be in this place. Yeah, I for sure wish my life took another turn, that I had an education and a good job, but none of that was in the cards for me”.

100 billion cells make up the brain that communicates electrically with 1,000 trillion neural connections at up to 250 miles per hour. This sparking of electrical power creates man’s personality and behaviour. Human being has an armory of instincts to help him/her stay alive and violence certainly has an enormous impact that will reshape one’s life and give rise to evil. What is inside the mind of Kuklinski and Hitler and Stalin……?Alas, it is truly difficult to understand the power and complexity of the brain.

Believe it or not, I actually felt sorry for him. Without doubt, Kuklinski is another victim of society. Personally, I view his life as a classic case of a severely abused child, filled with seething rage, becoming an abuser and turning into a remorseless killer. What a sad, sad way to live......