Fire Your Weapon
The idea behind this title goes all the way back to civil war times. I thoroughly enjoy history and learning the stories of the men and women who sacrificed time, resources, and many even their lives to give us what we have today. Many lessons can and should be learned and applied in today's times.
There are so many times throughout history where peoples lives came to an immediate halt so that they could take up arms and defend the life, land, and liberties given by God. Although we are thankful for every one of these times, many of the stories are heartbreaking and painful to hear.
Today, I want to focus on one story in particular from the civil war. The truth is that there were men of all ages that were hitting the battlefields to fight in those days. Although most soldiers were between the ages of 18-39, reports show that around 20% were under the age of 18 and a large number of those were even under the age of 15. As you can imagine, many of these young men would get into the heat of battle and just freeze out of fear. After many battles, it is said that you could walk the battlefields and find many guns that had been loaded multiple times but never actually fired. Many of the rifles would have multiple rounds where the soldiers would load more ammunition without ever is charging the gun. The solution to the problem was to have someone walking up and down the lines and their only job was to scream "Fire your weapon" over and over. This was to remind the soldiers to calm down, focus, and actually fire their weapon at the enemy.
I have spoken to several great men and women who have served in the armed forces and many of them have similar stories of soldiers who have joined the military, gone through all of the training, they know exactly what to do, BUT when they get in a combat situation, they freeze up out of fear, and essentially waste the knowledge and training they have been given because they never actually fire their weapon.
So, how does that apply to us on a day-to-day basis? I'm glad you asked...
We live in the information age. It's pretty amazing that we can jump on google or YouTube and basically learn how to do anything. There are countless people on social media that want to teach you how to start a business, a side hustle, get in shape, or anything else that you could want. There is so much free information at our fingertips that we have no excuse to not be obtaining the knowledge that we want. We follow so many motivation accounts that we spend
our days reading great quotes and hearing about other people's success, and all of this is great to a certain point. However, here's the problem... Many times we get so caught up in reading and watching and following that we forget to execute. We forget to take action. Just like many soldiers, we get the right training, we load our weapons, but we forget to fire our weapons. When it's time to execute what we have learned, we freeze up and decide to go "reload" our weapons again to make ourselves feel better when the reality is we haven't even used the ammunition previously loaded. Then what happens? We get jammed up because we keep reloading without ever firing and we are of no use.
The self help books, the training videos, the motivational accounts and quotes are all great and can be a fantastic asset to your success! However, if you are ever going to grow and reach the potential and success for yourself, then you are going to have to step out of your comfort zone and take action. Take the training you have been given and the ammunition you have, set your sights on the target, and then... FIRE YOUR WEAPON!