Lifting Up

I speak to ‘radio people’ almost every week who underestimate the power of their stage and their own voice.

When our industry doesn’t value talent, it becomes harder for those talented few to value themselves, and ends with the mediocrity we often hear.

It’s such a waste, especially now, when hope and affirmation and belief are in such short supply.

The writer, William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech proclaimed that the writer’s duty is to “help man endure by lifting his heart.”

Why should your task be less than this?

Why should the definition of what you do be less than this?

Who first said it’s something that anyone can do?

No author has ever written a book read and loved by every pair of human eyes. If that was the objective, no books would have ever been written.

There may be tens of thousands who hear you today as background fuzz, never actually listening to your words intently.

That’s no reason to minimize your mission.

If you can lift the heart, the hopes, the spirit of even one person today, isn’t that a worthy goal?

You have a gift.

You have an enormous stage.

You have someone listening today who desperately needs you to reach down and pull her up, to remind her of her better self.

Make your job description include the challenge to lift up someone’s heart today, in whatever way your talent can make that happen.

Don’t settle. Strive. Make your calling noble, even if your owners don’t.