What is Your Life's Blueprint?

This is one of my favourite speeches from Martin Luther King Jr, and I thought you might like it too...


"I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life's blueprint?

Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected withour a good, solid blueprint.

Now, each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid, and a sound blueprint.

I want to suggest some of the things that should be in your life's blueprint. Number one, in your life's blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth, and your own somebodiness. Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Secondly, in your life's blueprint, you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your variuos fields of endeavour. You're going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life - what your life's work will be. Set out to do it well...

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don't just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn't do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets life Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. But be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if your can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you will win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are."


This inspires me every time I read it, and I hope it encourages you too. Go out and be GREAT!