Lou Hoover was in the midst of her second tenure as President of the Girl Scouts in October 1936 when she received a letter from Jean Magee. Magee was a high school junior tasked with writing a term paper on ‘The American Girl.’ She judged Lou Hoover to be the best authority on the subject. Unable to ‘sit beside you while you tell me what qualities you would like to see in a real American girl,’ Magee posed eight questions in her letter, among them:
What are your ideas of the true American girl?
Do you think the girl of today is a true American?
Do you believe that her interest in outdoor life and various sports has had a tendency to spoil her womanhood or develop it?
Lou Hoover received so many letters of this type that she could not possibly reply to all. Lou read this letter with interest and had her secretary Edith Harcourt respond by citing relevant passages from an address Mrs. Hoover gave at a Girl Scout convention.
‘The Old Scouts, the old pioneers were, were pushing ahead to better lands, better conditions, better ways of living…. Is the American girl not doing this very thing with her frontiers today? Is she not searching for new and better ways, not for herself but also for helping others?’ For Lou Hoover, the answer to this question was obviously yes. The modern American girl, especially one involved in scouting or girls’ athletics, was every inch equal to her fore-mothers.
Lou Hoover concluded: ‘A mind, an eye, a hand accustomed to coordinate successfully in one or more handicrafts or skills will do good teamwork in anything new they undertake together. A person accustomed in the small affairs of youth to recognize the factors of a situation, to estimate the needs, and to do what is within the owner’s power to improve things, is ready at maturity to recognize and assume adequate responsibility in the larger problems that come before her.’
The future is in your hands, as is the present! As important as planning for the long term is to understand that your current attitudes will be crucial for your future results. Why live with so much anxiety?
This obsession with the future that many of us have only takes us away from one day living what we always dreamed of. We’ll be so distracted by thinking about how we want to be in a few years’ time that we won’t remember the key step to that achievement: action.
So run after it, place your goal on a podium and plot your route to it calmly, without putting too much pressure on yourself. Everything happens at the right time, but you have to go for it!