{"id":1809,"date":"2015-07-10T20:24:26","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T20:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/?p=1809"},"modified":"2015-07-11T00:16:40","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T00:16:40","slug":"mosher-way-without-a-game-plan-left-me-far-short-of-expectations-i-had-for-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/?p=1809","title":{"rendered":"Mosher Way without a game-plan left me far short of expectations I had for myself"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Terry<\/a><\/p>\n

TERRY MOSHER<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t believe that today it\u2019s cloudy with a cool breeze waffling through the trees. That\u2019s a big change from the blistering hot and unusual weather we have been having.<\/p>\n

Change is what I want to talk about today. Mary and I were talking last night about the incredible story of her mother who through sheer will and determination and belief single-handily lifted herself up from poverty to become a wealthy landowner in Longview, WA. She did it by overcoming long odds and important people in the community who insisted that she couldn\u2019t possibly do it.<\/p>\n

That got me to talking about myself. I don\u2019t want to sound like a braggart, but I think I\u2019m fairly intelligent, yet I have not accomplished as much as I should considering that. And I think there is a reason for that.<\/p>\n

The Mosher Way is steeped in a hard work ethic. It likely started with my paternal grandparents. They were Germans who believed in work, work and more work, and little talk. My grandfather and grandmother were farmers who like most farmers back in the 1920s to 1950s had to survive the Great Depression and did it by working the find dirt of this Earth over and over again and running dairy cattle on their large acreage outside the small New York village of Allegany on what was called the Five Mile.<\/p>\n

My father and his two brothers worked alongside their dad while their mom took care of the house and the cooking. My picture of my grandmother is of a large, stout woman with an apron wrapped around her while she baked pies and cooked large portions of chicken and beef for, not dinner, but lunch.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, my grandfather was up early working the farm, the land, and coming in to the house only to eat and sleep sometime after darkness and quiet fell over the farm.<\/p>\n

In all the years I knew my grandfather, I never heard him say more than a couple words. If talk got you money, and more talk got you more money, my grandfather would never have had any money.<\/p>\n

It was work that was valuable to him. If he couldn\u2019t work, he was lost. That tradition of work carried over to his sons, especially my father. My father only stopped work long enough to eat and sleep, just like his dad. Entertainment to my dad was working.<\/p>\n

That farm work and that German DNA produced a large and powerful man in my dad. He was six-foot three and a trim 230 pounds in his middle age. His hands were the biggest I have ever seen, and his natural strength was unbelievable. I\u2019m sure he didn\u2019t know his own strength. He just assumed everybody could lift a car motor out of a car; it was no big deal.<\/p>\n

That combination of little talk, hard work and strength and power and no complaining (my father in his later years discovered that somewhere along the line he had broken his pelvis bone, which forced him to walk with a little limp, but he doesn\u2019t know how or when he did it, and didn\u2019t seem to care to find out) has moved on to his sons.<\/p>\n

Of my father\u2019s four sons, I\u2019m probably the most talkative, but if you ask my immediate family they will tell you I don\u2019t talk much. And they are right. I\u2019m more of a listener. However, I do talk pretty well when I have a keyboard and computer screen in front of me as I do now.<\/p>\n

But the point of all this is during the conversation Mary and I had last night it suddenly dawned on me that the reason I have not had more success is because of the Mosher Way I just described. I\u2019ve been working since I was eight when I worked on a farm and I\u2019m still working, if you consider writing work, which I really don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I have had no expectations of myself other than just to report to work each day (I never have missed a day\u2019s work in my life, and my dad never missed a day in his 38 years working for Mobil Oil) and do the best job I can do. I have never plotted a work-plan with a time frame that would set an upward climb of a job ladder. I just have always concentrated on today and left tomorrow to chance.<\/p>\n

As we talked last night, I told Mary I felt like a failure because I had never looked to the future and said this is where I want to be. I just didn\u2019t plan things. If I had, I told her, I likely would be retired by now and living in the south of France, enjoying the beach and all that goes with that life.<\/p>\n

Instead, I became a grinder. You could depend on me \u2013 I\u2019m a very loyal person \u2013 to be there, be there early, and be productive, and while others around me got promoted to better positions I just kept my head down and kept on grinding away.<\/p>\n

So today I\u2019m upset with myself that I didn\u2019t promote myself more, that I didn\u2019t have a plan of action that would move me up that ladder of success. But I couldn\u2019t force myself to be more than what I was \u2013 a Mosher doing it the Mosher way. Work hard and get things done no matter how long it takes, and then report to work the next day and do it again.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019m disappointed in myself that I didn\u2019t reach the potential that was in me, and that I didn\u2019t use the intelligence that God gave me to make things better around me and for myself.<\/p>\n

Mary says it\u2019s not too late. But I don\u2019t know. I\u2019m 107 now and the curtain is being drawn on my life. Can I get up and stop the curtain from closing? Maybe. Maybe not.<\/p>\n

What makes me even more disappointing about myself is the raft of presidential candidates who mostly are village idiots and I think if they can run certainly I could too because I may have not lived up to my expectations but I\u2019m no village idiot.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s enough for today. I\u2019ve talked about myself too much.<\/p>\n

Be well pal.<\/p>\n

Be careful out there.<\/p>\n

Have a great day<\/p>\n

You are loved.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TERRY MOSHER   I can\u2019t believe that today it\u2019s cloudy with a cool breeze waffling through the trees. That\u2019s a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-column","category-mosher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1809"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}