Black Rob, Biggie, and Saint Patrick (part 2)
YOU NEED TO HAVE VISION LIKE WHOA!!!!!
In our last blog post we looked at three life lessons regarding creating your legacy. The Saint Patrick way. In this blog we will continue that thought by looking at the last four life lessons of Saint Patrick. If you want to have a legendary legacy than you need to have vision like whoa!
1: You need to have vision like Whoa!
Just like Black Rob said in his song, “You see something ill it’s whoa, money ain’t a problem, see my dough is like whoa.”
If you have a vision like whoa, your legacy will echo for eternity. In order to accomplish that vision, you need to come up with a plan. This means you have to arrange to sit down and write down your dream, legacy, and ideas. You write that down, then write down how you plan on capturing that one-horned rainbow flying vision.
Similar to Black Rob, Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying, “If you fail to plan, then plan to fail!” My dream for everyone reading this is for you to get a vision for your life, family, business, or whatever else you have going on that is like, whoa!
Life lesson from Patrick: At an old age, Patty boy was just getting started. The average life expectancy in Pat’s time was about 25–30 years old. He was 48 when he decided to aim for greatness.
At an age when most would retire or finish out their life, Patrick decided to change the world, declaring to us all that age is just a number. You may be 16 or 107; it’s not too late. You are just getting started. Building a legacy does not have an age requirement.
At age 48, he had another dream. This time it was a dream of the Irish people on the shoreline begging the “Holy Boy” from youth to come back. Patrick took this as another sign from God to go back and preach the Gospel to an entire nation and to the people who enslaved him.
This is an important fact to know: all of Ireland was considered barbaric and unreachable by the other Christians. Patrick was assigned with what seemed to be an impossible task since there were no Christians in Ireland. Creating lasting legacies requires you to do the impossible or, at the very least, the inconceivable, as Vizzini from Princess Bride would have said.
Patrick had to design a vision, write out a plan of action and execute his plan if he wanted to be successful at creating this legacy. And for the record, his success was like, whoa!
2: Rise and Grind is the only way to shine
Building a flourishing legacy requires you to put in the work. You have to take your information that you hustled to get, bring your vision in front of you and take your plan, and then as the fake Don King lookalike from Rocky V said, “Put some hustle behind that muscle.” For my info on how to hustle I suggest ordering Charge The Storm book and read the chapter on creating hustle@ www.sidehustle.press
So many of us have a plan and a vision, but then we sit back and wait magically for success to come to us. This is not how you build a lasting legacy. Waiting on success to come to you is like waiting on my dad to come home when I was 12 sitting on my front porch with my fishing pole. It just ain’t going to happen.
But not Patrick, not me, and not you. We will put in that work. What is grinding? I am glad you asked; grinding is the task of doing something over and over again to obtain a goal (that’s The Apostle of Hustle Colby Sutter’s definition).
I had a wise man by the name of Jason Humphrey once ask me, “Colby, how do you define hustle and grind?” I looked Jason in his perfectly soft brown colored eyes, and I told him, “Hustle is getting all the information you can about whatever you want to accomplish, finding out the what, the how, the why, and any obstacles that may come in your way. It’s full of reflection and critical thinking. The grind is the actual physical part, doing the task at hand.”
That’s life-changing information I just gave you, and now you know my secret — boom- knowledge (drop imaginary mic here). Creating a lasting legacy will demand daily hustle and grind out of you.
Life lesson from Patrick: Patrick had an amazing work ethic, and he was just a plain genius. He went to Ireland with the goal to spread the Gospel to a lost nation.
He did this by first meeting with all the kings, chiefs of tribes, leaders, and anyone else in charge of the masses. He knew if he could convert leaders, the rest would follow. So often in life, we try to make a change from the ground up but Patrick when from the highest point down.
This strategy played a significant role in his success, but he still had to put in the work. He was a grinder. He would live with each tribe for months doing life with them. He worked with them, ate with them, and built a team of leaders to follow him around as he would go to new tribes. He created new leaders to help do more work for him so he could reach more people. Before you know it, Patrick was traveling with a posse of roughneck Irish gangsters doing life with every person he came into contact with. This is how he influenced change among the masses. That is how you create a lasting legacy, boys and girls.
3: Haters gonna hate:
As the great Biggie Smalls said, “If you don’t know, now you know.”
Whenever you start chasing after a legacy or whenever you stop dancing and start making money moves, people are going to start hating. People will doubt you and tell you that you will fail. They will tell you to give up. I have a few words for you to say to those people, but being a pastor, I can’t tell you what they are, other than say, “Haters, back off!”
People who hate produce doubt and doubt creates fear. You cannot let fear decide any of your actions when it comes to building your legacy. Fear is the enemy. Say that with me, look at little Timmy next to you and say it, “FEAR IS THE ENEMY.” Now give him an Irish kiss as you wander away.
I choose to live my life by surrounding myself with people who will throw gasoline on my dreams, not water (that is some free advice for you; actually, it is not free. Please send me 100 dollars for that advice, thank you). You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. That is a quote from Jim Rohn. I double-dog dare you to write down the five people you spend the most time with and then write down what qualities you share with them.
Life lesson from Patrick: This part of the story is where old Patty boy receives O.G. status in my book. He was making such an impact in Ireland that people started to hate him, threatening him with jail and murder.
In his book, he writes one of the most gangster things I ever read, and now I want to quote it for you, “Daily I expect murder, fraud, or captivity, but I fear none of these things because of the promise of heaven. Did I come to Ireland without the help of God because I chose to? It was God who brought me here. I am bound by the Holy Spirit so that I cannot even see my own family. Is it my own doing that I feel blessed mercy toward the very people who once enslaved me and killed so many male and female servants from my father’s household? I am a freeborn man by the measure of this world, but I sold my noble birth to serve others. I am not ashamed of this, nor do I regret it. I am a slave of Christ for a foreign people for the sake of the indescribable glory of life everlasting which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Once again, building a lasting legacy requires service to others. Patrick dedicated his entire life to ministering to the people who hated him.
Patrick even went to visit his old slave master to pay him money for running away. The wealthy slave owner got word of this, and out of having so much pride and hate, he took all his possessions from all of his properties and threw everything into one of his mansions. He then lit his mansion on fire to burn them all up. To top it off, he must have been cold that day because he ended up throwing himself into the fire as well. He just could not face the embarrassing fact that his former slave has become more successful than him.
This proves once again that hatred and jealousy kill. Keep your eyes in your own lane and just make moves. Ignore all the hatred around you, as the wise Colby Sutter once said.
4: Legend status:
“If you follow these rules, you will have made bread to break up. If not 24 years on the wake-up, slug hit your temple, watch your frame shake-up.” Sorry — Biggie Smalls lyrics again — I couldn’t resist. But if you do follow these steps, you will succeed at anything you do in life. You will achieve results, and you will create a legacy that lasts forever. You just need to define for yourself the direction of your legacy. You do that by defining for yourself what success means to you. For Patrick, it was to share the Gospel with a lost nation, and he got results.
Life lesson from Patrick: Listen to these stats from Saint Patrick’s life: he is credited for planting 700 churches, creating numerous schools, ordaining 5,000 people into the priesthood, and converting and baptizing over 120,000 people himself.
He is credited with converting an entire nation to Christianity. Some say he raised people from the dead, and others say he drove all the snakes out of Ireland (I think snakes is a metaphor for chasing all the Paganism out of Ireland), but either way, his stats speak for themselves and prove this man was a legend among legends. We can learn a lot from his life. His life should inspire you. I know it inspires me.
Final thought:
Everyone, regardless of faith, celebrates Saint Patrick’s Day, but most do not know the true story of this man’s life. So, before you pick up your green beer (maybe pour a little out for my homie Patrick, if you crazy kids still do that) and wear your green shirt to watch a parade of random strangers march up and down their driveways, please take a second and just reflect on this man’s extraordinary life. Take a second and think about how you may be able to apply some of his principles to your own life.
Saint Patrick died March 17th, 461
My mom died March 17th, 2002 (This is in memory of my hero who inspired life-changing freedom in my life; my mom, who is a legend in my world). I get the honor of moving her legacy forward.
