Meaning | Perspective | Success

Do you remember the film, “The Bridge on the River Kwai?”:

Alec Guiness played the Senior British Officer in a Japanese concentration camp, and he undertook on behalf of the prisoners to build a railway bridge for the Japanese. He thought that this would lift his men’s sagging morale and give them a sense of purpose, something to accomplish. It did all of those things. And they built the bridge so well that the Allies had to organize an expedition to blow it up. And when the Senior British Officer saw that they were trying to destroy his achievement, he was outraged. Then comes the terrible moment in which he realizes what has happened, and he cries out, “What have I done?” He was so busy succeeding in his enterprise that he lost all sense of its meaning. He had built a bridge for the enemy.

We do it all the time. We are so busy trying to succeed that we lose our sense of…