Six months before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on 10/26/1967. In this particular speech, he gives the students a few guidelines to follow in order to reach success in life and calls for them to commit to fighting for freedom and justice in America. The words King spoke on this day are still relevant to anyone looking to set a standard of success in their life. Here are four excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech that anyone can use for their personal blueprint of their own life.
"Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are 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 a basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. And 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 on the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley. But be the best little scrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be the sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win, or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
And finally, in your life’s blueprint, must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live. You have a responsibility to seek to make life better for everybody. And so you must be involved in the struggle of freedom and justice.”
We honor #MartinLutherKingJr for being our blueprint.
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