Carpe Diem Analysis: It's Time To Seize The Day

It is Time to Seize the Day

Many people dream of accomplishing great things in their lifetime. They dream about being financially successful, about making the world a better place by contributing to society and they also dream of receiving recognition for their accomplishments. As they get older, many people discover that despite having had great aspirations, they never actually achieved many of the goals they had dreamed of accomplishing due to their failure to act when they had the chance. The importance of the seizing the moment is expressed by Horace, the Roman poet, in his Carpe Diem poem when he writes, “carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” which in English translates as “pluck the day putting as little trust as possible in tomorrow”
Although it was believed that he had no advanced knowledge of the planned Watergate Complex break-in, Nixon was found guilty of attempting to cover-up the connection of the burglars to his reelection committee in the aftermath of the burglary. Historians have attempted to understand what caused Richard Nixon and his staff to make such an irresponsible and politically suicidal decision. In his article titled The Watergate Cover-up: It’s dynamics and Implications, Dennis S. Gourhan proposes various possible reasons that may have caused the Nixon administration to blunder. One of the theories that Dennis Gourhan proposes is that the apparent lack of public concern in the immediate aftermath of the break-in “may have had the greatest impact in encouraging the president and the others involved to reach a decision prematurely without fully understanding the magnitude or the ramifications of the problems it was designed to correct.” The misconception that the break-in was a small and irrelevant issue led Richard Nixon and his staff to believe that a successful cover-up could be achieved. Once the cover-up began to unravel, it was too late for Richard Nixon and his staff to backtrack as Dennis Gourhan aptly notes, “the president and his advisors had embarked on a course from which retreat at a later juncture would become increasingly
After a decade of working for the company he founded, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple Inc. Tom Zelecnock describes that despite being unemployed, Steve Jobs decided to “treat it as a freedom rather than a curse” and that Jobs himself said later on in his life “that getting fired from Apple was the best thing to ever happen to him, because it allowed him to think more creatively and re-experience the joys of starting a company.” In an interview conducted by Daniel Morrow, the executive director of The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program, Steve Jobs outlined his opinion on how people achieve success: I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about; otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.
The determination and subsequent success of Steve Jobs can serve as an important message for any person who doubts the importance of utilizing every available opportunity that the path to achievement is with