If you’re a boss, it’s easy to get caught up in the
affairs of the day, even though you may not recall today’s crisis even a month
from now. When that happens, the following poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley can help
restore perspective.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless
legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a
shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold
command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,
stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart
that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias,
king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside
remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The
lone and level sands stretch far away.

Boss’s Bottom Line

Think about this when you’re tempted to bask in your own importance or wear
yourself to a frazzle over a crisis that you won’t remember in a
month.