The Persistent Achiever

The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-ittiveness; third, common sense. - Thomas Edison

This is how you develop the persistence you need for any worthwhile venture:

Have a definite purpose: knowing what one wants is the first, and perhaps, the most important step toward the development of persistence. People are seldom persistent if they cannot say categorically in clear terms what it is they want.

Get set for difficulties: Settle it in your mind that things will not be an easy ride. Most times, you never know the difficulty of a task until you venture out to do it. “Is there anyone… who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you're going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: ‘He started something he couldn't finish.’”

Learn from mentors: Irrespective of what it is, you are most likely not the first to do what you are preparing to do or are doing already. Many times we behave like loners on an expedition. Knowing that people have gone before us will help us to learn from the difficulties they faced, obstacles they overcame and mistakes they made. We can prevent all the wrong turns they took and also learn how they overcame the present difficulties we are facing.

Do something daily no matter how small: There may be some things you cannot do now. You may need more money, some expertise or some more education. Ignore those things without forgetting about them completely. You are ignoring them so that you can focus on the things you are able to do at the moment to make progress in your endeavor. Do something today, no matter how small.

Develop Diligence: only diligent people ever achieve anything meaningful. Diligent people always make progress in their fields. They excel and are always sought for anywhere they go. Solomon said, “Do you see a man diligent in his business? “He shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before unknown men”. This is a major difference between the genuinely rich and the poor in every society. “Laziness, leads to poverty; hard work makes you rich.”

Tell yourself “I can do it”: you are the right person for the challenges you face. Not your neighbor, friend or brother – but you! All you need to do is search inside you. You are deeper than you think. You have more inside you than you are seeing right now. You “can do all things through Christ which strengthens.” Belief in one's ability to carry out a plan encourages one to follow the plan through with persistence. Get inside you and draw out the resilience, the ideas, the creativity, and the energy you need to stand.

The Versatile Achiever

Life can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Life is to me the most versatile thing.

We live in a versatile world. daily the same you is expected to be many different things. Sometimes this can be very confusing as we can easily mess up our roles and responsibilities. This need not be so as we can be as versatile as our responsibilities require by simply adhering to the following:

Know your roles and responsibilities: Many people do not know who they are and what they are supposed to do as a result of being that person. Many of us are like actors staged by a director only for him to discover we don’t know what role we are staged to play.

In a football field, there are eleven positions and eleven responsibilities. Each player takes on a position based on the responsibility he has on the field to ensure the victory of his team. A twelfth player is not needed on the pitch because there are only eleven responsibilities. The role determines the responsibility.

Act like wet clay: Clay can be hard when dry. Buildings constructed with clay bricks can stop the penetration of a bullet. Dry clay is durable - don’t be like it! The case is different with wet clay. When wet, clay becomes plastic and can take whatever form the potter decides to mold it into. That is how we should be with the several roles we have and the responsibilities we must live up to. Sometimes we pick up the responsibility of one of our roles and try to play it in all the roles we are involved in. Such will act like bosses to their children and fathers to their wives. Get this straight; you are not a clay brick! You are a dynamic creature equipped with the ability to be all you are expected to be at any point of your life.

Focus on which role you are acting:  Once you identify which role you need to play at a particular time, try all you can to focus all your energies on the responsibilities of that role. Focus on each role’s responsibilities and play it properly at each moment. This requires sensitivity from you. Once you identify the role and its responsibilities, focus on them until another switch is required.

Have fun: if we enjoy all the roles we are expected to be responsible for, we won’t make a mess of them. Each role will be something unique that we long to exercise our responsibilities in if only we add the ingredient of fun on each of them. You have to enjoy being a husband, enjoy being a boss, enjoy being an employee, enjoy being a father, or a mother, or a sister before you can perform satisfactorily in it. Nobody runs away from what he enjoys. 

Ambition and Success

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. - Salvador Dali

Do you want to build success one ambition at a time?

Determine exactly what you want: Because people do not know what exactly they want, they move from one thing to the other. Every person at one point or the other in life will have to answer this question; what do you want to become? Yours might not come that way but it will come in some other form. The important thing is not how the question comes to you but what your answer is.

Work with your strengths: make sure your ambition(s) align perfectly with your inherent strengths. This will first require knowledge of your strengths. Working out your ambitions based on this knowledge will equip you with the necessary tools required for the achievement of your goal. It will also make your goal fun to accomplish.

Break it down into smaller bits: one reason why we fail in life is because we are so troubled with the pursuit and immediate accomplishment of great ambitions. Every meal is easier to finish when eaten one bite at a time. Many things are impossible to accomplish with one swoop. Your ambition is one of those things. There is no need to fret though. Simply break it down into smaller, simpler bits. Every big thing is made up of smaller things. Armies invade lands not individually but in battalions. They will be an easy crush individually. Picture your ambition as a battalion set for you to conquer but put in mind that every battalion is made up of individuals. You may not be able to handle the battalion but I am sure individual soldiers will be easier for you to handle. The smaller you break down your ambition, the easier it is to crush.

Do not make it all about you: Any ambition that will require the downfall of another who is already doing very well is not a worthy one. Selfish ambitions will lead to envy, greed and wickedness. The wrong ambition or the wrong path taken to achieve a right ambition has made emotionless monsters out of men in time past. Albert Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.”

Creativity NOW!

           Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions. - Albert Einstein 

 Generate curiosity: the first thing needed is curiosity. Curiosity stems from creativity. Curiosity and creativity are linked by a two-way arrow. The process for developing either can go in both directions. You can use your curiosity, which is actually easier to form, to develop creativity. This can most easily be done by asking probing questions. If used appropriately Questions open up things that ordinarily will remain closed. Some questioning tips are:

Tip no. 1: Ask yourself about changes. E.g. What would taste better if it were less sweet? How can I make it sweeter? Tip no. 2: Ask yourself questions with lots of answers. E.g. What are some of the uses of air?

             Think deep: Creativity never occurs in the shallow regions of the mind but rather in its deep recesses. Treasure is never found floating on the surface of ocean waters but rather deep down at the bottom of it where only the resilient get to.

              Form a picture of what you want: You must see it in your mind’s eye. Anything can be seen in the mind. Very few people know that. You see, you have two pairs of eyes. The first is the outward eye, which is visible to everyone. Your outward eye sees only the things that are in the physical environment. The inner pair sees beyond. It sees what cannot be seen from the physical environment. Both pairs work together in feeding your mind with information. The outer eyes feed your mind with information that has defined boundaries. However, this is not so with the inner pair. The inner pair feeds your mind with boundless information. With your inner eyes, sight has no boundaries unless the ones you map out for it. You can create the picture of anything you desire to see or have physically.

               Do not let your environment restrict you: have a mindset that what you see is never what you get. Anything can become anything. A boulder can be a statue, a black stone can be coal, a tree can be paper, that problem you are looking at can be a business. Do not despise all seemingly worthless things. They are the parents of all worthwhile things.

To Succeed, Connect the Dots

I have killed lions and bears, and I will do the same to this heathen Philistine... – David (King of Israel)

So you played in the football team of your school, learned how to sew, did a plumbing internship, have a degree in biochemistry, and now you are managing your uncles restaurant. You sit down alone to ponder on your life and it does not seem to make any sense. So many scattered dots make the story of your life.

Cheer up! You are not alone. In fact, you are in good company as many other successful folks once felt their life was a chaotic mess. In a host of success stories the characters had to connect these dots to make sense of their lives.

To connect the dots simply means to make sense of seemingly unrelated events of your past as you look to succeed in your venture. When young David was faced with his epic fight with Goliath he recounted his experiences while tending his father’s sheep. He said. “I have killed lions and bears, and I will do the same to this heathen Philistine.” I am pretty sure that when he was protecting the flock he never taught it was preparation for the Goliath showdown.

As it was with David so should it be for you. To connect the dots in your life, you should keep in mind your experiences – the good, the bad, the ugly. Do not conclude that the things that have happened to you were mere coincidences. They all happened for a reason and though they are in your past the reason they happened lie in the future.

Develop a broad perspective over your life. A broad perspective would mean you are able to entertain basically everything that surrounds your life. These are the dots. The dots are important, very important. They make you. The present you is simply the result of the dots you have connected. Connect other dots and you will have set your life on success path.