Dreams are a dime a dozen…it’s their execution that counts
- Theodore Roosevelt
A number of years ago after coming back from a one-year scholarship abroad, the then Editor of Sunday Independent, Mr. Ikechukwu Amaechi, encouraged the then Sunday team (to which I belonged) to enter for the NMMA awards, insisting that if we did not win, it should not be because we did not send in entries. In his words, “If you don’t hit the mark, do not let it because you did not make a trial.”
A few of us heeded the advice and made the entries and the rest is now history. The moral here is that he who makes an attempt to hit the mark already has a 50-50 chance of success right from the start, but he who does not try is already doomed to failure.
This all-important phenomenon of the need to take action when necessary is central in our quest for relevance and successful achievement on this planet we have all found ourselves in.
The educated too?
You find many of our educated youth idling about in the name of the thought that “there is too much unemployment in the country now.” While I agree that most of us do need some sort of paid employment to start off and give us leverage and the requisite experience to launch out on our own, the fact also remains that the dearth of employment opportunities should not be the reason for failing to take action and wasting away years.
We need to think inwards and look around, and find just that opportunity waiting to be unveiled and taken advantage of. After all, that is the essence of the education we spent several years in the tertiary institution to amass – to stretch the mind and give it such an expanded horizon that it will be employed in the solution of problems that might confront us in life. Unless the education you get can do this, then it is indeed a matter of wasted years and sleepless nights!
The ‘Siddon-look’ syndrome
I once saw a poster around the Lagos area (in Western Nigeria) which said, “Don’t be a Lagos Looker; Just Do Something!” Many of us need to imbibe the message and concept behind the poster to fight and conquer the tendency towards indecision and procrastination, the greatest thieves of time. The time is always right to do something right, said Martin Luther King.
Conrad Hilton also once noted that success seems to be connected with action. Successful people simply keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.
The great American stock market investor, Warren Buffet, once said someone is sitting in the shade today because someone else planted a tree a long time ago.
The trick is to form a habit of making a move and making it in the right direction on a regular basis. As the late Myles Munroe of blessed memory put it, the secret of a man’s future is hidden in his daily routine.
Fear of mistakes and failure?
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, we should do the thing we most fear to do. A man’s failure in life will not be justified by the excuse, “I was afraid of mistakes and failure or uncertain of success.”
We must get good at one of two things: sowing in the spring or begging in the fall! Neither of these are problems, birth circumstances or obstacles, which could be seen as justifiable grounds for not taking off or for quitting. It has been acknowledged over time that problems are indeed the seeds that birth great enterprises. We are all conversant with the saying that necessity is the mother of invention. The only people who have no obstacles are in the cemetery, as Norman Vincent Peale once noted. The great American President, Theodore Roosevelt, also once stated that the only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything. “Do not be afraid of mistakes, providing you do not make the same one twice,” Roosevelt exhorted.
Having to start small?
The late Isaac Durojaiye, founding managing director of DMT Mobile Toilets, with the benefit of hindsight, once declared that “It wasn’t the largest seed that the parable said would become the biggest tree; It was the tiny, little mustard seed!”
You don’t necessarily have to start big. Most big corporations today started out as small family cottage firms, with the family members as the only employees! The key saying here is to start small and think big!
And don’t be discouraged by harsh realities and seemingly discouraging circumstances; they are nothing more than the tests of greatness. After all, raw gold doesn’t look good until it goes through some tough processes to become valuable. The most daunting circumstances show up at the verge of great breakthroughs – a look into the biographies of most great men will emphasize this fact.
You must be highly conscious that you are the master of your own fate. No one is either rich or poor who has not helped himself to be so, just like the Germans would say. Do not be afraid to start small; the important thing is to start and move ahead.
Every man, a golden goose
Every man has a goose that lays golden eggs – if he only knew it! This should not be too hard to reason out. The Creator put each of us here for a purpose, and has equipped us with all the necessary assets or potentials to see us realise that purpose. These assets or potentials in each of us are our ‘golden eggs’. When developed and exploited, there is no limit to what fruits it can bear for such a person, his loved ones, and humanity at large.
Attaining the Next Level
When you start making the move towards the mark, you must realize that progress is the name of the game. You must consistently move to surpass your last landmark or record and realize that the rung of a ladder was never meant to be rested upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher, just as Thomas Henry Huxley once said. And you must make conscious effort to attain the next level in good time.
Man is so constituted that he must be happiest when he is conscious that he is most active in useful work
- Orison Swett Marden
