HINDSIGHT

By Farida Salako

George R.R. Martin once said; “No man ever wakes up in the morning and says; ‘oh I am evil, what evil can I do today’ even those who were thought to be evil by history thought themselves to be the heroes of their stories” hence, the ideal of or thought process, you cannot be bigger than what you think of yourselves, who you are and what you do is projected in the actions that you emanate to give life to who you see in the mirror. Adolf Hitler, one of the worlds most recorded dictators said; “for as far as men die and men are born, the concept of liberty can never be taken away from humanity” by some feat of syntax self-elevated thinking, Adolf Hitler had seen himself as a liberator, that he was saving humanity with the actions he took, that he was saving Germany.

The concept of self-belief is something extraordinary, something that serves as a fuel to drive your zeal, you wanting to be better, to grow, the need to elevate from your current state of thought, where you are at the moment and climb higher and higher. And all of these are built in several stages of our lives and for me, the first is: discipline and perseverance; there is something of resilience and discipline that is borrowed deep down into our success stories, for luck is only preparation that met opportunity. We become the kind of priorities we make, we make things happen as fast as we culture ourselves to work, under duress, under freer circumstances, or in neutral instances.

The second is smile; I once was reading a report on the New York Times some years ago and the lead passage of the report reads that a man had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in Brooklyn and his suicide note reads thus; “I won’t jump if just one person smiled at me today” and yet he died. All he needed was just one smile, so, smile when you talk, smile when you laugh, smile when you smile because it is rather imperative and pertinent, and you wont grow old quick either.

Another point is Read, read like your life depends on it because it does, read like you breathe. It is a common African saying that one who is willing to grow has to stand on the shoulders of others, he has to be willing to want learn from the people before him, from those who had walked the path that he hopes to thread. There is no virgin idea in the world any more, whatever it is that you want to venture in, someone had travelled a thousand years ahead of that route, so read his stories and learn.

Lastly, tell your stories, personalize your stories, tell it and let it serve as a stepping stone of success for those that will thread the same path as you. It is often said that life is too short to make all the mistakes, so help the future generation and record your failures, record your success and your errs. Carve your name on the marble of age, let history record that you fell as hard as you stood and somewhere between the fall and standing back up, you grew stronger than what you wanted, you became better, history remembers the men who took the bull by the horn.

Remember, you are not bigger than your thought process.