LivingLife: Champion or Accident?

Success is one very interesting type of animal. We all want it but most of us do not want to do the things that can get us there nor do we want to experience the stuff that makes us more likely to get there – temporary failure, disappointment, discouragement, hard and smart work and the like. It always reminds me of that Sunday school lesson where we were taught that the road to hell is wide and well tarmacked while the one to heaven is narrow and full of thorns. First as hungry as we want it, we have to be sure how we want it to look like. There are people whose success story is sitting at UTC eating a burger and drinking canned soda early in the morning, while others, it is driving a top of the range car, not living in their house or having a bank account full of cash, just a top of the range car. As crazy as it sounds, identifying and defining your idea of your own success is one of the hardest of jobs. It must be fully fledged, right from the family aspect, financial aspect to the play things that one would like to have. After defining your success clearly, then the time to make mistakes begins. Canute Waswa in his Business Daily (Kenya) article appropriately titled “Making mistakes is the breakfast of champions” which I highly recommend to any forward looking individual, made my day with this simple but informative statement. “There’s one sure way to avoid making mistakes, and that’s to avoid life” Life is full of mistakes. In fact in some way, life is a “mistake” in itself. If you have a good hold of biology, then you would know that you are one of the several “you’s”, let’s call them fellows racing to be you. Chances are you were faster, a more skillful swimmer or any of a million reasons, which makes you either a champion or an accident. In fact you can view your total existence in any of these two ways. The champion will top in everything they try to do not because they are genetically made to succeed but because they think that they are champions, while the accidents just live their lives from one accident to another without any clear sense of purpose. The accident will just view everything that happens to them as some predetermined list of events while the champions will saunter along their chosen path, in the process making so many mistakes but learning from those mistakes to survive even bigger mistakes later. In fact when you see someone counting how successful everybody around them is and wondering where they got this rotten luck that keeps them out of the automatic success around them, then you have found those who view themselves as accidents, to the extent that they think others have successes by accident. When these champions were making mistakes and learning from them they looked like nondescript fellows without a future, yet they were slowly building their future. The accident type of individuals should be avoided like plague especially if you are a champion preparing your pedestal to success, lest they drag you down into the sewers of wallowing self inflicted deficiency. This Sunday, be a champion! http://Twitter.com/KelvinOdoobo