My dear Jack, let me offer you some words of encouragement this morning. I know things are tough. But if truth be told that is the rite of passage into adulthood.
When you come from nothing, when your parents don’t have much, facing the challenge called life can be tough. Yes, you can have wishful thinking imagining what life would be like were your parents rich. That’s okay. Daydreaming can be good, as long as you know how to mechanise it for your vision. If your parents were rich you wouldn’t be worried about accommodation of course. You wouldn’t even worry about how to start life. But that’s not your reality. Your parents aren’t rich. But you can turn your deprived status into a drive to succeed. You can turn it into motivation, use it to develop an ambition. Such desire of course comes loaded with disappointment in the early stage of life. That’s normal. It’s because you can’t leapfrog life. You still have to go through the paces. And when you consider the state of your country it would seem you have double jeopardy. Why weren’t you born American you wonder? Or Canadian, or English? But in life we must first accept our reality if we want to change the reality. And so you must not only acknowledge your disadvantages, you must also acknowledge the state of your country. There’s nothing you can do about your citizenship, for now at least. But there’s a lot you can do about your state of mind in order to change your circumstances.
The first thing to do is to put yourself in a state of hustle. You must want to succeed. And demonstrably so. It must not be wishful thinking. Which means you don’t joke with whatever opportunities you have. Note that opportunities don’t always look like opportunities. Opportunities often come disguised. The future sometimes dons an invisibility cloak. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not there’s an element of luck to success. The phrase used by Solomon is “time and chance.” But when your chance comes will you be ready? Are you positioning yourself for it? You don’t position yourself for a break being lazy, or not taking your job seriously, or not grabbing opportunities to prove yourself. The way life is, it wants to test if you can handle the future. So it puts you through difficult paces. You’re not going to apprehend the future you desire without faith. You must believe in yourself, you must believe you will make it. You must want it bad enough. I’m not saying be crooked or do shady stuff. You can succeed without all that nonsense. Success acquired doing all that invariably boomerangs.
It’s an insult on your intelligence to believe the only way you can make is through crookedness. You will make it. Do it the right way. It’s always better. You’ve just got to keep pushing somehow. The break will come at some point. Just apply yourself. Apply all the dimensions of yourself to your work. Don’t say this is what I’m being paid for, I won’t go beyond that. You’ll short-change yourself. Chances are it’s those extracurricular applications of yourself that land you your future. That’s where “luck” hides. It’s in those extras you put in. Take time to study the success of those before you, genuine successes. You’ll discover those who succeed go out on a limb. They put in extra effort. Those who succeed are devoted to what they do. It’s how their names began to resonate in critical corridors – corridors where names are suggested. You must be known for something. If for nothing be known for excellence. Be excellent at what you do. Be honest. It engenders trust. You want people to trust you. Trust is the currency of life. Do what you do well. You owe yourself that. If you do shoddy job people will be afraid to recommend you. They won’t want to waste their equity on you. I’m not giving you advice I didn’t follow as a young man. I’m sharing with you looking back over life. It’s important you express your creativity. You have it. Examine things from different angles. When you do you gain new perspectives.
There was a young man I knew. He was a lawyer. He put in his best into whatever assignment he was given, went out of his way to deliver good work. He applied himself. Things were tough for this young man in those early days. He didn’t have a car, had to take the chaotic public transport system to get by. The scarcity of buses and cabs in those days meant he had to wrestle with flesh and blood to get home from work. It’s unimaginable. And when it rained it poured. He can’t count how many times he was drenched on his way to or from work. He wouldn’t even bother to take off his jacket. What was the point? Despite the low pay he applied himself diligently. Through this he developed the habit of discipline. That discipline would pay off when he started his own law practice. He had learnt self-motivation. He had learnt diligence. He had learnt perseverance. As a veteran of rainfalls he could endure. He was a veteran of struggles. He became a veteran of life. There were discouragements but he never gave up. He just believed in the future. He held on tenaciously to his dreams of tomorrow. And then the break began to appear. At first it was shy, peeping from behind the curtain of life. Soon it grew bold.
Every opportunity this young man had he poured himself into. He despised the shame, focused on his dreams. He didn’t care what others thought. Soon people began to recognise his extra efforts. They saw the extra he brought to basic assignments. Those extras became his differentiation. And soon people began to pay him for those extras. And the payment rose year after year. People began to appreciate the results he produced. His efforts weren’t based on what he was paid. It was based on what he could give to a brief. Ironically his first major break came from a reference given by a client who didn’t have much to pay. He nonetheless put in his best.The result produced ended up being showcased in a marketing round to a high profile corporation. They wanted to meet the person behind such brilliance. That was the first major break. He’s never looked back since. He keeps pushing. He’s still practising the same principles that propelled him to success – hard-work, discipline, devotion, faith in God, excellence, diligence, trustworthiness, creativity.
If you want to succeed you must subscribe to these values. Work hard. There’s no other way to succeed. Be devoted. Pour in your life into what you do… Excel. Don’t accept shoddy standards from yourself. Be diligent. That requires consistency. Use your creativity. Think outside the box, see things from a different perspective. Trust God. He wants you to succeed. It’s important you put the interest of your customer first. Your goal is to make him succeed, to make him glad he came to you.
No one knows the path to the future. Life is a virtual map. Start small. Start where you are. You will grow if you apply yourself. As you begin to succeed help others along the way. Success is responsibility. Have a vision of success. Have a picture in your mind of what success means to you. It’s always tough at the beginning, and too often we give up. It is those who persevere that eventually make it. Don’t give up at the first sign of failure. It’s never going to be easy when the odds in life are stacked against you. Your goal is to beat those odds.
The story of success is the story of the contribution of so many people, and so may discouragements. Endure. Keep your focus. One day you’ll look back and you will tell your story, about how you succeeded against the odds.
